June Gathering: Goodbye Jyri, Hello Sonja!

Even though the heat wave is not exactly here yet, Finnish game developers are preparing for summer holidays and IGDA Finland will quiet down for a couple of months. At the June Gathering invitation we promised that Remedy will give a presentation. That started the rumor mill and draw people 45 minutes too early to the bar! Around 7PM there was already a queue forming at the door and total number of visitors climbed up to 147 (12 new). Thanks to the (wrong) rumors people were expecting to see Alan Wake demo but had to satisfy with a trailer video and photo travelogue from E3. The demo was not shown because Cuba Café have limited audiovisual devices but Remedy promised to show the Alan Wake demo in a more proper place in fall. Patience!

After the presentation Jyri gave a talk and told that he will have less time for IGDA Finland chapter due to the fact that Alan Wake will be released on spring 2010. He will anyhow follow the IGDA Finland chapter activities from the Advisory Board. From now on the Lead Coordinator will be Sonja Kangas who has been organizing IGDA Finland events for the last couple of years. Besides changing the Lead Coordinator there will also be some additions to IGDA Coordinators gang. New IGDA Finland Coordinators group and Volunteers will be introduced in fall.

IGDA Coordinators, Volunteers and Advisory Board wanted to thank Jyri for his efforts in supporting IGDA Finland chapter to become one of the most active IGDA chapters in the world. One outcome of the work is MVP Award which IGDA Finland Chapter got at GDC07.

After the speeches it was time for relaxation and chatting as usual. Even if Finnish game developers are starting their summer holidays soon, there was a lot of networking and discussions on the fact that K30 is currently the address for many Finnish game companies and that several interesting Finnish game productions will come out during the summer and fall 2009.

In fall we’ll give you more insights on what people can expect from IGDA Finland during the season 2009-2010 as well as how upcoming Finnish game releases will be shown at the pub nights. Until then, have a nice and relaxing summer! Game on!

June Gathering: Tuesday 9th

It's time for IGDA Finland season 08-09 finale with a presentation from Remedy! Join us on June 9th and enjoy a fun evening with fellow developers. We would like to thank the Finnish game developer community for being so active. It has truly been a pleasure to organize the events for you! Also special thanks to Remedy for supporting IGDA Finland presentations session and Cuba Bar for the nice venue. After the June IGDA Gathering it's time for summer holidays. See you again in fall '09!

IGDA FINLAND JUNE GATHERING Place: Cuba Bar, Erottajankatu 4, 00120 Helsinki (map) Time: Tuesday, 9th of June, doors open at 19:00

IGDA Finland May Gathering

The winter's last cold breath was still to be felt lingering in the air as last May's Gathering took place at Cuba Café as usual, with a delightful 157 visitors present! We've seem to have attracted a nice number of new people to the event this time around, taking into account that a whopping 37 visitors were there for the very first time. Who knows, perhaps the wild rumours about free drink coupons sponsored by Digital Chocolate might have had something to do with that. [singlepic=455,320,240,,center]

Apart from the usual mingling and such, we had the good guys from Digital Chocolate present and they showed us a few of their brand new games, including Tower Bloxx Deluxe for the XBox Live Arcade and California Gold Rush for the iPhone. The 4 player Tower Bloxx setup seemed to be in a specially heavy use all night long, with hardly a moment without anyone eagerly on the controls.

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You can find the rest of the photos in the gallery by clicking here or via Flickr. And don't forget that the next Gathering is taking place at Cuba Café on the 9th of June, from 7:00 pm to 11:00 pm. Be there or be square!

NOTE: The June Gathering starts at 7:00 PM, instead of the 6:00 PM stated in this post earlier.

April Gathering - Midspring Meeting

The cold winter had passed but left the midspring weather a bit chilly. However, the people in game industry showed what they're made of and joined the Monthly Gathering on April 7th. It was a good evening for IGDA as Cuba Café saw a total of 97 visitors out of which 7 were new.

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One of the main topics of discussion was of course the Game Developers Conference 2009 and the good vibes it left on people. There were other major topics in addition, including the prospering of Finnish titles in App Store and our new industry partner, Walkthru, a Finnish company concentrating on translating games from English to Finnish.

People also talked about the Special Interest Group, Women in Games or "WIG SIG" which got a new advisory board. Sonja Kangas is now a board member in WIG SIG as well as Nordic Game Program and IGDA Finland. You can find more details from Sonja's article about WIG SIG.

The game development club Score is exclusively representing Finland in Microsoft Imagine Cup semi-finals with two titles: Villa Penguila and Unity. Both games can be downloaded from Nordic Game Portal.

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You can check out the rest of the snaps at the gallery or alternatively at Flickr.

Don't forget to add the next Gathering Event on your calendars! It'll be held on May 5th, same place, same time. See you there!

March '09 Presentation: Dive into indie business

Once again people behind the Finnish game industry gathered to listen to IGDA Finland's Presentations, this time taking place at Diana-auditorio, Helsinki. Followed by the monthly Gathering event at Cuba Cafe, the presentation was held on March 10th and it was organized in association with Remedy Entertainment. The inspiring line-up consisted of Paavo Perttula from Tweehouse, Petri Purho from Kloonigames and Jani Kahrama from Secret Exit.  There were 13 were new visitors in a total of 97 participants, more than filling up every seat! Paavo Perttula presented their business plans for a social-interaction-oriented MMO game targeted for young audiences. Having offices in Helsinki and Santa Monica in California, Tweehouse secures their revenue sources by offering design and implementation services and live services alongside their own game development. They are developing their own multiplayer platform called Trunktech specifically designed for developing, deploying and managing massively multiplayer applications. Paavo also showed us their intuitive map editor which can be used to easily create large, interactive game worlds and to publish them in realtime as well.

Next up was Petri Purho from Kloonigames and the Post Mortem of Crayon Physics Deluxe. Petri begun his presentation with a relaxed and humoristic touch and told about his life before original Crayon Physics. In 2006 he got into prototyping game development which meant creating one new game every week. Petri told us this worked well for him and he started publishing a new game each month on his blog at kloonigames.com. In June 2007 he created Crayon Physics in five days which sparked so much attention and interest that Petri decided to make a better version of it. Crayon Physics Deluxe prototype video gained fame on Youtube and spawned a number of clones, both commercial and non-commercial ones. Crayon Physics Deluxe won the Seamus McNally Grand Prize in 2008.

The third presentation was given by Jani Kahrama from Secret Exit on indie game development and their experiences with it. Secret Exit started off with two people but hired two more when they received funding. They told us that the amoung of competition in indie development is huge and the marketing opportunities are lacking. Good timing is essential and to push the sales the developers should aim to remove all obstacles at the same time as opposed to one after another. Jani explained that their game Zen Bound got lots of positive feedback but the public visibility was low. They did make the front page feature and that multiplied their sales by four. The lesson in the presentation was to advertise on all available channels at the same time and to wait for sales increase and then ride on the sales with, for example, lowering the price just as the peak is beginning to fall off. Zen Bound won the IMGA award “Excellence in 3D”.

Q&A session followed the presentations. After the presentations people headed off across the street to have a party at the IGDA Finland Gathering in Cuba Cafe!