A Night with PlayRaven and Aalto Game Executive Programme

Lasse Seppänen, CEO of PlayRaven, started the night by explaining to us why strategy matters. Going into game design is a serious business. Saying we "just want to make games" is like saying "I just want to drive a car": it's vague and directionless.  Lasse's piece of advice is to work out the details and have people who can actually handle managing all these decisions:  It's not enough to just make games without this foresight.

 

The Game Executive programme at Aalto University: an intensive three-part "bootcamp" for game developers that combines insight on such topics like Financial Planning, Free-to-play, Asian markets, Branding, and Pitching.  During the evening, Saila Laitinen, Co-founder of Sfonge Ltd gave us a breakdown on the facts about China as a mobile market:  China has had the largest number of active smartphones in any country since 2013.  China's mobile game market is expected to maintain growth over the next three years, while the global game market growth drops slightly.  But what Laitinen warns us about is that the Chinese market is much different.  Here, there are four times more Android devices than iOS users, and double the revenue.   The channels for distributing Android games is fragmented between many different providers, including China Telecom's own channel, Play.cn, and almost a third of iOS players derive games from third party platforms instead of the official AppStore.  Because of expensive mobile data tariffs and bandwidth limits, and the popularity of low to middle end devices, games developed for the Chinese market need to take this limitations into account to deliver the smoothest game experience possible.

To conclude the talks for the night, Anca Agapi, program manager for Aalto University Executive Education gave a run through of the full programme and prices of the education program, open to all game developers, which is starting on October 29th 2014.  Afterwards, the participants enjoyed mingling and sponsored drinks courtesy of PlayRaven.

IGDA Finland October Gathering and Presentation with Unity

Upcoming Unity 2D toolkit, tips&tricks, physics, etc... The list goes on what the awesome IGDA Finland Presentation held for the attending crowd at Club Adams, which peaked at 270 attendees!

Andy Touch from Unity presented us with the upcoming feature to Unity. He showed us a glimpse on how the developers can use Unity more easily to create 2D games with the build-in tools. After Andy, Marco Trivellato took to the stage, also from Unity, and provided some essential tips & trick to help the developer on daily tasks, which ranged from profiling the game to garbage collection. Sampsa Lehtonen (Recoil Games & Draconus Entertainment ltd.) revealed what he had learned in making 2.5D games, such as Rochard which focused on the physics in 2/2.5D games. Brendan Erquiaga from Retora Game Studion wanted us to use our time better and so focused on the essentials of Editor Scripting in Unity. Examples ranged from simple short-keys to changing how Unity pre-/post-processes models. And last but not least, VIOPE launched the Game Development World Championship 2013 in the event, see more info here.

Warm thanks to all presenters and attendees. Stay tuned for updates of the upcoming gathering!

IGDA Finland October Gathering and Presentation with Unity

The weather is getting colder, but our season is just getting warmed up! We have cooked up for you a hot bowl of IGDA Finland Presentation on the topic of Unity to keep you warm, so check out the presentations and speakers below:

Native 2D is coming to Unity! (Andy Touch) Andy will demonstrate the new framework and how to setup your projects to use 2D features such as physics, polygon collider generation, sprite objects and spritesheet animation. He will also talk about how the new features fit into Unity's existing asset-creation workflows and give examples of 2D-related additions to the scripting API.

Unity Tips&Tricks and Good Practices (Marco Trivellato) In this presentation we will talk about different Unity tricks that the audience will be able to take away and use immediately. Topics include profiling and optimisations, memory and garbage collection, editor tricks as well as Unity game development good practices.

Unity Physics Gameplay (Sampsa Lehtonen) In this session we delve into the physics features of Unity and explore how they can be used to implement and enhance gameplay. The focus is on Sampsa's personal experiences and lessons he has learned while working on Unity games with 2D / 2.5D physics gameplay.

Unity Editor: Make it work for you (Brendan Erquiaga) In this presentation we will cover all aspects of Editor Scripting and how everyone should leverage them to improve development. We will talk about scripts to help remove friction from your pipeline, methods to automate tedious tasks, and tricks for improving day-to-day Unity use. Additionally we will explore the strength of giving editor tools to your designers, allowing them to maximize their efficiency. 

Game Development World Championship 2013 (VIOPE) Game Development World Championship 2013 is a sequel of successful Viope Game Programming Contest 2012, which engaged over 500 teams from 70 countries. The GDWC 2013 is open to game developers and enthusiasts all over the world, from students to freelancers and professionals. The competition starts from 8th October 2013 and lasts to 26th January 2014. Especially throughout the competition, participants will be couched by the world's famous companies - Rovio and Microsoft - to name a few. The winning team will get great prizes (to be be announced at the Opening Ceremony), more importantly to showcase your talents and grab future opportunities in the gaming industry.

Presenters:

Andy Touch (Unity) Since he added physics to a cube and watched it bounce, Andy has been interested in experimenting and playing around with gaming technology. Having specialised in Unity at university, and then going on to teach the engine to higher education students, he is now part of the Evangelist team at Unity Technologies and helps to spread the word to new users and to show off what it can do! He loves creating interactive 3D art experiments, taking part in game jams & hack days and helping Unity Developers to get the most out of the game engine.

Marco Trivellato (Unity) Marco is a veteran in the game industry with a strong background in computer science and a passion for programming and video games. He worked for many years in Italy, Canada and now England. In his time in Vancouver he worked for Electronic Arts and Next Level Games as systems and rendering software engineer on triple-A titles like FIFA, Fight Night 3 and Captain America, spending most of his time on game engines, focusing on their performance and architecture. Then he decided to move on and joined Unity for a new career challenge. He now works in UK as Field Engineer helping other game developers to make great games!

Sampsa Lehtonen (Recoil Games & Draconus Entertainment ltd.) Sampsa Lehtonen is a game programmer with over 10 years of experience in the industry. Even with a Master's degree in computer science, he is self-taught what comes to developing games. He has been working on titles ranging from indie (Triplane Turmoil 2 for PC) to mobile (Rock Runners for iOS and Android, Bad Piggies) to "triple A next-gen" console games (Rochard for PS3, PC, Mac and Linux).

Brendan Erquiaga (Retora Game Studios) Brendan is an independent game developer who has been using the Unity Engine to fuel his creations for the past four years. Being a Designer/Programmer, he has always enjoyed the freedom & speed of working in Unity. He started as a self-taught hobbyist, then attended university for game design which helped him work his way up to full-time developer. He has lead large teams, created solo projects, done Unity contract work, developed for Retora Game Studios, and last year he taught teenagers to develop mobile games in Unity. Currently Brendan is the Creative Director at Retora Black, a mobile game studio out of Phoenix, Arizona.

IGDA Finland Gathering start at the same place right after the presentations. Stay tuned for updates!

IGDA Finland Presentations – Unity Time: 8.10.2013 at 17:00 Place: Club Adams, Erottaja 15-17, Helsinki Finland

IGDA Finland October Gathering Time: 8.10.2013 at 19:15 Place: Club Adams, Erottaja 15-17, Helsinki Finland

IGDA Finland Gathering with Bitsquid

The season has now officially started! We had a great crowd to see what was on Bitsquid's sleeve. Johan Strömberg gave us a brief rundown on Bitsquid as a company and Niklas Frykholm followed it with extensive Bitsquid engine demo.

In case you missed the Presentation part head to http://www.bitsquid.se/ and Bitsquid GDC 2013 Showreel to see what's the fuss is all about!

See you at the next Gathering!

IGDA Presentations and June Gathering with Grand Cru

Summer is here, we think.

Prepare to pampered, because the summer starts with IGDA Finland Presentations! In June the hot topic is game design and we have gathered awesome people to tell you about it. The presentations are as follows:

Articy:draft 2 Kai Rosenkranz (CEO, Nevigo) Articy:draft 2 is the first professional tool for game design in commercial studios. This tool helps to create, organize and communicate the game vision while being tightly integrated into your pipeline. Read more here!

Game Design Miikka Junnila (Aalto University, Media Lab) : Game Design – where to start? Before we make games it is useful to know what they actually are. We’ll examine one definition of ‘a game’ and then take a brief look into what game design consists of. The presentation is especially useful for those who have just entered the world of game design.

Joni Suvanto (Design Director, Digital Chocolate) Digital Chocolate develops and publishes casual and social games for the web, Facebook, and mobile phones. The company has operations in the U.S., Finland, Spain and India. Joni is going to give us his thoughts about f2p, metrics from game design perspective, how they have used them and what the future holds for it.

After the presentations it’s time to put those sweet drink tickets to good use! We are proud to be sponsored by Grand Cru, a game company with a knack for mobile and social games. The Cru in question also seem to have a thing for mind games because they have a cryptic message for all of you: this time there is something special about the drinks! What could it be? In addition to all this you will get an update on Grand Cru’s current affairs. If you didn’t know they have a new game coming it’s about time you did!

Can you take two more plot twists? We will have the fabled Oculus Rift head-mounted display at the Gathering, here is your chance to try it yourself! Don’t forget to check out the 3D Leap Motion  controller as well (we just can’t resist cool inventions).

Grand things are happening at this Gathering, so bring your own cru to enjoy it all! See you there! - IGDA Finland Presentations Time: 11.6.2013 at 17.00 Place: Club Adams, Erottaja 15-17, Helsinki Finland - IGDA Finland April Gathering Time: 11.6.2013 at 19.00 Place: Club Adams, Erottaja 15-17, Helsinki Finland