Please register before Tuesday the 24th of January by sending an e-mail to both:
Brice Clocher (mangatomegmail [dot] com)
Tommaso Piazza (piazzachalmers [dot] se)

PlaygroundSquad

School information

What is PlaygroundSquad?

PlaygroundSquad is a stepping stone to get in to the game industry. We aim to place ourselves at the doorstep of the game developers, offering the right training, experience and connections that will get you that first job in the industry. It's called “Advanced vocational education and training”, and we really emphasize the training part. As the students develop their skills and learn the tools of the trade, they also get hands on experience developing their own game concepts. At PlaygroundSquad, programmers, artists and game designers get to work side by side in these game projects. This offers a unique chance to experience the game development process and learning that there's more to game art than making a cool 3d character and level design is more than just building a map in an editor. Combine this with a six month internship at the end of the two years education and the students are likely to find themselves employed at a game studio the day of graduation.

What are our main goal and previous achievements?

Our main goal is for our students to get a job in the game industry and we're very happy to have a high success rate. We have former students at all major Swedish game studios as well as many of the smaller ones. It's also good to see that some have gone abroad, working with other studios across Europe. Another thing that makes us happy is the fact that a lot of the students have made lead positions within the studios, some even within the first year after graduation.

What is our connection to the game industry?

The developers are involved in every stage of our education. They control the content of our curriculum as members of our advisory board as well as help us out with specific lectures and even complete courses. In the application process they help us reviewing the applicant’s portfolios to make sure they have the best possible preconditions to succeed. And having an open dialogue with the studios helps us finding the right match for the student’s work placements when it’s time for their internships.

What does the future look like?

We will have to follow the rapidly evolving industry, but we will keep focusing on project based training, as it has proven to be very successful. We will probably have a few more sites around the world, with the UK as our highest priority at the moment. We would also like to see more students going their own way and starting their own studios.

Alumni information

It is very important for PlaygroundSquad(PSQ) to keep track of our alumni. We take different measures to insure that we can keep track of them and make our network grow. As listed below you can see what those measures are.

As our network gets bigger and bigger our motivation to strenghten our schools name and the all over quality PSQ increase. As one of the leading game educations in the nordic region we think that we have succeeded in doing so. We will never stop and never let our guard down, always keep getting better and graduate more talented students.

Alumni activities and networking

Internet forum; A great way to keep the old alumni in touch with each other.

Workplace meetings; Every year we go to visit as many PSQ alumni as we can.

Lectures; Alumni return to PSQ to hold lectures.

Social events; We arrange social events at PSQ for both alumni and students currently studying at the school.

PSQ Alumni facts

• Approximately 7% of all employees in the game industry in Sweden have been educated at PlaygroundSquad.
• Approximately 75% of all the graduated students are hired within 6 months, and the majority of them on the day of graduation.