Autumn Turku Hub Gatherings with Tribeflame, Wargaming and Gameturku

September and October was filled with exciting events in Turku. Here’s a digest of what’s been happening in our local IGDA Finland Hub!

23.9. IGDA Finland Turku Hub gathering with Tribeflame

Tribeflame presenting

A monday night didn’t stop enthusiastic game developers and hobbyists from gathering with Tribeflame, one of the longest running game companies in Turku. Tribeflame has released a number of games, such as Light the Flower, Reiner Knizia's Labyrinth, Reiner Knizia's Clustermaster, and the latest of them being Benji Bananas that has reached 20+ million downloads combined in the Appstore and Play Store.

Gentlephant was also demoing a “Super meat boy for mobile” -kind of game which was met with great interest and a lot of cursing because of the hardcore platforming nature of the game. Together we celebrated Turku’s biggest game success so far with drinks and Bar Bryssel’s great sauna!

9.10. Turku Game Lab re-launch and Turku Hub gathering with GameTurku and Wargaming.net

The day was filled with events. Firstly the Game Tech & Arts Lab was re-launched as Turku Game Lab in the ICT-House. Turku University’s and Turku University of Applied Sciences’ game lab will strengthen the community and give tools for students and to-be developers to get their hands dirty in making games.

The day continued with a gathering in the usual place with GameTurku and Wargaming.net. GameTurku is a new portal and brand for the Turku game development scene. GameTurku is now the go-to place the get information about everything that is going on in the area: http://www.gameturku.com/

We were also very lucky to have Yury Shilyaev, the director of education and Aleksandr Zezulin, executive producer at Wargaming.net as guests for our gathering. Our gathering once again hit over 100 guests and after Alex's presentation he was met with a long Q&A session about all things World of Tanks and etc. We also learned that approx. third of the players of WOT spend money on the game and a few guys from the audience confessed to have used hundreds of euros to the game!

Aleksandr answering tough questions

We'll be back on November with more exciting guests and reasons to share a pint with a fellow game developer!

Tatu Laine & Turku Hub Coordinators

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 Rovaniemi Hub launch

The northernmost IGDA hub in the world has now officially been opened at Rovaniemi, on 26th of September, in the arctic where it’s so cold that computers keep constantly freezing! Not really, just kidding..

The formal part of this event took place at the main campus of Rovaniemi University of Applied Sciences. There we had two guests who talked about IGDA Finland, about the support it has to offer for students and starting game developers, and about their personal experiences on taking up a career in gaming industry. Total number of people listening and asking lots of good questions was 19, so one might say that we had a fairly good start considering the size of the audience.

First speaker was Tatu Laine, Creative Director from NordicEdu. He talked about IGDA, what it actually is and why we should know it, and also about educational games that his company’s focuses on.

Second speaker was Jukka Laakso, CEO from Rival Games. Among other things related to working in a game startup, he introduced us to IGDA Scholarship. It is really something you should check out if you’re planning to have a career in the business.

After the formal part we moved to have some drinks and of course talk some more. We also had totally new participants who were then introduced to the Pelilabra room at Valtakatu 19.

All in all, it was very encouraging and motivating to hear the guys’ startup stories and the things they had learned along the way. The stuff I personally learned from this event actually could have their own post some time later. Informative and fun indeed, more of this, please! Here are some photos from the gathering:

How our new Industry Partner AWS can help Finnish game studios to grow?

IGDA Finland has recently got fabulous new Studio Affiliates like Frogmind, Kuuasema and Housemarque. Also Amazon Web Services, G-Cluster and Lexia have joined as Industry Partners. Welcome! Amazon Web Services (AWS) has witnessed several game industry success stories. That's why we decided to have a chat with the AWS guys to learn what type of business growth tips they can give to Finnish game studios.

When it comes to cloud computing, there's no bigger name than Amazon Web Services (AWS). Most likely every relevant Facebook and mobile game developer knows and uses / has used AWS. How big AWS actually is?

AWS: We have hundreds of thousands of customers in over 190 countries and among those customers we have a significant number of gaming customers leveraging AWS. Customers like Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Supercell and Sega all take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of AWS technology. For game developers AWS 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.

Why you decided to become an IGDA Finland's Industry Partner?

AWS: We want to support the Finnish game developer community to help them become more successful in their game development efforts. Leveraging AWS services has helped companies like Supercell, Rovio, and Grand Cru to focus on game development instead of setting up and managing the infrastructure.

More concretely, how can AWS help Finnish game development studios to grow? AWS: Game development is part science and part art. Developers strive to deliver compelling entertaining experiences for users but never really know how successful their game will be until they actually launch it. A big question that a game developer must address is how to prepare for game success or even failure? For a Social Game the number of players can be unpredictable; for some games the number increases rapidly and then drops again. To cope with the rapid growth anticipated with their most popular games Monster World, Diamond Dash and Bubble Island, Wooga turned to Amazon Web Services. With AWS Wooga (link to the case study) could scale easily to meet their peak demands. On the flip side, when the peak was met and the game dropped back to a steady state they were able to scale back the number of servers they were using just as easily and all without the headache of acquiring and managing their own physical infrastructure.

Amazon focuses on five things:

1) Pricing - always looking for ways to drive down costs for customers. When Sega’s Online Operation team was looking for a new home for their public websites, AWS was the obvious answer. Once migration on to AWS was complete, Sega noted a cost reduction in server costs of 50%.

2) Flexibility – Game developers are innovators. They are always looking for new ways to bring compelling entertainment in the form of games to users and as such need the flexibility to stitch together infrastructure as they see fit. Sony’s Naughty Dog Game Studio (link to the case study), maker of the popular Uncharted Series, looked to AWS to support them with Uncharted 3’s online multiplayer features and noted that the ability to have low level access to AWS’ powerful services meant that they are never in a position where there is something they can’t do.

3) Rapid Provisioning – With AWS Auto Scaling game developers know that they can programmatically increase the number of servers they use to meet user demand. This means that they can provision only as much as they need to get started and as the game grows in popularity they can scale to meet demand. In addition, they can scale back down when the demand decreases to a steady state.

4) Focus on the game – AWS enables game developers to focus on what they love, building great games, while AWS handles the undifferentiated heavy lifting of core infrastructure.

5) Rapid Growth and Scale – game developers can be confident that there are always resources available to support the rapid growth when a game becomes a hit. Take for example the Finnish-based game developer, Supercell, that successfully launched Hay Day and Clash of Clans in 2012. Since then Supercell's player base has reached over 8.5 million daily players and to manage their infrastructure they use AWS. The AWS services are important for Supercell to manage the rapid growth of their server usage and keep their players happy.

Amazon has done lots of case studies, including many Finnish game industry super stars: take a look at the Amazon case studies to learn more. Just to highlight some, check out Rovio and Supercell case study.

Join IGDA Finland November 12th Gathering to meet with Amazon guys in person.

IGDA Finland Oulu Hub September Gathering

On 19th of September the local game developers of Oulu gathered once again for a relaxed night out at the restaurant 45 Special to embrace (or ward off) the closing autumn. This time there were no presentations or other official programme, but rather some laid-back socializing and casual conversation. Amongst the discussion one could hear longing for the “good old” games, listen to new game ideas being tossed around and participate in general game or game development related chat. All in all, a very warm and easy-going evening.

In October IGDA Finland Oulu Hub will arrange a “Interested in game industry” evening, targeted especially for students interested in applying for a job or an internship in a game development company. We will have a couple of presentations from professional game developers and after that we’ll spend the rest of the evening networking and having fun. And of course, you don’t have to be a student to join in; all are welcome!

For more information about our events and news concerning the Oulu game development scene, follow https://www.facebook.com/IGDA.Finland.Oulu.Hub

Antti Wilenius & IGDA Finland Oulu Hub coordinators