Invitation: September Gathering

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Back to work - back to work and to IGDA Finland Gathering! We'll kick start the Season 2010-2011 on Tuesday September the 7th. Despite the sunny weather Finnish game developers worked hard over the summer. There were several good news and impressive progress. Join us at Cuba bar to catch up the latest news from fellow game developers. Besides chatting and cheap drinks, we'll have also some retro games (on Wii)!

See you next Tuesday!

IGDA FINLAND SEPTEMBER GATHERING Place: Cuba Bar, Erottajankatu 4, 00120 Helsinki (map: http://igda.fi/?page_id=5) Time: Tuesday, 7th of September, doors open at 19:00

You can find the preliminary dates for IGDA Finland Gatherings 2010-2011 here.

PS. The 2nd round 2010 of Nordic Game Development Support is closing on 1st October. Check out Nordic Game website for more information and don't forget to apply! http://www.nordicgameprogram.org/?id=23

IGDA Finland wishes you all relaxing summer holidays!

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The season 2009-2010 ended with a blast on 8th of June when IGDA Finland organized both IGDA Finland Presentations session and IGDA Finland Gathering. In addition we also collaborated with HIIT - Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. Their AVEA seminar on Research in Virtual Economies took place in the morning on June 8th. Check out the final report of the AVEA project to find out more!

IGDA Finland Presentations was arranged in association with Sulake. Once again we had full house at the Sulake premises with nearly 100 following the two hour presentations session. This time te topic was "Startup Stories" and six Finnish startups together with Trip Hawkins from Digital Chocolate and Ilari Kuittinen from Housemarque shared their stories of the art of start. The recording of the session is available online.

After the presentations IGDA Gathering sponsored by Housemarque, Relationship Games, Ironstar Helsinki, Rocket Pack, Fantastec and Uplause started. Housemarque together with more recent startups sponsored drink ticket game where people needed to combine or trade tickets in able to put together some fancy cocktails. Microsoft Lipshack singing booth was also well in use. IGDA Finland Gathering attracted 176 participats -- thanks a lot all for coming!

Later in the evening Relationship Games organized an ideation competition. Participants suggested improvements and new ideas to Relationship Games' missions in different categories - Love & Attention, Everyday Life, Activity and Intimacy - and the best idea for improvement was rewarded. The winner of the Relationship Games competition was Osiris "Ziro" Falcão who won a bottle of sparkling wine at Cuba Cafe. Congrats to Ziro! Thank you for everyone for great ideas and feedback on behalf of Mari Parviainen CEO of Relationship Games!

Next IGDA Finland events will take place in August /September. More information to follow, click to igda.fi and/or IGDA Finland Facebook group what's on during the IGDA Finland season 2010-2011!

IGDA Finland May: Talking about project management

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IGDA Finland Presentations in association with Sulake was organized along with the usual IGDA Finland Gathering at the Cuba Cafe. This time we teamed up with Sulake, the company behind Habbo Hotel. Sulake kindly offered a venue for IGDA Finland Presentations at the city center of Helsinki. Project Management issues were discussed by Jon Leslie from Hansoft, Joonas Tamminen from Redlynx and Jan Storgårds from Aalto University. The presentations session was also streamed online and the recording can be found from: USTREAM.

On a general level Hansoft talked about agile project management, Scrum as a process and Hansoft tools. RedLynx has over 10 year of experience in game development and their CTO Joonas Tamminen gave a nice overview of different attempts, different type of projects, platforms and technologies as well as described how their take on project management has changed over time. Jan Storgårds is a PhD candidate at the Aalto University in Finland. He has been studying brand value creation process. In his presentation he went through results of the study based on interviews conducted in 19 Finnish game studios and 26 persons representing the game industry. If you want to get more in depth with the topic, see the interviews with Joonas ja Jan IGDA volunteer Reina Magica made after the presentations.

The IGDA Finland Presentations session got fully booked (nearly 100 people joining) within first 12 hours and the room surely was packed! Still everything worked smoothly. A big hand goes to Sulake for hosting this and future IGDA Finland Presentations sessions.

After the presentations, it was time to head to the Cuba Cafe just a few blocks away. This time IGDA Finland Gathering attracted 115 developers. The evening continued with topics touching project management. All lecturers were present at the Cuba Cafe. There were also lots of people from Remedy due to the fact that Alan Wake was done and shipped. Congratulations Remedy!

The last Gathering before summer holidays will be on Tuesday June the 8th. See you there!