Jobs site moving to Games Jobs Finland

Since IGDA Finland started offering our jobs site it has grown into the important platform it is today, making it easy for game companies to reach new recruits and talents seeking positions in the industry to find where they are needed.

However, as you all know, IGDA Finland is run by volunteers. The amount of responsibilities has also grown in size over the years and the gatherings alone take a huge amount of effort to organize. Running the jobs site is no longer something that is viable for us to keep around eating away our resources and thus the IGDA Finland board has decided to focus our efforts to events and community activities. This means that from now on all of our attention will be on Helsinki and the other hubs all over the country.

Fear not though, this will not be the end of a safe haven for game industry related jobs posting: IGDA jobs site functions will be transferred to our industry partner Games Jobs Finland/Barona IT for further development and maintenance.

The IGDA jobs site will be closed by end of May 2014 and all traffic will be guided to Games Jobs from now on. Before that all active job ads will be posted to Games Jobs Finland. Games Jobs Finland will contact the current and future partners.

We’d like to thank all the companies who made the jobs site an important employment tool for the industry and hope you keep utilizing it after the transfer! May you find the best talent out there.

http://gamesjobs.fi/

IGDA Finland May Gathering with Supercell

Thank you everyone, that was a super fun gathering in Adams with a loud crowd and hundreds of happy faces! So a big thanks to our generous sponsor – Supercell!

On the stage we had a short presentation where Supercell introduced Reaktor, the company who is behind the Hello World Open.

Reaktor presented The Story behind the exciting competition. Originally the company had a coding competition called Pong camp in 2012, which was so much fun that they decided to organize a national coding competition in Finland, the first Hello World Open. It was a massive success, and this year they are going global and organizing the competition together with Supercell! The original reason was to have fun and make coding sexy, as well as teach programming for children. In 2014 they also organized programming schools for kids in Finland.

Hello World Open finals are held on June 10 in Helsinki. Check out more in helloworldopen.com.

After presentations the evening continued as always with music, drinks and mingling. Dear reader, make note: the last gathering before the summer break is in June, so keep your eyes open and see you next time in Adams!

IGDA Finland May Gathering with Supercell

Fantastic, the spring is here and soon it’s time for another exciting IGDA Finland Gathering in Club Adams! We are super happy to announce that in May our guest of honor and generous sponsor is the amazing Supercell, so see you in Erottajankatu!

The May gathering also counts as the the kick-off event for the Hello World Open semi-finals! For the past seven days, the world’s best coders have been working on the toughest coding challenge on the planet. On May 6th, we’re excited to mark the start of the three qualifying rounds to crown the first-ever world champions of coding! The championship finals will be held live right here in Helsinki on June 10th. Read more at www.helloworldopen.com.

IGDA Finland May Gathering Time: 06.05.2014 at 19:00 Place: Club Adams, Erottaja 15-17, Helsinki Finland

As usual, the cloakroom service is offered free of charge on behalf of Club Adams.

IGDA Finland Turku Hub, the year 2014 so far

Wow, the year 2014 started out in a hurry! We've already had 4 gatherings in the IGDA Finland Turku Hub! 2014 Started out with a stroke of bad luck with our gathering venue as we lost our dear old Ravintola Bryssel to Sedu in January! 1½ years worth of gatherings flew past in that venue so fast. We were left with some dear memories of the great atmosphere and the lively discussions from the venue sauna... So we found a new venue and the January Gathering was held in The Castle, which attracted almost 100 visitors since it was arranged with the Microsoft LevelUp -tour. Iraklis Grous from LudiCreations was over at the gathering the show off the Kickstarted board game Gear & Piston. It was mighty interesting to hear how they arranged a successful kickstarter campaign on a game that was actually developed in Finland.

The Castle was also a great place for an IGDA Finland gathering, but on the same evening we found out that The Castle was closing down! Talk about bad karma losing 2 venues in a row... So we were off again to find a new venue! Luckily it didn’t take long to find the next suitable venue: Hunter’s Inn! We had a “test run” gathering there in February and by looks of it all, we found a new great venue. In March we combined the evening with the Turku Game Day with Mikael Haveri from Housemarque also visiting us at the gathering. We had Resogun running on the bar's big screen and the people were really impressed with the game! (Luckily we had a 1080p projector...)

Come April and because of the need for more space, we arranged the gathering this time in our old (where it all began in 2011) venue Panimoravintola Koulu since we had a big guest for the evening, Wargaming.net! We had the biggest hall for us and free drinks for the evening and Alexander Shilyaev, the Director of Global Operations at Wargaming.net gave an insightful presentation about the growth of the company and other fun details along the journey. Suffice to say, it was a great evening for game developers and alike.

See you again in May! - Tatu & Turku Hub Volunteers

EXPA & IGDA Finland Jyväskylä Hub April Gathering

This month Expa put local game companies on the stage to show their talent, projects and games. We got four great guests making games in Jyväskylä. First on the stage was Patty Toledo from FanART Games. Their game Mega FAN! is a combination of music and games, giving fans new way to interact with their favorite bands and giving bands a chance to connect with their fans. They already have an impressive roster of bands and first game features on the way.

Next, we heard from Juuso Hietalahti, the designer of The Infected: 28 Cards Later. The Infected is a card game in the vein of Werewolf or Mafia, with survivors trying to survive in a world of zombies with a traitor in their midst. He was also in the middle of converting The Infected to a digital card game.

We also had the pleasure of seeing what the brand new Zaibatsu Interactive had made in just a few short weeks. They recently moved to new offices and have worked furiously making a new prototype that was for now called simply Game#1. Game#1 was a co-operative game of moving small slime-balls around on a tablet device.

Our last invited guest was Olli Rundgren from Pisamala, working on bringing games to education. They were just a couple of short months away from publishing their game. Olli has experience from being software developer and shared stories and experiences of what is it like to run a business.

We also got to try out a soon-to-be-published Windows Phone game Goldfish in the Sewer, from our good friend Tuomas from Add Inspiration.

Next month we’ll join the Tekes Skene Roadshow. See you there!

- EXPA & IGDA Finland Jyväskylä Hub