IGDA Finland April Seminar and Gathering, sponsored by Google

The spring has finally arrived to this northern city far, far away. The hot Finnish gaming industry threw away its padded winter clothing and gathered at El Jefe again in April. This time we had a seminar before the monthly gathering event, and guess what… the seminar tickets were actually sold out. The seminar Evolving into the Future was sponsored by Google.

We had three very talented speakers: Noah Falstein, Robert Nyman and Mandy Waite.

Noah Falstein is the chief game designer at Google and a true veteran in the game industry. Falstein spoke about the transmogrified reality, meaning the amazing possibilities that the recent technological developments raise, such as the magical opportunities with virtual reality. Falstein also gave a surfing lesson to the Finnish audience, just like he had promised.

After Falstein the stage was occupied by Robert Nyman, who talked about the tools and options that Google offers for game developers. In his presentation Level up your game with Google Nyman presented interesting numbers about business drivers, retention and player progression. The presentation slides can be found here.

Next there was Mandy Waite from Google Cloud Platform’s team. She talked about Firebase, which is a solution that helps developers focus on the applications rather than backend programming and servers.