2024 Games Resident

Universe Builders

Screen Queensland’s Games Residency is a year-long program for early-career game developers, focused on developing the skills and knowledge required to develop new games and games studios.

The first of its kind in Australia, the residency program is run in partnership with Workforce Australia Self-Employment Assistance provider Birdifi Bridge, with participants provided with co-working space, access to leading industry experts, business mentoring and income support.

About James

James Knight is a lifelong multiplayer and massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game fan, having played almost every MMO game and online multiplayer game, and has dedicated his entire career to working with the most innovative multiplayer game and technology developers in the industry. He is the founder and currently sole developer at Universe Builders. He has over 10 year’s professional experience in the games industry and three years as a university lecturer. Pivoting from game design and 3D animation, he transitioned into engineering and then product management roles, and still maintains a passion for design and art. He holds two bachelor’s degrees and has worked in several different industry roles including engineering, design, and development management.

Primary skillset: programming, production

Residency Goals

My goal is to develop business maturity so that I can eventually run a game development studio with employees and contractors, and to produce a Horizontal Slice with all the core mechanics, features, and technologies to develop a Vertical Slice.

Residency Project

Void Survivors is a cooperative swarm-defense massively-multiplayer game, where hundreds of players group together to survive for as long as possible against increasingly difficult waves of nightmare invaders. Void Survivors re-imagines the mega-popular single-player ‘survivors’ genre into a massively-multiplayer format with cooperative mechanics and with deep Twitch integrations for streamers to play with their live audience. The game is currently in pre-production and solely being developed by Universe Builders, who are currently seeking funding to be able to complete a multiplayer prototype.