Just landed!

What's up with the facepalm?

During Nordic Game 2008 in Malmö we got a invitation to visit the Hedmark University College in Norway and keep a small presentation on what our club activities are all about, hopefully inspiring their students to found a club of their own. TAMK School of Art and Media sponsored us with the travel expenses along with our office of international affairs, while Hedmark University College was kind enough to provide us with an awesome room in Hotel Victoria and loads of food and drinks during our stay.

This is our wrap up from the best trip anyone has ever made!

New Game

Score on rails to Hamar.

Our current club president Juho did a lot of hard work to book our tickets and figure out different schedules beforehand, so for me and Heikki it was a leisure ride all the way. This was our first time as a club to go abroad and have presentations in English about our activities, so everyone was a bit nervous on how it would turn out. Luckily all our scheduled transports were golden and before we knew it we were walking around in the streets of Hamar! Nina was our main contact from their side on this trip and she gave us a ride to Rena, where we were supposed to have our first presentation to the programming students.

Stage One

Awesome bar!

We were expecting something like an auditorium full of students and a really formal introduction, but instead got to perform in a much cooler place: their very own student pub! They even sponsored free beer and pizzas for everyone during the whole night! So it was a combined IGDA Hamar meeting and an afternoon class of sorts. After our somewhat successful presentation we got the great opportunity to mingle around with the audience, that consisted of students from Rena and even some representatives from their local game companies! All in all we met a lot of fun people to talk with and they felt really interested in forming a local student club to boost their networking and coordination. After the party we said goodbye to our new friends and Nina took us to our Hotel in Hamar, where we instantly doze off, completely exhausted from all the talking and new people.

Stage Two

Think about it.

After a good night’s sleep the good fellows from Hamar took us in to visit their Incubator, a project that provides fresh startups with an office and related tools to support their growth. We got to see some of their projects and hear about how they got to where they are today while lunching away in their office. Awesome? Yes!

Shortly after the meeting we started off with our second presentation (this time in a real auditorium) for the game design students in Hamar. We got some nice questions flying around and again the school had free chicken wraps and lemonade for everyone to enjoy along with casual chatter. How much better can it get? A lot, because shortly after the presentation we got our first official love letter from an anonymous fan! (if anyone can track her down, tell her we’re not that far away on lonely winter nights)

Bonus Stage

Piloting a miniature helicopter inside was a fun challenge.

The god of random threw her dice again and for some reason we found ourselves from the Hamar students’ home party in their private game lab! There were a lot of really cool people and we geeked out with Rock Band and our own 5D project games leading the party through the night. It was a sad moment to leave knowing that we wouldn’t see any of our new friends again during our trip, but we promised to throw emails around and keep track on what everyone was up to.

Closing Animation and Credits

We were walking zombies in the morning but a small pillow deathmatch (result: tie) did the trick and I’m writing this as we close in on Helsinki-Vantaa’s airport. We’re all totally exhausted from meeting all these new people and talking constatly with someone, but it has been one of the greater highlights of our club activity and we’d definitely be eager to do it again at a later date! Next time we’ll double the days.

Walking back to the station.

We’re also really looking forward to seeing if the students of Hedmark University College decide to form a club that we could organize all sorts of cool stuff with. They all have such a great potential and opportunities open to them if they just raise their voices enough. Want to beat our Score? Get on with it!

With best wishes,
Teemu Haila
Founder of Score