Reminder: Last chance for Games First after party access!

If you still haven't joined IGDA Finland ry and want to join us for May Gathering and Games First 2015 after party on Tuesday, today is your last chance to register as a member! Join before midnight today (May 10, 2015, 23:59 EEST) and your access is ensured. Registrations any later than the deadline are not guaranteed to make it to the name list, so to make sure your entry to the event is hassle-free we recommend becoming a member sooner rather than later. See you on Tuesday!

IGDA Finland May Gathering & Games First After Party hosted by Supercell

Oh my, it’s once again the time for one fabulous night in Helsinki with IGDA. This time the gathering is merged with the Games First After Party at Kaapelitehdas hosted by Supercell.

Because this is obviously one of the most popular industry events of the year and we expect a massive amount of visitors, the gathering is only open for IGDA members and Games First guests this time. This is our way of giving a special thank-you treat to our members for your support, so remember to take your IGDA membership cards with you and show them at the door.

Don't forget that studio affiliate members are included in this invite as well! Moreover, if you are a member and haven't received your membership card yet (or join before the event!), there will be a name list at the door to make sure you won't get left out.

Welcome to Merikaapelihalli, see you there next week!

IGDA Finland May Gathering Time: 12.5.2015 at 19:00 Location: Kaapelitehdas, Merikaapelihalli, Door M1, Tammasaarenlaituri 5, Helsinki, Finland

IGDA Finland Turku Hub April Gathering with Epic Games

IGDA Finland Turku Hub was again happy to have Epic Games as a guest in our gathering. This time we tried another a slightly bigger venue Ravintola Mauno which turned out great. The gathering was the official party for this years Turku Game Day.

Sjoerd De Jong gave a live gamedev demo of Unreal Engine 4 and also showed off his own project Solus by Teotl Studios. We were very impressed what kind of freedom the tools in UE4 give to designers. Solus has basically been pieced together by Sjoerd almost on his own so quite an achievement.

We also had the pleasure of hosting guests from Fingersoft in our gathering so the night was great in many ways. 120 people attended the gathering this time so that sets a new record for IGDA Finland Turku Hub gatherings!

We’ll be back in May!

IGDA Finland April Seminar and Gathering, sponsored by Google

googleseminar

The spring has finally arrived to this northern city far, far away. The hot Finnish gaming industry threw away its padded winter clothing and gathered at El Jefe again in April. This time we had a seminar before the monthly gathering event, and guess what… the seminar tickets were actually sold out. The seminar Evolving into the Future was sponsored by Google.

We had three very talented speakers: Noah Falstein, Robert Nyman and Mandy Waite.

Noah Falstein is the chief game designer at Google and a true veteran in the game industry. Falstein spoke about the transmogrified reality, meaning the amazing possibilities that the recent technological developments raise, such as the magical opportunities with virtual reality. Falstein also gave a surfing lesson to the Finnish audience, just like he had promised.

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After Falstein the stage was occupied by Robert Nyman, who talked about the tools and options that Google offers for game developers. In his presentation Level up your game with Google Nyman presented interesting numbers about business drivers, retention and player progression. The presentation slides can be found here.

Next there was Mandy Waite from Google Cloud Platform’s team. She talked about Firebase, which is a solution that helps developers focus on the applications rather than backend programming and servers.

After the seminar the doors were opened to the monthly gathering. We had once again over 200 game industry people at El Jefe.

Thanks to our sponsor Google!

Thank you El Jefe!

Keep on rocking everyone and see you again at May!

IGDA Finland Seminars Presents: Evolving into the Future (Sponsored by Google)

The event is headlined by veteran game designer and producer Noah Falstein, who will speak about the opportunities in rapidly developing technologies that promise to soon provide us with the ability to seamlessly blend the real and the virtual, and why this is an ideal time to get involved.  He will also provide some surfing lessons.

Robert Nyman will follow with a presentation about how Google works together with game developers, wants to help them and options for products, services & startups.

Mandy Waite will close with a look at what's required to provide real-time updates between users and players and the various options for implementing them, all the way from building your own backends to client side coding with Firebase's real-time database.

17.00 Welcoming words by IGDA/Google (5 min) 17.05 Noah Falstein - A Wave of Transmogrification (45 min) 17.50 Robert Nyman - Developers in the Nordics & how Google thinks (15 min) 18.05 Mandy Waite - Taking the pain out of real-time backend development (40 min) 18.45 Closing words & transition to gathering (15 min)

IGDA Finland Seminars are continuing education events for IGDA visitors and offer a chance to network with industry leaders and veterans.

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/igda-finland-seminars-evolving-into-the-future-sponsored-by-google-tickets-16413743950