Finnish Game Day '18 in St. Petersburg

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Finnish Game Day is a free, one-day, "East meets West" style event where industry leaders from Finland discuss topics like investments in games, publishing and international markets, attracting and retaining talent at game studios and Finland as a place to grow you game company. Panelists will share their views about trends in the market, discuss business opportunities. 

Details and agenda, along with registration for the event, can be found at:  https://finnishgameday.com/fgd18

Finnish Game Day is hosted in cooperation with the White Nights Conference, an international game development and marketing event that follows Finnish Game Day on June 28th-29th. As a bonus, the first 15 Finnish game studios participating in Finnish Game Day ’18, will get a special package sponsored by Business Finland: A free private booth with two free standard tickets to the White Nights conference

Sign up here by June 8th to reserve your booth. Be sure to enter "Play Finland" under “How did you find out about the conference?" so the organizers will know you’re are attending our event. The first 15 applicants will get a free booth!

Given that St. Petersburg is one of the host cities for the World Cup, hotels and transport will likely be booked to capacity. Here's a two page info sheet with tips on travel, accommodations, and Russian visas.  

Get 15% off White Nights St. Petersburg

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The next White Nights conference will be held on June 28-29, 2018 in St. Petersburg. Over 1,600 attendees are expected. 

The program is available on the conference website. The conference will additionally feature workshops held by Google, Facebook and iOS representatives. Pre-registratin for these sessions is required on the conference website. 

The Developer Exhibition will once again be held as a part of the White Nights, where over 150 talented teams from all over the world will showcase their best games in order to meet leading publishers, representatives of platforms, investors and to receive valuable feedback from industry gurus and fellow colleagues. Best of the best will receive a trophy and great prizes at the Indie Game Cup Awards Ceremony. We are accepting applications for the Developer Exhibition (https://goo.gl/forms/k0R7cpmJPFuO3r633) and for the Indie Game Cup until June 8, 2018. 

The agenda also includes great networking events: a pre-party sponsored by Unreal Engine to be held on the day preceding the event and the main all-night party on the huge sailing ship The Flying Dutchman at the end of the first day.

IGDA Finland members get 15% off the ticket price by using promo code IGDA-Finland on the conference website.

Information on obtaining Russian visa is on the conference website

Helsinki Hub: May Gathering with PlayFab

By Giorgos Riskas and Roope Sorvo

The May gathering was sponsored by PlayFab, a complete backend platform built exclusively for live games.

Brendan Vanous, head of developer success at PlayFab/Microsoft was really impressed with how inclusive the game development community is in Finland. As he said, in many other communities competitiveness make developers grow isolated and he is really happy to see that this is not the case.

In his brief talk, Vanous spoke about live game operations and how they can shape the future of the gaming industry. Live operations, or LiveOps, help games to grow according to the needs of the users, so that they can be evolve and therefore, live longer.

Vanous described how the growth of mobile games has changed the scene since the early 2000s and how LiveOps services have played their part in driving the mobile industry to the top. The said services allow developers to either complement their existing infrastructure or adopt the LiveOps platform in its entirety.

Probably the most interesting part of the presentation was the comparison between two teams of developers that followed different approaches on how to engage their audience. One of the said teams kept collecting data and tried to stay aligned with what the audience needed, in contrast to the other one that stopped their support after some early updates. The results indicate that the old way of supporting games as in the previous decades is not anymore viable in the live games market.

“The developers should always listen to their community’s feedback and build on it”, Vanous said. “That’s the way to do things nowadays, and unfortunately many people don’t understand that,” he added.

This time the Demo Corner was divided into two distinct categories: projects by Aalto University students, and independent game projects that both happened to make their second appearance in the IGDA Demo Corner.

It was the first time that Aalto students had the opportunity to gather valuable feedback outside their university. The games were developed as part of a course and is a collaboration effort between different Master’s programs of Aalto’s Media Lab. The 3 featured projects have been in development for roughly five months by teams of five to six students.

PlusMinus is a third person puzzle game in which the main character uses magnetism to fight enemies and solve puzzles. The story of the game finds the main character trying to escape from the system in futuristic dystopian world.

Metsä is an atmospheric hybrid installation game that is played while sitting in a dark tent. The player controls the footsteps of their avatar by pressing two individual buttons situated on a blanket, attempting to make their way through a dark woodland avoiding obstacles by jumping and sneaking.

Hidden Wish is an asymmetrical co-op adventure game with a combination of different mechanics. The stylized game mixes 3D segments with literally hand drawn levels where first player makes their way through a 2D platformer, meanwhile the second player uses a more cursor-oriented UI to create a path for the other player by moving around different parts of the levels.

In addition, two games made their second appearance in IGDA.

Exploding Babies was developed by Nut Farm during the Global Game Jam and is a hectic 4-player battle arena game where the players try to win by detonating the babies of other players using sound waves. The developers’ return to the demo corner of IGDA after March is part of their focus on live events where they can get people to try it in teams of 4 and test its full potential.

Another team that returned to the demo corner was LunarByte, with their first title Trail of Relics, a puzzle game where the player draws a path for their avatar through increasingly difficult mazes. The game has been in development for about half a year and it is currently on beta. As the developers said, the feedback that they receive at IGDA gatherings is a lot better than average which helps them focus on the areas that they should during the development.

See you in August!

 

IGDA Nordics Party at Nordic Game 2018

Facebook event

Welcome to the IGDA Nordics Party!
Nordic Game Conference 2018 is taking place in Malmö on 23-25th of May. We are delighted to announce that this year, IGDA chapters from Nordic countries are joining forces to make the BIGGEST IGDA PARTY ever and we wish to highlight our gaming companies in this event. 

When and where?
23rd of May, after the first day of the conference we will gather at 20:00 in Moriska Paviljongen, Norra Parkgatan 2, 214 22 Malmö, Sweden. 

A HUGE thanks goes to our main sponsor Fingersoft and associate sponsor Apprien!

Get 20% off the Helsinki Game Music Festival

The Helsinki Game Music Festival is a one-day event dedicated to video game music and features performances the Game Music Collective and more!

The festival kicks off at 14:00 at the Helsinki Hall of Culture on May 5th. 

For more information visit the event website: 
https://gameharmony.com/concerts/helsinki-game-music-festival/

IGDA members get 20% all ticket categories when using the link below: 
https://gameharmony.com/igda

Please note: Normal prices are 39, 49, 59, and 69 Euros and the discount will automatically be applied when clicking the link.