Score's 2008 Wrap Up

2008 was a special year for Score, the Finnish game development club heavily associated with IGDA Finland. We decided to provide you with a wrap up of all our coolest activities that took place last year, just to get the feeling that a lot is happening!

Supernova Game Development Lab

Just in the beginning of 2008 Score hit a major milestone and got it's very own game lab inside TAMK School of Art and Media, called Supernova. Our undisclosed budget got us top of the line audio equipment, large screen, four well specsed workstations with all of the important licenses. This really allowed us to have a place to gather in daily and share the newest updates while working out the next grand scheme.

Microsoft Student Partner Programme

Our (ex-)president Teemu Haila got chosen to participate in Microsofts Student Partner Programme and since then Microsoft has been positively active towards our club and it's goals, especially by providing training material for XNA and various other opportunities disclosed later on.

Nordic Game

Neogames and TAMK sponsored our key members for a trip to Nordic Game 2008 in Malmo! You can read our post-mortem from the trip, but in short we got some really valuable contacts and got to see the actual state of Nordic game developer community. The trip was a real source of inspiration and next year we wont be just visitors any more!

Game: Steamsky

A result from our game development course, Steamsky was one of the first “real” playable games from Score. It was an experimental title with XNA in the spirit of Star Control and, sad to say, we had more trouble with production management than actual coding or design skill. Still, it was a two month project and a milestone of it’s own.

Game: Epic Flail

Epic Flail was also made as a part of the previously mentioned course. The reason for making this impish little flash-game was to teach its coder some Actionscript 3 in which he didn't have any previous experience.

At the time, most of the people from Score were somehow psyched about physics engines which lead to Epic Flail having physics in a major part as well. Actually there was only one gameplay feature in EF which utilized the physics engine, only making it more important: a huge stone boulder attached to a rubber line. It was only natural to make the slaughter of infinite amount of zombies using this epic flail as the goal of the game.

As it was paramount to get a grip on AS3 with this project, no existing code could be used. Every technical element of the game (sprites, physics, gameplay logic, memory handling and effects, etc.) were wrapped up into a single library, the first game engine of its creator. Zombie engine - not only slow but a damn ugly one as well!

Game Project: 5D

5D was an experimental project of fast paced prototyping. In short: five games in five weeks with five people, five days a week and five hours a day. This project was inspired by Lasse Seppänen from Remedy/IGDA Finland and not only marked a milestone in communication with the local developer industry but also focused on the important things that our school can’t teach. We tried to document everything, so please go read our reports and watch the games.

Assembly Summer 2008

We got VIP seating thanks to Microsoft and Teemu Haila kept an XNA for beginners seminar. We didn’t have the time to participate in the game development compo but decided to do so at any costs next year. We also got in touch with some nice people and probably will feature our own (or shared) booth!

Trip to Norway

As a result of our visibility in Nordic Game we got an invitation to the University of Hamar! We kept two presentations about the benefits of club activities and how to start one. To our very pleasant surprise we met some of the local companies in their IGDA Hamar meeting and were even invited to party at their own game development lair! Please refer to our post-mortem from the trip for all juicy details.

Game: Pisara

XNA game by Heikki Leppänen about spiders battling it out on a rainy glass window. The official description in finnish: "Peli sijoittuu ikkunalasiin, jonka karmien alalaidoissa on hämähäkin verkot. Ulkona sataa ja lasiin lentelee pisaroiden lisäksi havunneulasia. Kaksi hämähäkkiä kiipeilee ikkunalasilla ja yrittää tehdä reitin toistensa verkkoihin ikkunaan lentelevistä havunneuloista, jolloin pisarat valuvat neulasia pitkin verkkoon. Pelaajat saavat vuorotellen hetken aikaa siirrellä ruudulla olevia neulasia. Pelaaja voittaa kun toisen verkkoon valuu liikaa pisaroita."

XNA game development course

Some of our members, Teemu Haila and Heikki Leppänen, kept a course on designing games with XNA in TAMK. The course was very special in the sense of everyone participating in Imagine Cup and thus getting free XNA training material from Microsoft! We are looking forward to keeping the course again next year, if possible.

XNA @ JKL

Again, Teemu and Heikki went of to keep a two day intensive course on XNA in the University of Jyväskylä, sponsored by Microsoft. We got some very positive feedback and will definitely do something similar in the future again!

Supernova Update

As 2008 was brought to an end, we got some Christmas presents from our school, consisting of (nearly) every top console title release in the last six months and some long awaited new hardware to keep out lab equipment up to date. Thanks, TAMK!

Epilogue:

All in all, we saw a lot of members come and go during the year with great and unique projects. Jenni Järvinen joined in our administration with a long background in IGDA volunteering, Teemu Haila gave room for Juho Hartikainen as the current standing president and both Heikki Leppänen and Antti Salomaa took much more active role in developing Score to the point it is now in.

We are also thrilled to say that all our board members (and several normal ones) are both IGDA members and IGDA Finland volunteers with Teemu being the web coordinator and Juho the webmaster of IGDA Finland.

2007-2008 Season Report, part 3: Gatherings Overview

Hi Everyone! This is the 3rd and final part of our season report for last season which ended in summer 2008. Be sure to check out parts one and two as well!

It's been another hectic fall and that has unfortunately meant that it's taken us way too long to get this report out again. Our apologies for that. Last part of the report will give you highlights from all the gatherings held during the season 2007-2008, including short introductions and links to the original articles.

(NOTE: Attendance figures in this report are the double checked ones and might in some case differ from those mentioned individual Gathering After Action Reports slightly)

August '07

After the relaxing summer break, the well-tanned game developers were full of eagerness at the IGDA August Gathering in System Rock on 28th August. This time 124 attendees joined the party. Digital Chocolate and Bugbear were especially well represented! Also professionals from Remedy, Red Lynx and Recoil were there.

September '07

This time IGDA Finland gathering started differently because the evening begun with our first-ever IGDA Finland Presentation event at Pääposti Auditorium. The theme of the session was money. We were positively surprised of the plentiful and versatile audience. There were a little over 60 people watching the presentations, from students to business developers and game designers. The gathering itself drew in 125 attendees. It was also good to notice how the presentations attracted people who have never been at the pub nights but found it a comfortable way to take part in our activities. Some practicalities were still looking for their place but otherwise things went well. The speakers at the first session were Erik Robertson from Nordic Game Program, Ilari Kuittinen from Housemarque and Timo Vuorensola from Energia Productions.

October '07

The cold fall weather took it’s toll on Octobers IGDA gathering attendance. Even with industry representatives from Tampere, the attendance rose to 99, just shy of a hundred.

Most notable at the gathering were the new decorations on the wall. System Rock had gone through a small facelift, which was well received by attendees. While attendance was lower than usual, those who showed up had the rare luxury of free tables. This luxury was quickly exploited and various boardgame sessions sprung up around the room, amongst them Munchin and Scrabble. A person with a brand-new iPhone got a lot of new friends as everyone wanted to try the device out.

November '07

Despite the icy and windy weather, 243 brave game industry professionals made it to the System Rock on 13th November for the Recoil-sponsored November gathering. 243! Thanks to everyone who attended -we clearly beat the previous record of 210 attendees set in November 2006 (which by the way was also a Recoil-sponsored event).

Finnish game development scene was well represented from Recoil, Bugbear and Sumea to RedLynx, Ironstar Helsinki and others. Also several IT-professional joined the party to marvel at active discussion amongst game developers. IGDA Finland was happy to welcome 45 newcomers to the party as well as people all the way from Spain, Digital Chocolate’s game studio Microjocs and a bit closer to home, from Tampere TTVO!

December '07

The last gathering of the year drew in a nice crowd of 174 attendees total! In December gathering AMD provided drink tickets ensuring the mood was indeed very merry all night long.

The other sponsor was Microsoft and they provided us with the demostands, with which we hosted 2 game competitions, as well as the prizes for those competitions. Both demostands were popular but Guitar Hero 3 demostand even had people lining up to play from time to time so it was clearly the more popular one.

January '08

Year 2008 got a kick start on 8th of January when there were both IGDA Finland Presentations and a pub night in snowy Helsinki.

This time IGDA Finland Presentations in association with Remedy was held at Papa Giovanni Showroom just opposite System Rock. The room was fully booked with 59 people. It was especially good to see new people joining as well as individuals who usually don’t visit the pub nights — something for all that is!

Pub night was in line with “tipaton tammikuu” (Alcohol-free January) with slightly less people than usual. This time 97 developers reached System Rock. Both lectures and pub night attracted new faces which is always super! There were also regulars from Bugbear, Housemarque and Sumea. Also a group from Tampere were there again which can be seen as a challenge to fellow developers from other bigger towns like Oulu, Jyväskylä and Turku!

Febuary '08

Long and dark winter is getting to the bones of Finnish game developers. It is the flu season in Finland and that surely shows! In February IGDA pub night attendees were a bit few in number but strong in spirit! This time there was only about 78 attendees.

Between pre-GDC chatting and local game industry news, the attendees filled out a questionnaire about the venue. There has been a discussion whether IGDA Finland should find a better venue for the gatherings (which finally happened in October 2008).

March '08

Bugbear was celebrating its 8th anniversary at the IGDA Finland March gathering. In addition to free drinks, the 209 party goers were treated with a slot car racing track to play and T-shirts to take home. Bugbear’s birthday party speech proudly proclaimed Bugbear as the worlds leading independent driving game developer (as all the other good ones had been bought off by publishers :P), and had a few interesting tidbits about Bugbear’s next projects.

April '08

The third IGDA Finland Presentations session was held on 8th of April at Papa Giovanni Showroom and drew 39 interested souls in to listen. This time the theme was education covering everything from most interesting research findings to current state of games’ education and recruitment in Finland: how to boost up collaboration between companies and school which would benefit both. The gathering itself attracted 93 attendees.

May '08

IGDA gathering held on 6th May had extra board gaming flavor thanks to Tactic. Kati Heljakka and Petter Ilander from Tactic’s Product Development unit were visiting us. That time 82 game enthusiasts joined the party chatting about game development and board games in particular.

June '08

Finnish casual game start-up Everyplay wanted to give a kick start to summer vacations on 10th of June when the last IGDA Gathering was held before the summer break. It was a great way to celebrate the birth of the latest addition to the line-up of Finnish game developers. IGDA Finland happily welcomes Everyplay and wishes them to live long and prosper!

IGDA June Gathering sponsored by Everyplay drew in 163 developers to join the event. You could clearly notice the closeness of summer vacation because the chat went around summer plans more than work related stuff and industry news.

Jussi Laakkonen the CEO of Everyplay gave a short presentation of the company. For many Jussi was previously known as the Business Development Director of Bugbear. This time he talked convincingly about casual games and how the current games are just the tip of the iceberg. Everyplay believed that games are for all and playful interaction is getting common outside game industry as well.

That's it for this season report. Make sure to read parts one and two as well!

- Joona and Lari

GDC 2009 Scholarships Notification

The IGDA Student Scholarship Program for GDC09 is now underway! If you're a student interested in the field, be sure not to miss out the opportunity to meet the big guys of the gaming industry in San Francisco, California next March! Through this program, if selected, you will receive a main conference pass with access to all sessions, roundtables and keynotes, an industry mentor that will introduce you around and a chance to visit a local studio and an orientation session as well. This is a big opportunity for anyone who is interested in getting his or her career off the ground! ;-)

If you want to know more about what's ahead, check out reports from previous winners, including Liz's report from 2007. It's also worth mentioning that there's a forum post from one of the judges, Mr. David Weinstein, giving an insight in the judging process. The deadline for all applications is Thursday, January 15th, 2009.

2007-2008 Season Report, part 2: IGDA Finland Growth Continues

Everyone! Welcome to the second part of this season report. You can find the previously published first part of the season report here.

During last season, which ended in summer 2008, IGDA Finland once again grew nicely. We didn't quite reach the 30% yearly growth as previous season, but that just might be because we're pretty much reaching the majority of the Finnish game industry by now. The latest published figures put the amount of jobs game industry jobs in Finland at around 1200-1300 (although this figure is from 2006 - we really need more up-to-date figures). During the season, our invitation mailing list grew 34% reaching 945 people and by the time of writing, we've already exceeded the 1000-mark!

Our membership grew to 235 by end of the season, which means we've doubled our membership in 3 years! Not only did it grew, but we had more individual full members than ever before, seeing both student members and individuals from affiliate studios moving to that category. While we appreciate the membership that we get through our affiliate studios and those of students, nothing spells commitment to IGDA more like people who decide to pay the full membership out of their own pocket. Most importantly, it also tells us we must be doing something right. :)

Last season our gatherings drew in a total of 1486 attendees averaging 135 attendees/gathering, both showing slight growth from last season. November gathering sponsored by Recoil broke the record they helped us set last year with a new attendance record of 243 attendees.

Here are some of the actual statistics of the last season: (Click on a chart image for a full-size version)

Membership Growth by Type

Membership Breakdown

Membership Profile Development

Monthly Gathering Attendance by Season

Growth of Mailing List

The first part of this three-part season report can be found here and the third part is here.

Joona and Lari

2007-2008 Season Report, part 1: the Main Accomplishments

Welcome to our newest season report! Like last season, this report will be published in 3 parts throughout the fall. We've been so busy providing you guys with another brilliant season, that it has taken us this long to get to writing this. Our apologies for the delay & I hope you find this interesting. As always, comments & feedback are welcome! Even though the last season wasn't as groundbreakingly successful as our phenomenal '06-'07 season, 2007-2008 season (August 2007 - June 2008) was still a very good year all-around.

This article is divided into three parts, this first one concentrating on the main accomplishments of the season (as judged by the coordinator team). The second being more pleasing for the propellerhead section of our members including an analysis of growth numbers and other "stats stuff". The third part is a short overview look at all the Gatherings that took place during the Season 2007-2008.

These are the main accomplishments of the season:

1) IGDA Finland Growth IGDA Finland has seen some growth in all areas and almost broke the 1,000 names mark on our invitation mailing list, with a growth of about 35% last season. So when we sometimes experience issues with delivering the invitation to all of those inboxes, it's a result of our web team upgrading our mailing system to deal with the increased volumes. We'll talk more about the stats in the second part of the report.

2) Increased Coordinator Team IGDA coordinator team was strengthened with Mats Diktonius from Nokia, who served as the Volunteer Lead for the season and Sonja Kangas who came on board to give wings to our long-time dream of organizing regular presentation events to complement our highly successful gatherings. This brought our coordinator team numbers from 3 to 5, a significant increase of resources.

3) New Studio Affiliate We also received a new affiliate, Chat Republic. It's always a big thing for us to get new members who want to show their support for the work we're doing. That tells us that we're on the right track.

4) IGDA Finland Presentation Series This initiative had been on the table for ages, but gatherings and all the other things we were already doing kept our small coordinator team overworked as it was and the project never materialized. As Sonja joined the coordinator team, we had a coordinator whose sole focus for the season was to get the presentation series started. So give a big hand to Sonja!

Let's quickly look at all the presentation events of the season:

Sep 11, 2007 - The first ever IGDA Finland presentation was focused on money (link)

Erik Robertson from Nordic Game Program gave hints on how to get funds from the Nordic Game Program

Ilari Kuittinen from Housemarque spoke about their experiences and future visions of downloadable console titles

Timo Vuorensola from Iron Sky -crew shared the crew's vision for an Iron Sky game and set out to find possibilities for cooperation

Jan 8, 2008 - The second presentation focused on development tools (link)

Kai Auvinen and Lassi Leppinen from Digital Chocolate (Sumea) and Sami Vanhatalo from Remedy spoke about Tools in mobile and console game development

Apr 8, 2008 - Last presentation event of the season was about education and research (link)

Night was kicked off by Koopee Hiltunen (Neogames) who gave a briefing of a survey on game education (Pelialan koulutusselvitys)

Veikko Miettinen (Pelitalo Outokumpu), Frans Mäyrä (University of Tampere), Petri Lankoski (University of Arts and Design Helsinki), Veli-Pekka Piirainen (Kajaani AMKK) and Juha Vanhanen (Adulta) spoke about ways to utilize the findings of game research and student projects as well as to improve the collaboration between industry and education

5) Website Upgrades Our website saw several improvements during last season. We got a new visual look and new features like the Attendance History on the top of the page. The Newsletter system was upgraded as well.

6) New Logo Along with the visual looks of the website, we designed a new logo for the chapter, to replace our original logo created back in 2005. The logo is based on the IGDA logo, but adds more Finnish touch by including the map of our country. The idea is to communicate our affiliation with IGDA and it's values and our pride of being part of the Finnish game industry. Different color versions include the one with the original IGDA colors and a white & blue version (that are the colors of the Finnish national flag). These color choices further emphasize what the logo is meant to communicate.

7) Public Mission Statement We've come to realize that our mission has always been clear to our coordinator team, but has not been communicated clearly to our potential members. To change this, IGDA Finland made for the first time, it's mission statement public and it was posted in the about us -section of our website.

8 ) SCORE, a New Student Club Score is the first Finnish IGDA Student Club and is also known as TAMK University of Applied Sciences Game Development Club. Several club members are also active IGDA Finland volunteers or coordinators, including our webmaster. Check out their website at http://score.igda.fi/ to find out more on their current game project 'Frayed' and about the club itself!

9) More International Attention An article about IGDA Finland was written in Helio Magazine's Spring 2007 Edition. Read more about the article here: (link).

The MVP Award given to IGDA Finland at GDC 2007 already during the previous season was mentioned in IGDA.org’s 2007 Annual Report that came out during the '07-'08 season. Read more about the MVP award here: (link)

That’s it for the main accomplishments, stay tuned for part 2 of the season report…

The second part of this article can be found here and the third part here.

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This article is the work of 2 of our newest IGDA volunteers, Lari Unkari and Joona Pulliainen, both students of PelKo3 at Adulta. So if you find this article unsatisfactory, you know where to point your finger at ;)

More seriously this is their first assignment as volunteers, in the future you will hopefully see these two gents writings a lot more, as they are the nucleus of our new content team, whose main focus is to provide our website with regular content updates. Welcome to the team Joona & Lari! - Jay, Lead Coordinator

This task seemed a bit challenging for us as newcomers, but thanks to the help of Jay and Miikka, we think we've pulled it through. - Joona

I certainly feel that they didn't expect us to write a full-blown article, or then Miikka is more devious than I had anticipated. Anyhow, reading up on the past events was interesting. So many things and so many events that I would've wanted to be in have taken place during the last season.

- Lari