New innovators: GameCarver

Ciarán Davies’s passion for computer games started when he was a teenager. Now some 20 years later, he has turned his passion into a business.

Davies's fledgling company, Zoodazzle, is to make its public debut at next month's Web Summit with its GameCarver launch product.

Davies set up Zoodazzle in 2012 having spent over two years prior to that teasing out the concept and design for GameCarver, an authoring tool for mobile game development that facilitates multi-location collaboration.

“The inspiration for the product came from my experience of working with artists and game designers and seeing their difficulty in realising their creative visions with tools that were designed for engineers,” Davies says.

“Our technology is disruptive because it challenges the conventional wisdom that artists and coders use different tools. GameCarver is a cloud- based collaborative solution that allows users of all technical levels (artists, engineers and game designers) to work on the same project using the same tool.

“Due to the visual nature of our solution, the entire team can work together on designing, building and refining a game or any type of rich content app.”

Davies studied computer science at college and worked with a number of large IT companies as a software developer before getting involved with a start-up. “I found I really liked the energy and culture of start- ups and actively sought out opportunities within this sector,” he says.

“Having had this background, I knew what a start-up was going to be like, so when it came to striking out on my own I wasn’t afraid of taking the plunge. The downturn in the economy also meant there was a lot of early-stage support and the timing seemed right to give it a go.”

GameCarver has cost around €250,000 and 25,000 engineering hours to bring to market. Funding has come from private investors, with support from South Dublin Enterprise Board and Enterprise Ireland's competitive start fund. Davies also participated in the Enterprise Ireland- backed New Frontiers programme at the Institute of Technology Tallaght. Zoodazzle is based at the institute's Synergy innovation centre.

The company employs five people and, subject to successfully raising around €1.5 million over the next few months, employment will quickly triple as sales and marketing initiatives get under way.

Zoodazzle has been selected as one of the featured start-up companies at the Web Summit and Davies is hoping this exposure will put GameCarver on the international map. It will be sold on a subscription basis and has already been extensively tested in real use.

“For an engineer there is always the temptation to wait until you have the product perfect before you launch it. We fought this urge in the interests of getting good feedback that would allow us to produce an even better result,” Davies says.

“The general view in the industry is that game development must be technical and complicated, and the current toolsets available are either focused on an engineering audience or make little attempt at a cross-skills solution.

“We are challenging this convention be saying game creation should be about being creative. No other technology out there has the same real-time collaboration as GameCarver. Our technology means developers can make games in a more natural way by inhabiting the worlds they are creating.”

Likely GameCarver customers are game developers all around the world, with a particular focus on those designing for mobile use. The US is the company’s single biggest potential market.

“The global games market is predicted to exceed $100 billion by 2017 with mobile gaming representing some 34 per cent of that,” Davies says. “We are offering this rapidly growing sector the ability to increase the quality of its user experience whilst simultaneously decreasing its development costs.”

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