April Gathering - where to find talented game gurus?

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

The night was kicked off by Koopee "Neogames" Hiltunen who gave a briefing of a survey on game education (Pelialan koulutusselvitys) which will be published on 24th April by Neogames. One challenge for the growth of the game industry will be the lack of skilled work force. Neogames survey will suggest actions to enable the growth of the industry.

Frans Mäyrä from the University of Tampere and Petri Lankoski from University of Arts and Design talked about universities´ role in “education”. Universities do not train programmers or 3D artists but generate a lot of important data about the gamers, technical trends as well as tools for ideation or software development. Frans reminded that Tekes is a good source of funding. Especially when companies do not have the needed resources (time or people) an alternative would be to join a project where companies would collaborate with researchers as well as other companies along by the value chain. University of Tampere is currently preparing SoGame project which focuses on integration of social media and games in online services. Petri Lankoski brought up that University of Art and Design (Taik) is closer to praxis and hands-on work but still would also educate “educators of educators”.

The next three talks focused on professional training. Juha Vanhanen from Adulta gave a talk about courses Adulta is offering. Currently there are both basic and additional training available from basic game industry education to Game producer / manager course as well as business course (Pelialan liiketalouden valmennusohjelma). The students will graduate every second year and according to Juha majority of them have found work at the industry. KAJAK (Kajaani University of Applied Sciences) has a Game Programming Module. The studies started in 2006 and first students should graduate in 2009. KAJAK would be interested in closer collaboration with companies around Finland because there do not YET exist that strong game industry in Kajaani area. On-the-job training offers should be targeted to Veli-Pekka Piirainen. The last but not least was Veikko Miettinen from Outokumpu Pelitalo. Pelitalo is focused on 3D graphics. North Karelia College Outokumpu started game level designer and 3D-animator education in the fall of 2005. Currently they have a good line of applicants and good skills on 3D modeling and animation. They have also worked with Swedish Playsquad.com and utilized their motion capture equipment. Education theme continued at the bar where Outokumpu Pelitalo and Taik were showing some of their works. Petri Lankoski presented “Lies and Seductions” game project and Outokumpu showed their showreel, 3D models and animations. IGDA Finland Presentations attracted 40 people this time and the pub night gathered 105 gamers to the System Rock.

Website engine update... done

Just a heads-up. If everything went well, this note will be gone by tomorrow. We are sorry if this messes up with someone's IGDA Finland experience, but saturday evening is the best time to upgrade for us. --

Done and done. Nothing to see, move along.

Feature: Attendance History

Take one part of AJAX, three parts of JavaScript, some PHP, mix with MySQL and Photoshop the results: Attendance History launched! Currently this graphical explosion is on it's final beta stages and for now only supports "Netscape" type browsers, mainly excluding Internet Exploder and Opera, whose proprietary rendering engines can't take valid code. Sheesh. If you are the lycky user of one of these browsers, get Firefox.

That said, please direct your optical attention to the top right portion of this site and use your cursor to interact with the past. We are very proud of our active chapter meetings and wanted to broadcast this more publicly. This presentation was brought to you by the following Score members: Niko Kosonen (ajax, php) and me (design, php).

Got feedback?  We need it! Webmaster (at) igda (dot) fi.

April Presentation & Gathering - Tuesday 8th

Hello everyone! Looks like winter is trying to catch up on us! But no blizzard can stop the monthly stampede to IGDA Finland Gathering! But wait... There's more! It's time for our 3rd IGDA Finland Presentation - In our presentation series.

*IGDA FINLAND APRIL PRESENTATION #3* Venue: Papa Giovanni Showroom, Keskuskatu 7 Time: Tuesday 8th April at 17.30 to 19.00

*IGDA FINLAND APRIL GATHERING* Place: System Rock, Keskuskatu 4, 00100 Helsinki (map: http://igda.fi/?page_id=5) Time: Tuesday 8th April, doors open at 19.00

What are the most interesting research findings at the moment? What type of collaboration schools and game developers have at the moment? Could students collaborate with the companies in doing user tests, 3D graphics or level design?

Join us at the IGDA Finland Presentation #3 session which is organized in association with Remedy. This time we talk about education and research. There are several schools, universities and other educational institutes in Finland offering courses in game design, production, graphical design, animation, sound design and programming. How to find a win-win situation -- a way to utilize the bright minds and future talents easily and/or improve processes and develop better tools for the developers with the help of educational institutes?

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) will talk about ways to utilize the findings of game research and student projects as well as improve the collaboration between industry and education.

We'll continue the night with good discussions, beer and some demos at the System Rock from 7pm onwards.

Cheers!

March gathering – full house celebrating Bugbear’s birthday

Bugbear was celebrating its 8th anniversary at the IGDA.fi party. In addition to free drinks the party goers were treated with a slot car racing track and T-shirts. Bugbear's birthday party speech proudly proclaimed Bugbear's as the worlds leading independent driving game developer [as all the other good ones had been bought off by publishers ;-)], and had a few interesting tidbits about Bugbear's next projects.

More photos from this event

Bugbear said that it is working on its biggest action driving game ever, which combines "FlatOut on steroids" with all new original stuff. The company also revealed its long term vision of expanding beyond pure driving. IGDA Finland gang is making virtual waves to Bugbear and wishing good luck for the future!

The birthday party attracted regular visitors from Helsinki area and Tampere but also several first-timers even as far as from Rovaniemi which is over 800 kilometers (nearly 520 miles) away! Besides the exciting news from Bugbear also GDC08 was well on view. Finnish game developers were again well represented at the GDC. The total turnout was close to (if not over) 100. Many interesting contacts and possibilities were kick started there and IGDA pub night at System Rock was an excellent place to celebrate the promising opportunities and good deals.

There was a steady flow of developers through the evening, with the total turnout as high as 210! The night lasted well over 3 am!

Next time we will start the night with IGDA Finland Presentations. See you all on 8th April!