IGDA Finland goes Game Dev Days

It’s almost April, and that means Game Dev Days are here again. The Estonian game conference is held now for the fourth time and it brings together game development professionals from all over the world to the lovely city of Tallinn. This year IGDA Finland will be there to attend the event in full force: we are working on bus rides from several hubs bringing people all over the country to Helsinki, where we’ll board a ferry to our southern neighbor. The participating hubs for this event are Oulu, Jyväskylä, Turku, and Kotka.

The buses are not the only thing we have in store for participants. IGDA members can get 20% off of Standard conference tickets with the code "IGDAFIN542”. There are also special discounts for both ferry trips as well as hotel accommodation. Note that some of the hotel discounts are only available until 25.3.2016, so make your reservations on the double!

The conference is held on 8.-9.4.2016 at Original Sokos Hotel Viru.

Our ferry of choice (Tallink) leaves on Friday, 8^th of April at 10:30 AM. Join us for some international good times!

Discounts

Remember to use your IGDA discount for conference tickets: you’ll get 20% off of Standard conference tickets with the code "IGDAFIN542”.

We have plenty of partners to help you get there and rest well. To travel cheaper, use the promo code GAMEDEV to get 30% off of Tallink Silja ferry trips to Tallinn from Helsinki and Stockholm. Offer is valid for travel between 06.04.2016 - 11.04.2016.

Those traveling from farther away can also get discount tickets from OnniBus. If you prefer flying to the conference, airBaltic also offers discounts. Both of these partners use the code GAMEDEV as well.

Discount prices for accommodation are available at the following hotels:

Original Sokos Hotel Viru

Standard Single room 81€/night Standard Double room 86€/night

To book your room send an email including your personal details and promo code GAMEDEV to viru.reservation@sok.fi or book by phone +3726809300

Estoria Solo by Sokos

Solo King Single room 85€/night Solo King Double room 95€/night

To book your room send an email including your personal details and promo code GAMEDEV to viru.reservation@sok.fi or book by phone +3726809300

Tallink City Hotel

Standard SINGLE room 65€/night Standard TWIN/DOUBLE room 75€/night

To book your room send an email including your personal details and promo code GAMEDEV to hotelbooking@tallink.ee

Additionally, those who favor even cheaper options, we have a pre-booking for 12 beds at  Center Hotel at very low price.

1 Family room (4 beds) - 48 EUR/night

3 Twin rooms - 30 EUR/night

2 Single rooms - 25 EUR/night

We need to confirm this reservation by 25.03.2016 or the reserved rooms are freed up. Contact your hub representative if you are interested in taking part in this deal.

Contact information

Each hub will inform their members on bus schedules in their own channels. To find out more, contact the representative of your local hub.

Jyväskylä

Tuomas Roininen – tuomas.roininen@igda.fi Sasu Louke – sasu.louke@expa.fi

Oulu

Anna Salomaa – anna.salomaa@igda.fi

Turku

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/221379864882537/ Natasha Trygg – arsparietis@gmail.com

Kotka

Mika Turkia – Mika.Turkia@student.kyamk.fi

For those departing from Helsinki area, your contact person is Katri Laine katrilaine147@gmail.com. Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/838553366255862/

IGDA Finland Turku Hub gathering with Rival Games and Shark Punch

The March gathering was back in Hunter’s Inn, and this time with presentations by Rival Games and Shark Punch. Also in the demo corner: BitByByte’s first game Planet Shock.

Romanced by Rival Games

The future is looking good for Rival Games. After a hard year 2015 they have received funding and are soon ready to publish the third and last episode of their game The Detail. The Detail has a very decent metacritic score and has been received with much delight by both players and critics. The company is one of the more successful ones in the Turku game development scene. And more success is sure to come for this hard working studio. Rival Games currently employs 16 people, and they will be hiring more people this year.

On Wednesday the audience had the pleasure of hearing CEO Jukka Laakso talk about sales figures for The Detail on Steam, and lead writer JD Sorvari gave us insight into the process of writing the game.

The Detail is a graphic novel style game reminiscent of Frank Miller. It was initially planned to be five episodes long, but now the story is going to have its closure in the third episode. Sorvari told us about the shock that he as a writer had, realizing that his story would be cut shorter. First he had thought he had plenty of space to develop the plot and “romance” the players – but it was not to be. However, being forced to compress and reduce can often lead to better storytelling, which Sorvari hopes to have succeeded with in the third episode.

Releasing a game in episodes gives the business model an interesting flair. Laakso was able to visualize this by showing us graphs from Steam sales. Firstly, Steam is the number one sales platform for Rival Games, and stands for 63-70 % of their sales revenue. Other distribution channels are nowhere near as fruitful, for example iOS sales is only at 14 %, and others (like humble bundles and such) stay at 24 % of total sales revenue. For every episode and sale period the sales spike increased, while almost flat-lining in between. We wish Rival Games good luck with their third episode release!

Playfield taking a punch at Steam

The company Shark Punch was presented by Tero Tapio and Peter-Erik Kiis. They told about the origins, team and philosophy of the company. Shark Punch employs 13 people and their HQ is in Helsinki. The founders managed to sell their previous company to Disney, and then they went indie.

They initially released a game called The Masterplan – a 70s style heist game. After this first release they have focused on another type of development project: a distribution platform for other game developers, www.playfield.io.

There are thousands of games being released every year, and a new game very easily drowns in the static. How can developers get visibility and find the right type of player? The focus in Playfield is on helping game developers get discovered by players. Shark Punch wants to achieve this by personalizing recommendations and having a great storefront. They also have partnerships with Twitch and YouTube users.

Currently Playfield has 2000 games, and 1000 developers on board. The community is mostly between 25 and 34 years of age, and also mostly male. Half are from English speaking countries.

Playfield will be coming out of beta in Spring 2016. The point is: they don’t want players to miss “gems” in the game avalanche. They urge game developers to bravely contact them and try out Playfield.

BitByByte and Planet Shock

In the demo corner we got some space ship shooting and cosmic eye candy. BitByByte Creations is a new game development team based in Turku, and the game “Planet Shock” is in Steam Greenlight at the moment, go check this link and give support!

Text: Jenny Wiik

Photos: Natasha Trygg & Toni Heinonen

IGDA Finland Turku Hub

IGDA Finland March Gathering wth Reaktor Ventures: The Aftermath

Hello hello! Time to recap the Helsinki March gathering with Reaktor Ventures. This time there was no seminar so we got started a little later. The evening was more of a hands-on experience with a number of exciting Virtual Reality demos available. We also cheered and toasted Vesa Raudasoja for his success in the Board of Directors election! Vesa is the first Finn and only second European member of the Board, and his goal is to bring the “international” back to IGDA. To illustrate some of his ideas, Mr. Raudasoja described a collaboration between sites in different countries during the 2016 Global Game Jam. During the jam, the different locations posted progress updates, made video calls and cheered each other on over the weekend. What’s up for you in the next three years, Mr. Raudasoja? “I want to connect the dots in a large scale. The time is ripe for the European and International game developing communities to start working together more closely, in a natural way. I think all it needs is a little push in the right direction, and I wish to be there to put things in motion.” “Over the ten years I’ve been involved in building this community, I’ve made a lot of friends and connections, but it doesn’t end here. We are going to do this as a community, I couldn’t have made this alone.” Mr. Raudasoja also hopes that everyone would would offer him any insights or ideas about how to improve the international community and collaboration between the game developers of the world. You may contact him at vesa.raudasoja@igda.fi.  

Reaktor Ventures

The evening was sponsored by Reaktor Ventures, the Finnish seed stage investor. Mr. Ville Vesterinen, EIR of the company, talked to us about how Reaktor Ventures works.

“We like to be the first investor in the company, to add the most value. We invest from tens of thousands up to one million euro, and also offer the services of Reaktor’s 350 designers, coders & growth engineers to our portfolio companies free of charge. We have a strong interest in the Finnish game industry and want to work hard to make it succeed just as we want to work hard for the Finnish startup space in general.“

“So far at Reaktor Ventures we have invested in two very promising companies in the VR space. We have invested in both VR content as well as VR enabling technology, and intend to continue doing so in the future! Games are the obvious choice but VR has promise in many different sectors and we’d love to see companies across the board.”

Sólfar studios is an Icelandic gaming studio working on two titles: Everest VR experience (more on that later) and a game called Godling. Univrses is an early stage Swedish company developing the hottest central technology for all VR hardware - positional tracking.

What do you feel the future is going to be for VR technologies, Mr. Vesterinen?

“We believe that VR, and in due course AR will be among the central new growth markets of the coming decade and beyond. We have exceptionally deep understanding and competence in VR related technologies here in the Nordic countries, and we believe that wider Scandinavia, and especially Finland, is going to be home to many world leading VR and AR companies.”

Everest

Sólfar and Reaktor Ventures had erected a black box in the middle of the venue. Inside awaited a thrilling virtual reality experience on Mt. Everest, using the new HTC Vive system. Created from over 300,000 hi-res images, the environment also in fact allows you to physically move around, thanks to the Vive’s motion tracking tech. Cleverly using virtual step marks on the floor and a barely visible grid inside the VR world to mark the walls of the room, you can move around fairly safely inside the virtual experience without the fear of walking into a wall.

An exhilarating additional experience came from the handheld controllers. The handle-shaped controllers had great and very responsive grip, and the feedback felt surprisingly realistic - as if you were really dragging a gloved hand along the rope handles of a bridge! Also, being able to see your hands in virtual reality really adds to the immersion.

All in all, despite the shortness of the actual demo, the experience was very engaging, and doing what every responsible person should do to overcome their fear of heights – step over the edge into a bottomless icy gully –  was surprisingly terrifying, in spite of knowing there was solid floor under my feet!

Finnish Virtual Reality Association, FIVR, had a successful day hosting the grand opening of the Finnish VR Hub at YLE Iso Paja in Pasila earlier on Tuesday. The hub offers space and hardware for devs working on VR and AR projects, and contains currently powerful PCs, HTC Vive and Oculus Rifts. FIVR aims to bring together Finns interested in VR development. They currently have some 400 members, professionals and hobbyists alike, and joining is free of charge.

Their big day was rounded up by some very nice demos by FIVR members. The demos included a fun platformer called Lollihop, a VR comic episode game demo called Since They Left (Riidenpolusta Lähtien), a Samsung Gear VR space flight demo and another Vive demo, an exciting VR space painter called Tiltbrush. We got to try a couple of these demos, but due to very long queues, we simply couldn’t get through to all of them. Joonas Häll tried Lollihop, a game where you control an adorable platypus in a platformer world: “The game was really cool - you can control the camera through the headset, so by leaning forwards you can see things up very close, or take a peek behind a wall and see where you’re going to jump to. Very enjoyable!” I had a peek at Since They Left. It is going to be a five-episode game, combining features of comics, visual novel and adventure games. According to the game’s developer and main artist Kriina Rytkönen, the demo was an “episode 0”, proof of concept and a prequel to the main story. The story itself is going to feature the demo’s youths ten years later, meeting up in a forest with some supernatural elements. Sounds like fun! Maxine was again full to bursting with people having fun, trying out the demos and enjoying themselves. Until next time!  

Photos by: Janne Karvinen

Vesa Raudasoja elected to the IGDA Board of Directors

Vesa Raudasoja, a long time active member of IGDA Finland,  has unlocked quite an achievement as he was elected to the IGDA Board of Directors. IGDA Finland warmly congratulates Vesa Raudasoja for his election and wishes him continued success in his future endeavors.

The results of the election came out on Thursday the 3rd of March and new board members will officially begin their terms on 1st of April 2016.

The final results are as follows:

• Vesa Raudasoja - 473 votes
• Lucy Morris - 318 votes
• Melody Schaeffer - 241 votes
• Cat Wendt - 213 votes

More information on the election and results can be found here: http://www.igda.org/news/278072/2016-IGDA-Board-of-Directors-Election-Results.htm

IGDA Finland March Gathering with Reaktor Ventures

Guess what, folks! February is almost over and it´s time to get ready for the March gathering. And we´ve got plenty of awesomeness in store.

This time our event is sponsored by the fantastic Reaktor Ventures. They want to invest in the best seed stage companies and help them become global leaders in their industry. In addition to investing venture capital, the company makes their 300 professionals available for their portfolio companies for free. Since February 2013, Reaktor Ventures has invested in 27 seed stage companies, including 5 gaming startups.

Also, we´ll have some VR setups, including HTC Vive, for you to try out! Pretty cool, right.

vr_promo

For a full day of VR, remember to check out the The Finnish Virtual Reality Association Grand Opening with seminars and demos held at YLE Iso Paja, in Pasila. More info and registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fivr-hub-grand-opening-tickets

This will be a night to remember, so make sure to join us in March!

IGDA Finland March Gathering with Reaktor Ventures
Time: 08.03.2016 at 19:00
Place: Maxine, Urho Kekkosen katu 1 A, 6th floor, 00100 Helsinki

Please note that you need to be at least 18 years old to attend. The cloakroom service is offered free of charge.