IGDA Finland February Gathering with Amazon Web Services and VIOPE

The February gathering of IGDA Finland was teeming with eager guests as Amazon Web Services held a presentation about their latest game development tools and there was also a message from the Finnish Game Jam 2014 that attracted over 700 jammers all around Finland, the biggest FGJ to date! 

One of the main events of the evening though was Viope’s announcement of the Game Development World Championship 2013 winners. The competition attracted developers from 79 countries as participants competed in the Student or the Pro track. Congratulations to Hopping Penguin (Winner of the student track) and Like a Boss (Winner of the pro track and the main prize)! Check out the GDWC website to see all of the finalists and a video of the closing event: http://viope.com/contest.

Despite the rain and the cold weather Adams was jam-packed by the end of the evening. Thank you to all who attended and we hope to see you at today's gathering!

IGDA Finland February Gathering with Amazon Web Services and VIOPE

Now that the year has finally gotten to a great start, we decided to ramp it up in IGDA Finland February Gathering.

AWS_Logo_Web

First up we have a small message from this year’s awesome Finnish Game Jam 2014. After that the people from Amazon Web Services will give you a short intro on how gaming companies are leveraging their platform. And last but not least is the VIOPE crew presenting the Game Development World Championship 2013 which has reached its end. The 4-month-long competition drew massive attention of developers from 79 countries around the globe. It’s now time to reveal the finalists and announce the winners. Come and celebrate with us at the GDWC Closing Ceremony!

viope_logo

Here is a sneak-peak at what Amazon is presenting at the Gathering:

Amazon offers a comprehensive set of development tools and services that make it faster and easier for developers to build, deploy, distribute, scale, analyze, and monetize successful games. Learn how companies like Supercell, Rovio, Grand Cru, and Mojang are utilizing AWS platform to innovate faster and focus on game development instead of undifferentiated heavy-lifting of managing IT infrastructures. You will also get a chance to hear about some of our latest developments including application and game streaming from the cloud (Amazon AppStream) and C3, our latest generation of compute-optimized instances providing customers with the highest performing processors and enhanced network performance making this instance type a perfect fit for MMOG games.

The lovely people Club Adams offer the cloakroom service free of charge!

IGDA Finland February Gathering Time: 11.02.2014 at 18:00 Place: Club Adams, Erottaja 15-17, Helsinki Finland

IGDA Finland October Gathering and Presentation with Unity

Upcoming Unity 2D toolkit, tips&tricks, physics, etc... The list goes on what the awesome IGDA Finland Presentation held for the attending crowd at Club Adams, which peaked at 270 attendees!

Andy Touch from Unity presented us with the upcoming feature to Unity. He showed us a glimpse on how the developers can use Unity more easily to create 2D games with the build-in tools. After Andy, Marco Trivellato took to the stage, also from Unity, and provided some essential tips & trick to help the developer on daily tasks, which ranged from profiling the game to garbage collection. Sampsa Lehtonen (Recoil Games & Draconus Entertainment ltd.) revealed what he had learned in making 2.5D games, such as Rochard which focused on the physics in 2/2.5D games. Brendan Erquiaga from Retora Game Studion wanted us to use our time better and so focused on the essentials of Editor Scripting in Unity. Examples ranged from simple short-keys to changing how Unity pre-/post-processes models. And last but not least, VIOPE launched the Game Development World Championship 2013 in the event, see more info here.

Warm thanks to all presenters and attendees. Stay tuned for updates of the upcoming gathering!

IGDA Finland October Gathering and Presentation with Unity

The weather is getting colder, but our season is just getting warmed up! We have cooked up for you a hot bowl of IGDA Finland Presentation on the topic of Unity to keep you warm, so check out the presentations and speakers below:

Native 2D is coming to Unity! (Andy Touch) Andy will demonstrate the new framework and how to setup your projects to use 2D features such as physics, polygon collider generation, sprite objects and spritesheet animation. He will also talk about how the new features fit into Unity's existing asset-creation workflows and give examples of 2D-related additions to the scripting API.

Unity Tips&Tricks and Good Practices (Marco Trivellato) In this presentation we will talk about different Unity tricks that the audience will be able to take away and use immediately. Topics include profiling and optimisations, memory and garbage collection, editor tricks as well as Unity game development good practices.

Unity Physics Gameplay (Sampsa Lehtonen) In this session we delve into the physics features of Unity and explore how they can be used to implement and enhance gameplay. The focus is on Sampsa's personal experiences and lessons he has learned while working on Unity games with 2D / 2.5D physics gameplay.

Unity Editor: Make it work for you (Brendan Erquiaga) In this presentation we will cover all aspects of Editor Scripting and how everyone should leverage them to improve development. We will talk about scripts to help remove friction from your pipeline, methods to automate tedious tasks, and tricks for improving day-to-day Unity use. Additionally we will explore the strength of giving editor tools to your designers, allowing them to maximize their efficiency. 

Game Development World Championship 2013 (VIOPE) Game Development World Championship 2013 is a sequel of successful Viope Game Programming Contest 2012, which engaged over 500 teams from 70 countries. The GDWC 2013 is open to game developers and enthusiasts all over the world, from students to freelancers and professionals. The competition starts from 8th October 2013 and lasts to 26th January 2014. Especially throughout the competition, participants will be couched by the world's famous companies - Rovio and Microsoft - to name a few. The winning team will get great prizes (to be be announced at the Opening Ceremony), more importantly to showcase your talents and grab future opportunities in the gaming industry.

Presenters:

Andy Touch (Unity) Since he added physics to a cube and watched it bounce, Andy has been interested in experimenting and playing around with gaming technology. Having specialised in Unity at university, and then going on to teach the engine to higher education students, he is now part of the Evangelist team at Unity Technologies and helps to spread the word to new users and to show off what it can do! He loves creating interactive 3D art experiments, taking part in game jams & hack days and helping Unity Developers to get the most out of the game engine.

Marco Trivellato (Unity) Marco is a veteran in the game industry with a strong background in computer science and a passion for programming and video games. He worked for many years in Italy, Canada and now England. In his time in Vancouver he worked for Electronic Arts and Next Level Games as systems and rendering software engineer on triple-A titles like FIFA, Fight Night 3 and Captain America, spending most of his time on game engines, focusing on their performance and architecture. Then he decided to move on and joined Unity for a new career challenge. He now works in UK as Field Engineer helping other game developers to make great games!

Sampsa Lehtonen (Recoil Games & Draconus Entertainment ltd.) Sampsa Lehtonen is a game programmer with over 10 years of experience in the industry. Even with a Master's degree in computer science, he is self-taught what comes to developing games. He has been working on titles ranging from indie (Triplane Turmoil 2 for PC) to mobile (Rock Runners for iOS and Android, Bad Piggies) to "triple A next-gen" console games (Rochard for PS3, PC, Mac and Linux).

Brendan Erquiaga (Retora Game Studios) Brendan is an independent game developer who has been using the Unity Engine to fuel his creations for the past four years. Being a Designer/Programmer, he has always enjoyed the freedom & speed of working in Unity. He started as a self-taught hobbyist, then attended university for game design which helped him work his way up to full-time developer. He has lead large teams, created solo projects, done Unity contract work, developed for Retora Game Studios, and last year he taught teenagers to develop mobile games in Unity. Currently Brendan is the Creative Director at Retora Black, a mobile game studio out of Phoenix, Arizona.

IGDA Finland Gathering start at the same place right after the presentations. Stay tuned for updates!

IGDA Finland Presentations – Unity Time: 8.10.2013 at 17:00 Place: Club Adams, Erottaja 15-17, Helsinki Finland

IGDA Finland October Gathering Time: 8.10.2013 at 19:15 Place: Club Adams, Erottaja 15-17, Helsinki Finland

IGDA Finland February Gathering with Viope

12.2.2013 something called an IGDA Gathering happened. Club Adams, the new meeting place of gaming community in Helsinki area, was baptized with style. The first one to steal the spotlight was Viope.

Viope served us a multitude of goods. Firstly, they sponsored the February Gathering and donated a fair amount of precious drink tickets. We are ever grateful!

Viope had reserved another seat at the sitting: the first show of the night was the award ceremony of Viope Game Programming Contest 2012. We heard a few words from one of the judges, Remedy’s Saku Lehtinen, and then the stage was taken over by Viope’s Kwame Afreh and Tram Nguyen, who had the honour of presenting the awards.

The nominees came all over the world, Saudi-Arabia, Macedonia and Singapore, to name a few. Eventually both the main award and the student award went to a Singaporean entry Kindly ever after by the team Ancora. Congratulations! Check out all the nominees from here.

The spotlight was occupied again later that night: it was time for the Finnish Game Jam award ceremony! This year there was no single winner, and the prizes were in fact Honorable Mentions designed to celebrate noteworthy gaming experiences. In the spirit of the Game Jam the categories were delightfully wonky, such as Beertasking and Multidrinking Award and Public Love Award. You can see a list of all the honored and nominated games from here.

So that was the February Gathering. People swarmed in like there was no tomorrow, and thanks to all of you we made a record: whopping 296 visitors! We are insanely happy! We also offer a big thank you to our host Club Adams.

See you next time!

IGDA Finland February Gathering

The year of the Snake is already full of game related extravagance. You are going to see a lot of exciting action in the next IGDA Gathering, so let’s take a quick look to pique your unmatched curiosity.

The February gathering will be sponsored by the one and only Viope Solutions, an eLearning virtuoso from Helsinki. They will bring not only drink tickets but also good tidings: the Viope Game Programming Competition 2012-2013 is now behind us, and it is time to announce the winners!

The multi-purpose February Gathering also serves as the prize ceremony of the Finnish Game Jam 2013, that was held 25th-27th January. Prepare to see categories you’ve never seen before!

Don’t forget that the Gathering has moved to new locations in Erottajankatu 15-17. We’ll see you there! IGDA Finland February Gathering Time: 12.2.2013 at 19.00 Place: Adams Club, Erottajankatu 15-17, Helsinki, Finland

We'd also like to invite you and your friends to the movies before the IGDA Finland Gathering. Wreck-it Ralph at Kinopalatsi for free! Sign up now: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5225638024#

IGDA Finland October Gathering with Unity and GameFounders

9th October was a day of tricks and treats for the game folk in Finland.

October’s IGDA Finland Presentations are now behind us, and they were a success! All 250 tickets were reserved in advance. The theme of the evening was Unity 4, and a few lucky ones even won themselves a full Unity Pro 4.0 license. Just in case you inexplicably missed the event, let’s recap.

Nick Jovic and his merry men from Unity Technologies gave us a taste of the next generation of their platform. Colossal Order’s very own Damien Morello shared his tips and tricks for Unity, and you even get a chance to put your freshly gained knowledge to good use: Antti Lihavainen opened VIOPE’s world wide Game Programming Contest.

What comes to the post-Unity Gathering in Bar Cuba, the words of a fellow attendee sums things up nicely: ”It's a bit crowded.”

Nick Jovic was in the mood for a popquiz, and awarded correct answers with Unity’s t-shirts. We learned, for example, where the company’s main office is situated (San Francisco, for future reference) and where Unity will established their newest office (Berlin, now you know).

The other big thing came from across the Baltic Sea. Kadri Ugand from the Estonian game accelerator GameFounders first greeted us with kind words and then dropped the proverbial bomb: the second round of GameFounders program is now officially open!

Thank you for spending an evening with us! This time the number of attendees in the Gathering went up to 261. See you in November!

IGDA Finland October Gathering with Unity

October draws near, and so does the next IGDA Finland Gathering. This time we have organized a set of presentations for you to enjoy.

Pre-event: IGDA Finland presentations @ Bulevardi 31, Helsinki The presentations will revolve around Unity, the game development tool we all know and respect. As the launching of Unity4 approaches, we felt it appropriate to venture deeper into the mysteries of this popular software that hit 1 million registered users in April 2012. We have managed to gather an interesting line of speakers. The schedule and topics are as follows:

Speakers: Regional Sales Director Nick Jovic, Unity: Latest News Product Evangelist Russ Morris, Unity: Unity 4 Workflows -- Tips & Tricks Field Engineer Ken Noland, Unity: Inside the Tech - Hidden Gems

Damien Morello, Colossal Order:Unity Engine in a production environment Antti Lihavainen, Viope: Viope Game Programming Contest

PS. If you want to win something cool: please bring your business cards with you! We'll do a draw at the end of the Unity presentations.

Time: 9.10.2012 at 17.00-19.00 Place: Bulevardi 31, 00180 Helsinki Seminar is organized by IGDA Finland Eventbrite Event: Link  

IGDA Gathering in Bar Cuba

After the presentations it's time to indulge in cold drinks and hot topics just around the corner. The main sponsor of the October gathering is Unity. They will pamper us with drink tickets and other tangible utilities. We will also hear a few words from our other contributor GameFounders, a feisty startup accelerator that focuses on game developers. GameFounders startups will be showing their Unity projects on iPads. Can you handle so much luxury?

Bar Cuba. 7PM. Be there to share the passion with us!

IGDA Finland October Gathering Time: 9.10.2012 at 19.00 Place: Cuba Bar, Erottaja 4, Helsinki Finland