YMPT: Freelance developer relations and videogames curation.
Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council hired myself and Alex Johansson as Creative Producers for the 2024 Plug In And Play Festival, part of their Children's Capital Of Culture programme. We designed, curated, and delivered a weekend games trail over seven sites.
Since 2008 I have curated submissions for the Leftfield Collection, a part of EGX. EGX is one of the biggest videogame shows in Europe; taking place in the ExCeL Centre and the Birmingham NEC, attracting over 80,000 visitors per show.
From its first event in 2022 to the unfortunate closure of WASD in 2024, I was curator of WASD’s Curios lineup, which showcased new and experimental games.
I was hired as one of several camera operators for an experimental 8K film shoot, generating a corpus of footage for AI video editing experiments.
Congratulations! You’re about to embark on the exciting voyage of getting up on stage then making noises come out of your face. Welcome to public speaking. My name is David Hayward, and I was pretty intensively trained in public speaking during my teens. Over my years running events, I’ve been able to help many people […]
The Tentacle Collective, run by Payload Studios, is a collaborative showcase for independent commercial videogame developers, touring various large events such as EGX and Insomnia. Stand owner Payload Studios consulted me on the initial concept, then hired me to test out components for the stand build.
Feral Vector began as an experimental event for independent developers, and has become a festival about game design and play. Rather than just talks, it also features live games, prototypes, discussions, workshops, walks, roleplay, installation art, and performances.
I was one of the founders of Nottingham Hackspace, remaining a trustee for five years. As a fully boot-strapped grass-roots organisation, within 18 months it grew from three people in a pub to one of Europe's largest hackspaces. It now occupies a ten-thousand square foot workshop and studio space.
I was once rigorously trained as a public speaker, and am skilled at passing this knowledge on to others. Initially devised for Game Republic and Creative England, I can deliver practical public speaking workshops for groups of up to ten.
Collaboration with Jonatan Van Hove and Sos Sosowski for A Maze Berlin 2016. Participants learned about arcade parts, tools, soldering and microcontrollers, then under our tuition turned everyday objects ranging from paperbacks to ballet pumps into working videogame controllers.