February Gathering: Tuesday 10th

Next IGDA Finland Gathering is coming up! Cuba Café is once again opening its doors to all Finnish game developers. Quality chat, great company and excellent mojitos are waiting for you! Save the date. Also remember to get or renew your IGDA membership to get good discount on drinks.

See you there!

IGDA FINLAND FEBRUARY GATHERING Place: Cuba Café, Erottajankatu 4, 00120 Helsinki (map) Time: Tuesday, 10th of February, doors open at 19:00

Global Game Developers Jammed for 48 hours

Nearly 160 game developers jammed 48 hours during the last weekend in Copenhagen at the Nordic Game Jam. The first Game Jam was arranged at IT University in Copenhagen in 2006. This year IGDAs Education Special Interest Group got inspired by the event and machinated Global Game Jam network. Over 50 locations accepted the challenge. This year’s theme was “As Long as we have each other we never run out of problems”. Additionally each location had additional constraints. The constraint for Nordic Game Jam was that the games should be language independent. Copenhagen had the biggest Game Jam with nearly 160 participants. People competed in two categories: Bring from Home and Global Game Jam. At the Bring from Home it was ok to bring a game that was 99% finished as long as they work develop, improve or polish the game during the weekend. The theme for the Bring from Home track was humor. Participants of the Global Game Jam track could just show up with or without a team. The event would start with a brainstorm and group creation session.

The biggest winner of Nordic Game Jam was Make my Head Grow (Denmark). It won best audio, best visuals, innovative controls, audience award at the jury’s award. At the Global Game Jam track In One Piece puzzle game won the audience award and Sheeped Away got the jury’s award. Petri Purho (Kloonigames) won the most innovative game title with his 4min33sec which was a tribute to John Cage’s avant garde piece 4´33” from the 1950s. 0 - - 0 had the best audio at the Global Game Jam track and Chopper + tank = bees won for the best visuals.

January Gathering: Promises for the New Year

[singlepic=343,320,240,,center]The exciting year of 2009 started off with a bang at the IGDA Finland Gathering on January 13th held at Cuba Cafe in Helsinki. Despite the gloomy and cold weather and the Finnish tradition of "tipaton tammikuu" ("Dropless January", meaning an alcohol-free month) a whopping 138 visitors showed up to enjoy their time with a glass - or a pint - of their favourite beverage. We were also given the pleasure to welcome 9 new faces aboard. Hope to see you at the next gathering, too!

[singlepic=341,320,240,,center] Without hesitation the topic of the evening was the oven-fresh indie game Crayon Physics Deluxe by Petri Purho (2008 IGF winner), which has received lots of good press of late. Petri most likely got his hands blistered from all the congratulating handshakes he received throughout the evening!

The evening progressed nicely with developers changing ideas and the latest news on the field. All in all, the evening was a great success knowing that usually Januaries are on the quiet side. Later in the evening some visitors even found the will and courage to do a small-scale dance show! :)

[slideshow=31] You can see more of the photos taken at the event at the gallery.

Be sure not to miss out the next gathering on February 10th! Same time, same place!

Score's 2008 Wrap Up

2008 was a special year for Score, the Finnish game development club heavily associated with IGDA Finland. We decided to provide you with a wrap up of all our coolest activities that took place last year, just to get the feeling that a lot is happening!

Supernova Game Development Lab

Just in the beginning of 2008 Score hit a major milestone and got it's very own game lab inside TAMK School of Art and Media, called Supernova. Our undisclosed budget got us top of the line audio equipment, large screen, four well specsed workstations with all of the important licenses. This really allowed us to have a place to gather in daily and share the newest updates while working out the next grand scheme.

Microsoft Student Partner Programme

Our (ex-)president Teemu Haila got chosen to participate in Microsofts Student Partner Programme and since then Microsoft has been positively active towards our club and it's goals, especially by providing training material for XNA and various other opportunities disclosed later on.

Nordic Game

Neogames and TAMK sponsored our key members for a trip to Nordic Game 2008 in Malmo! You can read our post-mortem from the trip, but in short we got some really valuable contacts and got to see the actual state of Nordic game developer community. The trip was a real source of inspiration and next year we wont be just visitors any more!

Game: Steamsky

A result from our game development course, Steamsky was one of the first “real” playable games from Score. It was an experimental title with XNA in the spirit of Star Control and, sad to say, we had more trouble with production management than actual coding or design skill. Still, it was a two month project and a milestone of it’s own.

Game: Epic Flail

Epic Flail was also made as a part of the previously mentioned course. The reason for making this impish little flash-game was to teach its coder some Actionscript 3 in which he didn't have any previous experience.

At the time, most of the people from Score were somehow psyched about physics engines which lead to Epic Flail having physics in a major part as well. Actually there was only one gameplay feature in EF which utilized the physics engine, only making it more important: a huge stone boulder attached to a rubber line. It was only natural to make the slaughter of infinite amount of zombies using this epic flail as the goal of the game.

As it was paramount to get a grip on AS3 with this project, no existing code could be used. Every technical element of the game (sprites, physics, gameplay logic, memory handling and effects, etc.) were wrapped up into a single library, the first game engine of its creator. Zombie engine - not only slow but a damn ugly one as well!

Game Project: 5D

5D was an experimental project of fast paced prototyping. In short: five games in five weeks with five people, five days a week and five hours a day. This project was inspired by Lasse Seppänen from Remedy/IGDA Finland and not only marked a milestone in communication with the local developer industry but also focused on the important things that our school can’t teach. We tried to document everything, so please go read our reports and watch the games.

Assembly Summer 2008

We got VIP seating thanks to Microsoft and Teemu Haila kept an XNA for beginners seminar. We didn’t have the time to participate in the game development compo but decided to do so at any costs next year. We also got in touch with some nice people and probably will feature our own (or shared) booth!

Trip to Norway

As a result of our visibility in Nordic Game we got an invitation to the University of Hamar! We kept two presentations about the benefits of club activities and how to start one. To our very pleasant surprise we met some of the local companies in their IGDA Hamar meeting and were even invited to party at their own game development lair! Please refer to our post-mortem from the trip for all juicy details.

Game: Pisara

XNA game by Heikki Leppänen about spiders battling it out on a rainy glass window. The official description in finnish: "Peli sijoittuu ikkunalasiin, jonka karmien alalaidoissa on hämähäkin verkot. Ulkona sataa ja lasiin lentelee pisaroiden lisäksi havunneulasia. Kaksi hämähäkkiä kiipeilee ikkunalasilla ja yrittää tehdä reitin toistensa verkkoihin ikkunaan lentelevistä havunneuloista, jolloin pisarat valuvat neulasia pitkin verkkoon. Pelaajat saavat vuorotellen hetken aikaa siirrellä ruudulla olevia neulasia. Pelaaja voittaa kun toisen verkkoon valuu liikaa pisaroita."

XNA game development course

Some of our members, Teemu Haila and Heikki Leppänen, kept a course on designing games with XNA in TAMK. The course was very special in the sense of everyone participating in Imagine Cup and thus getting free XNA training material from Microsoft! We are looking forward to keeping the course again next year, if possible.

XNA @ JKL

Again, Teemu and Heikki went of to keep a two day intensive course on XNA in the University of Jyväskylä, sponsored by Microsoft. We got some very positive feedback and will definitely do something similar in the future again!

Supernova Update

As 2008 was brought to an end, we got some Christmas presents from our school, consisting of (nearly) every top console title release in the last six months and some long awaited new hardware to keep out lab equipment up to date. Thanks, TAMK!

Epilogue:

All in all, we saw a lot of members come and go during the year with great and unique projects. Jenni Järvinen joined in our administration with a long background in IGDA volunteering, Teemu Haila gave room for Juho Hartikainen as the current standing president and both Heikki Leppänen and Antti Salomaa took much more active role in developing Score to the point it is now in.

We are also thrilled to say that all our board members (and several normal ones) are both IGDA members and IGDA Finland volunteers with Teemu being the web coordinator and Juho the webmaster of IGDA Finland.

Feature highlight: iPhone compatibility

It's time to highlight something we made just for you iDevice owners out there!

If you point your iPhone/iPod Touch browser to igda.fi, it will give you a customized version of the site for low bandwidth connections and touch screen UI. From there you can easily browse the newest updates at a glance without spending the whole day downloading our full site's features. Of course you can always choose to view the full instead by clicking the "normal view" link at the bottom of the page.

Do you like the feature? Please give us some feedback on the comments! :)