Nordic Game Conference: Finland scored well!

Nordic Game conference was held on 14.-15. May in Malmö, Sweden. This was the fifth anniversary with a renewed focus on professional content and an emphasis on the Nordic region’s role as a global innovator, and forth Nordic Game conference for me. All in all IGDA Finland chapter had a strong presence at the conference with two advisory board members: Aki and Lasse, Sonja (coordinator), Teemu (webmaster) as well as our top class volunteers Vesa-Matti and Jenni. The conference has grown strongly from year to year from a small event with only a few hundred participants (it was called Nordic Game Potential back then) to this year's full scale conference together with large career expo, attracting over 1200 attendees. Fifth anniversary was momentous for Finnish game scene because there was record number of visitors from Finland including high number of students. On top of that Finnish developers really scored well at the latest round of Nordic Game Development Program. There were 75 development support applications out of which 19 were from Finland. At the end four out of eight funded projects were Finnish! Congratulations to Frozenbyte (Splot), Housemarque (Rope), Everyplay (Groove) and Kloonigames (Crayon Physics Deluxe)! The next funding round will be in fall 2008, be prepared!

Other possibility to shine in front of a big audience would be to put out an outstanding game during this year and get nominated for the Nordic Game Awards! Last Wednesday the Nordic Game awards were handed out for the second time. Best Nordic game of the year was World in Conflict by Massive Entertainment. Massive defeated Housemarque's Super Stardust HD just slightly, where as Massive got the fortune and the fame, Housemarque got a special mention :).

Nordic Game conference provided quality keynotes focusing on developing software and hardware in parallel for the Rock Band game (congrats to Olli-Matti Rautiainen from Outokumpu Pelitalo who was the lucky winner of a Rock Band set!). The other keynote focused on Lego Star Wars and Indiana Jones titles and dealt with challenges when working with license owners such as Lego and Lucas Arts. Lego Star Wars series has achieved sales of 18 million units to date. Besides big development processes also casual games were well in the view. Panel discussions focused around Freerice type of serious games, poking at the Facebook, Wikipedia as MMO etc. One thing evident though is that non-gamers are here to stay and Nintendo Wii is just the start.

WidSets Developer Competition

dev.widsets.com is announcing a developer competition!

According to them, Widsets developer team is looking for game developers to try out their platform. There seems to be plenty of room to show your skills so why not! Anybody from indie to corporate are welcome! Apparently there is only roughly two weeks time left so hurry up!

More details from competition HERE and the developer kit from dev.widsets.com

What is Widsets?

With WidSets you can get your favorite web content straight to your mobile phone. Find news and information, stay in touch with email and blogs, play games, share pictures and more. WidSets uses mini-applications called widgets to push updates from your favorite sites directly to your phone. Why waste time surfing for information when WidSets can do it for you?

XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 - Materials Available

The slides and video recordings of the presentations are available here:http://www.codezone.fi/XNA_Game_Studio_Tour_2007.Codezone

Finnish Games Association joins ISFE

http://www.figma.fi/

http://www.isfe-eu.org/

Europe's Interactive Software Federation announced that the Finnish Games and Multimedia Association is the 26th member to join the ISFE.

FIGMA counts eleven members in its association, all of them big software companies operating on the Finnish market," said Patrice Chazerand, secretary general of the ISFE.

Its presence in the ISFE strengthens the industry's voice in Europe. It will help us do several things: push on with our mission to secure effective legislation for the protection of intellectual property rights, achieve adequate enforcement of the legislation and win unrestricted market access both on and off line.

I am delighted to announce that with the arrival of the Finns virtually the entire Nordic block is now on board."

ISFE membership will bring my member companies more scope to get their voices heard by the legislators in areas such as intellectual property, e-commerce, the fight against piracy, WTO negotiations, protection of minors and the environment," said FIGMA's Managing Director, Riku Olkkonen.

The members of FIGMA include AMO/Nintendo, Atari, Electronic Arts, K.E. Media, Microsoft/Xbox, Nokia, Nordisk Film/PlayStation, Plan 1, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Toptronics/PAN Vision, and Vivendi Games.

The ISFE was established in 1998 and represents the interests of the interactive software sector throughout the 27 EU Member States plus Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. It has been running the Pan-European Game Information ratings system since 2003.

XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 liveblogging

14:30 Dave

* Dave explains the common things/tips to notice when starting a studio or just trying to get into game industry to make games * Dave moves on explaining goals of XNA * XNA goals as follows; Make it easier, Establish a vibrant community, low friction publishing channel for community games * XNA wants to establish itself as a tool to democratize game development * 700,000 downloads of toolset now, Adopted by more than 300 universities worldwide, More than 400 games (XNA Express 1.0) * Dave explains XNA as a robust educational platform & shows an example project (Aliens) that works from desktop computer using 360 controller * Dave explains XNA creators club, starter kit. Example games given with this kit, of all major genres. Shows off template functionality of XNA 2.0 briefly & shows off a template example project that users can dissect and modify freely. He continues showing a just compiled game deployed to 360 console. Looks and works exactly the same way in PC and 360.

15:00 Dave * Dave continues to explain minigames and samples provided in starter kit. Variety seems endless here. He shows off how to investigate components of the game in real-time, like a chase-camera and prototype how it works. * Dave shows off a visual game-like programming app called Boku that was made by Microsoft research, aimed towards kids. Apparently made with XNA, Boku allows you basically to create small games & interaction via a very simple programming interface. Microsoft wanted to use XNA to have fast iteration in the project. * Dave shows off Schizoid as an example. * He shows off examples from an XNA Dream.Build.Play competition, no Finland in competition apparently. Many of them games were done by one person or just a very small team. A lot of student projects also. * Dave said they will be doing the Dream.Build.Play again on December 08. * Dave showed off a Swedish made game Ragu, again wondering where is Finland. Ragu was one of the games in Dream.Build.Play competition. * Dave mentions about Imagine Cup 2008, a game development contest lobbying students to join since it's only for students. Game development is a new category in Imagine Cup 2008. * X360 XNA development will be free for students in near future apparently also and not only faculty members. * Dave thanks the university and wraps up * Jyri Ranki prepares his presentation > The presentation will be show with video and published to internet later on

15:30 Jyri

* Jyri explains his experience and agenda & the company he comes from * Jyri briefly goes trough an overview of Finnish game industry companies & famous games made in Finland. * Jyri moves into explaining about IGDA Finland. * He explains a basic cut-through of a basic console game development cycle & a sample org.chart with explaining roles in more detail. * Jyri talks on how to get into the industry and what is required to get in the industry.

16.00 Charles Cox

* Game in 60 minutes example

17:20 Break

17:45 Charles

* Charles goes more indepth with XNA 2.0 features * Button press deployment to XBOX360, builds and transfers it. * Allows you to use older "any" version of visual studio * Button press WINDOWS/XBOX live support * On Windows and XBOX you can store profiles (use it to save game and use other similar features) * Get the beta at creators.xna.com today! Final version avail. very soon!

* It's a wrap!