Amber Academy

Bucharest High School Students Discover Game Development

Amber’s social mission is embedded in its core values, so it’s no surprise that our team was always inspired to go beyond the studio walls and use their experience to improve the social and environmental condition of our city and community.

Among all social issues we considered tackling, we identified education is the area where we could make the largest impact. We asked ourselves how we can improve access to information and how we engage students in the process of learning game development.

The answer was to reach out to several high schools and inviting the students to our studio to show them the ropes. The idea was enthusiastically received in schools and with help from the professors, four groups of students were formed:

Mihai Viteazul National College

Tudor Vianu National College of Computer Science

Nicolae Tonitza Art High School

George Cosbuc Bilingual National College

The first sessions were scheduled in the spring and summer of 2017. We tried to share with the students as much about game development as possible, in an informal, fun and engaging way.

Each event had two parts: a tour of the studio and a workshop. The tour was meant to show them our work environment and how the Amber people create the magic. The workshop was called “Crash Course in Game Development” and it was divided in two sections: notions about game development, wonderfully presented by Gabriel Stancu and an empirical part in which the students were guided by Ionut-Gabriel Solomon & Aurelian Talpasanu to create their own game.

The students were amazing and made us really proud of the whole experience. They were curious about many aspects regarding this area, participated actively with good questions and had wonderful ideas when it came to creating their own games. We received great feedback from them and their professors— they had fun, learned new things and discovered that a career can be made out of playing games. We were thrilled to hear a large number of them would love to work in a studio like ours!