Claire Blackshaw
Flammable Penguins Games
Claire Blackshaw is a queer creative, currently Technical Director at Flammable Penguins Games working on an unannounced title. Based in London with her wife and cats, she has spent over a decade helping shape the medium of Virtual Reality.
Her perspective spans 'from assembly to stageplays,' informed by a career at giants like Sony and Adobe alongside UK staples like Jagex and Climax. Claire’s technical depth is formidable: she served on the internal design review teams for the PS5 and PSVR2 hardware, wrote OpenXR implementation for Adobe’s Substance Modeler, contributing to Godot XR work and acted as a Senior Online Consultant for Europe at PlayStation working on eSports and Metaverse initiatives.
Claire was recently featured in Kelly Vero’s book Breaking Through Bytes: Women Shaping the Digital World, recognizing her contributions to the industry. She is passionate about building new experiences and pushing the boundaries of interactive entertainment.
Claire Blackshaw is speaking at the following session/s
Postmortem - Shipping Godot VR and Porting to PSVR2
We set up an indie studio because we wanted to build cool things in VR. Part of that is working directly with hardware so we chose Godot so we could build our own tech stack overtime. This talk dives into the technical challenges of using an unproven engine and shipping in a difficult technical space where almost everyone is on Unity/Unreal with multiple layers between them. The challenges of hitting framerate and the design and technical choices and mistakes we made.
Review rewriting the font engine, dealing with undocumented APIs from platform holders and variety of corner edge cases that taking control of your tech stack as a tiny indie studio bring. Then add on the decision to port to PSVR2, Apple and variety of other hardware.
Session Takeaway
- How to build an engine as an indie.
- Understanding of Godot, and the pros and cons of seeding your tech state with an existing engine.
- Some VR / Godot specific programming lessons.
Session speakers
