guildford.games Festival 2025 Recap
Written by Hugh Wybourne, photos by Shomair Hanuk
A few weeks on from g.g Fest 2025 and we’re still buzzing over here! Of course, once this event has passed we’re already thinking about the next. Nonetheless, we’ve saved some brain power to give you a recap on how the day went.
Picture if you will, a cold and crisp Guildford morning at the G Live centre. It isn’t exactly exhilarating, but we’d like you to know that our setup for the day began at 7am! Long before our exhibitors were queueing at the door, the community was coming together to collect their lanyards and catch up as they prepared tables and stands. We were particularly pleased to see so many of our sponsors on-site as excited for setup as we were!
Simultaneously, round the corner in the ever-gracious Harbour Hotel our partner team were preparing the guildford.games Dev Summit for its sold-out debut appearance. If you missed it, the Summit was a new feature this year that invited developers, team leads, and studio professionals from the mystical lands beyond Guildford town! It’s very similar to what we do during g.g Fest, but fewer mascots and more discussions about business. We’re proud to be building on our community here and expanding to new horizons, here’s to a return of the Dev Summit next year!
The doors opened with flocks of gamers ready and waiting, and it felt like in seconds the quiet exhibition centre was full to the brim! Shortly after we kicked off, our keynote opening speech began featuring the legendary Peter Molyneux! The auditorium was stuffed with keen eyes and ears, many students younger than much of the history Peter was chewing the scenery recounting, and it was wonderful to celebrate our amazing history together with the man who essentially founded it all. He left the stage through a crowd of handshakes, thank-yous, and pens for signing and in true rockstar fashion exited with an accompanying “Peter Molyneux has left the building” over the tannoy, from the voice of Jayne Webley no less!
You may not recognise the name, but the voice is one many of you have no doubt heard before! Jayne plays the role of the tannoy speaker across all of the Two Point titles, and we were honoured to have her with us on the G Live audio system gifting her voice for some g.g fest-themed one-liners. She was there with a large chunk of the Two Point Studios team promoting the upcoming Two Point Museum which was available to play on stage beside Glowmade’s King of Meat! The two games couldn’t be much further apart in terms of energy and content, but they are unified by their community here in Guildford - that and the fact that our crew got to spend the day watching the wonderful demos and even snuck in some time to play themselves!
Just across from the Main Stage in The Auditorium, we had another round of portfolio reviews as is customary at g.g Fest now. This year was our best turnout yet, and we successfully scaled up to include nearly a dozen volunteers reviewing simultaneously throughout the entire day! Besides the exhibitor tables, the demos, and the reviews attendees had yet more to busy themselves with - and we don’t just mean the hog roast van, glorious though that was. As per usual, we had talks on throughout the day across three different sections of the building, and there were some absolutely stellar discussions going on.
We had g.g Co-Founder Lauran talking to DPS Games about building an intercontinental team. Our content Team Lead Liz led a discussion on disability and queerness in horror with Supermassive Games performing superbly in her maiden performance as g.g Fest host. Moreover, throughout the day upstairs we had a suite dedicated entirely to audio talks hosted by Barney Pratt of Supermassive in collaboration with Airwiggles, an international platform for audio professionals founded right here! The discussions were absolutely stacked with talent and the rooms were stuffed with eager ears literally unbroken from start to finish. The audio community in Guildford has been growing at a truly impressive rate over the last few years and we hope to feature more specialist talks in g.g Fest’s to come!
Every year we achieve astounding new things and incorporate them seamlessly into our event - and end up asking ourselves why we hadn’t thought of it before! I for one was excited to see the results of the Global Game Jam 2025 event that we took part in in partnership with the team at Media Molecule. The event took place a few weeks before ours and we demonstrated the submissions at a table upstairs, here’s to hoping we can do the same again next year!
Another bright sight was the presence of Heavy Metal Truants, this year’s official charity partner. They’re a group of hardcore metalheads that raise money for vulnerable children through group cycling fundraisers. G Live is big, but not quite enough for a full team of cyclists and so the team had a stationary bike hooked up to a simulation with the goal of reaching 100 kilometres across the day. Not only did they smash this goal but they raised over £1500 as well! Very heavy metal indeed 🤘
We like to think that we’re much more than just a games conference and that our voices reach out much further than our humble little corner of English countryside. You could see attendees making new connections, old friends catching up, and indie creatives excitedly discussing with each other new projects they’ve been dreaming up. It was a lovely chance for myself and the other g.g Volunteers to relax (although g.g founder Lauran had somehow found time to need stitches from A&E due to a technical error made battling a banner!)
Every year, we get bigger and louder and reach more people who travel from further and farther afield to share in this thing we’ve built. Though this last event has passed, know that the next is already on its way to you know and that we hope to see you there.