Nordic Game 2008

Friends in the industry are a powerful thing and should be handled with this side up at all times! Our world’s size was once again proven with finnish developers pouring in to the same flight to Copenhagen. I could be fatally wrong, but at least Digital Chocolate, Farmind and Secret Exit were surrounding us on all fronts.

   At the party place we had the wonderful pleasure to get in talks with our friends from Remedy and Dchoc the moment we walked in and it really gave a warmly welcomed feeling. Recoil had arguably the best free candy around and Finland seemed to be generally well represented with familiar faces everywhere.

   Still, networking with old friends isn’t nearly as cool as making new ones in an event like this, so I’d really like to highlight all the academic connections we gained by tripping around. More about them later on, because now it’s time to dedicate a whole paragraph for...

There was a group of Swedish students showcasing their awesome looking game Fairytale with a cool demo reel of other projects. All this was cool, but the real hitter for me was really their dedication without a supporting student community. They have been a year in production with expected release date in december! With over ten people in the team! Is the academic system so different in their country that they can pull off stunts like this or are they just extra tough students? I hope to find some answers in the near future as we dig in to our neighboring regions and how they do things. I’d really like to see what they could do with a well organized community backing them up, but before going in to that basket of fruits, students weren’t the only interesting people around!

Just to promote the most interesting contacts, Autodesk was there for us when we ran around shouting for more education. We got a contact to their local retailer who handles these sort of deal in Finland. On another front the Unity 3D team had their people on-site and their engine looks like a perfect fit for us to accompany XNA. It goes a long way to provide tools for designers to tweak all variables and important stuff like that while playing the actual game. Even more tempting, it compiles to OS X, Windows, browsers, Wii and iPhone! I suspect we’ll be seeing more of them in the future. But enough of our cool experiences, because some of these contacts really sparked our interest on a new concept, called...

Yes, yes, it’s old stuff, right? IGDA with their student SIG and all that jazz.

Well haven’t seen any action!

What if there were student communities in all Nordic countries with active communication channels with each other. This is not something far fetched, people. We could collaborate on an university level with shared projects and/or technologies and at the same time promote student internships to other countries by actually introducing the possibilities to students. Our vice president Juho is working over time (his foots on MY table and typing away on his Macbook while listening to jazz, I’ll grant you that) at this very moment to introduce us to all our previously mentioned new academic contacts. This could turn out to be something really, really cool in time. But academic alliances weren’t the only thing we picked up, since before going international, there’s something we must do...

Who would have thought? Before going international, we really want to sort out our local problems! Everyone around us can see the huge potential of having KAJAK, TAMK, Pelitalo, UTA, Adulta and all the other players form a big soft ball of game development awesomeness, but the world is against us. Everything is still not clear, but there seem to be some very out-of-place rivalries and grudges that actually limit the freedom our students have while trying to access all courses being held.

This is something that we as students can fix if we want to. We aren’t here to get taught what they feel like teaching, we are here to learn what we need! We can put the pressure on schools and show how things should be done by going out there and actually doing it ourselves! There’s nothing to lose and everything to win, so why are you STILL reading this crap and not actually mailing your local teacher to Score at once?!

And we had to travel all the way to Malmö just to figure this out. Sheesh.