Finland to be the first chapter of International Game Developers Association (IGDA) to formalize outside North America

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IGDA Finland is proud to be the first IGDA chapter outside North America to formalize as a legal entity. IGDA Finland has registered as an association under the Finnish law and its relationship with main IGDA in United States will be governed by a contract signed in September 2012 between the parties. How to become a member or renew your membership? Here! Here!

IGDA Finland will remain an official part of the international IGDA family and members of IGDA Finland will enjoy the full membership benefits. This new arrangement enables IGDA Finland to better serve the interests of the local IGDA members in Finland. This also means that more of the membership fees can be directed to better cater local needs.

As the first actions, IGDA Finland will start expanding its service offering beyond Helsinki. IGDA Finland wants to provide support to game developers across Finland. The first step is to build a network of IGDA Finland Student Club initiatives across the region.

“IGDA Finland wants to facilitate the exchange of ideas and best practices, help new talent to get into the local industry as well as attract foreign talent to Finland. With Student Clubs we are able to drive regional development, support local game development hubs across Finland and promote entrepreneurship”, states Sonja Ängeslevä, the first Chair of the IGDA Finland association.

IGDA Finland ry works closely together with Pelikehittäjät ry (Finnish Game developer Companies association) and Neogames Finland ry, to form Finnish Game Cluster which aims to help the Finnish game development business to develop and grow. The cluster aims to push Finnish game industry to it's present state to be even greater economical value. Finnnish games industry aims to be billion € industry by 2020.

For more information on IGDA Finland and details on how to become a member, please visit http://www.igda.fi.

Contact: IGDA Finland ry Chair: Sonja Ängeslevä Sonja.Angesleva@igda.fi Tel. +358 400 759 817

IGDA Finland ry is a legally registered association under the Finnish law. The mission of IGDA Finland is to promote the development of careers and professional skills of individual game developers (and individuals of related industries) based in Finland, and to further develop the international recognition of the Finnish game developer community.

International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is the largest non-profit membership organization serving individuals who create video games. IGDA advances the careers and enhances the lives of game developers by connecting members with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating on issues that affect the developer community. These core activities advance games as a medium—and game development as a profession.

Highlight: IGDA Finland Linkedin group

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Hello everyone, it's time for yet another feature highlight! Since all of you already belong to our IGDA Finland Facebook group (right?) it probably doesn't come as a shocker that we decided to found a similar group to Linkedin, a terrific networking service centered around our business lives. Being a member of this group not only increases your sex appeal but voices support for the Finnish developer community globally.

Here at IGDA Finland we are dedicated to serving you the best possible IGDA chapter and would like you to join in and keep Finland in the world map!

Feature highlight: iPhone compatibility

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iPhone UI home view It's time to highlight something we made just for you iDevice owners out there!

If you point your iPhone/iPod Touch browser to igda.fi, it will give you a customized version of the site for low bandwidth connections and touch screen UI. From there you can easily browse the newest updates at a glance without spending the whole day downloading our full site's features. Of course you can always choose to view the full instead by clicking the "normal view" link at the bottom of the page.

Do you like the feature? Please give us some feedback on the comments! :)

Coordinator Responsibilities for 2008-2009 Season

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Our 'About Us' -page has been updated to reflect our current organization and responsibilities, including an organization chart of how we have structured our coordinator team for this season. Basically we've formalized the split of responsibilites a little more than previously. For our most important areas of events and the website, we've also tried to form partnerships where two coordinators always work closely together, able to cover for the other one if they get sick or something.

IGDA Finland Organization Chart for 2008-2009 Season

Sonja and Vesku take care of all events, where Sonja takes care of the more over arching stuff and Vesku handles the concrete details. Vesku also coordinates the efforts of our sizable volunteer pool.

Miikka and Teemu handle the website. Miikka acts as the Editor-in-Chief and is responsible for all the content, Teemu concentrates more on the backend technical stuff but is also responsible for the visual looks. Juho is our new webmaster and Teemu's right hand man. He is also the hand and eye behind our current logo. Teemu and Juho are helped by the volunteeers of the web team and Miikka has been putting together a group of volunteer to act as the content team.

Whereas Sonja, Vesku, Miikka and Teemu concentrate on the ongoing activities of our chapter, Mats takes care of our 'one-of' projects. These are initiatives that actually have a 'finish date'. Right now he is concentrating on getting the chapter team new chapter t-shirts and updating our out-of-date banner.

As the lead coordinator, I try to help out where I can. :)

- Jay Lead Coordinator

Website engine update incoming [done]

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In the wake of our recent activation of news commenting, we're rolling out extensive updates to all our key systems related to security, bugs and layout fixes. There might some downtime and/or oddities during 23:00-24:00 GMT +2, so please bear with us. *edit: Updates nearly done! Notice the new indicator on news posts displaying the number of comments. We're still tweaking things here and there, but no further downtime or critical view bugs should occur. Thank you for your patience.

P.S. If you run in to any bugs, please either leave a comment in this post or hit us via mail (webmaster at igda.fi)! We also accept feature requests.

Commenting opened up to the public!

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The vote has been cast we have opened up commenting for everyone to use! We decided to promote activity in igda.fi and want you to participate by telling us your impressions on the topic at hand. Please note that you do not need to register to comment (you can if you want to reserve your very own nick name!), but we will moderate all unregistered commenters to avoid spam. Also, we will not post any invitations, reminders or AARs to the forums. Keep an eye out for the Facebook invites, tho!

Remember, commenting not only increases your sex appeal, but makes you look smart, too!

Subscribe to our event calendar!

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Feed buttonToday I'm here to talk about our event calendar. Did you know you can subscripe to it via iCal, Google Calendar or any other good calendar software? That way you can easily track upcoming events automagically! Here's a small how-to: Step 1: Click the elusive feed-button under the calendar to summon your already configured calendar app (such as iCal for all you lovely Mac fanatics).

Step 2: Agree/Ok the source.

Step 3: Enjoy!

You could also just take the feed url (webcal://igda.fi/?ec3_ical) and subscribe to it manually in Google Calendar etc.

The calendar is updated to reflect our upcoming season's meetings, so check your holidays to match in advance. Additional events other than our monthly meets can be added to the calendar, so if you know of something that should be advertised here, just us an email @ webmaster@igda.fi as usual!

Webteam update

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Greetings from the freshly updated IGDA Finland webteam! Miikka Luotio has now become the editor-in-chief, and simultaneously our former webmaster Teemu Haila is promoted to Miikka's place as a web coordinator. We are therefore pleased to announce that we have gained a new webmaster in our posse: Juho Hartikainen!

Juho is a Finnish dude living in Tampere and finishing up his second year of interaction design studies, which consist of designing varying fields of interactive media such as the web, games and interfaces. He has provided some background support for IGDA Finland in the past (logo design, website graphics, meeting doorshifts), and is now carrying out his school traineeship. Alongside his webmaster supervisor Teemu Haila, Juho is one of the co-founders of Score, the Finnish student game development club. Aside from his studies and projects, Juho either consumes movies, games, music, books and other forms of art, or goes creative by photographing, writing, playing piano, making music, drawing, coding or dancing. And yes, you guessed it - he would love to be a game designer some day.

Feature: Attendance History

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Take one part of AJAX, three parts of JavaScript, some PHP, mix with MySQL and Photoshop the results: Attendance History launched! Currently this graphical explosion is on it's final beta stages and for now only supports "Netscape" type browsers, mainly excluding Internet Exploder and Opera, whose proprietary rendering engines can't take valid code. Sheesh. If you are the lycky user of one of these browsers, get Firefox.

That said, please direct your optical attention to the top right portion of this site and use your cursor to interact with the past. We are very proud of our active chapter meetings and wanted to broadcast this more publicly. This presentation was brought to you by the following Score members: Niko Kosonen (ajax, php) and me (design, php).

Got feedback?  We need it! Webmaster (at) igda (dot) fi.

IGDA Finland Web Team Introductions

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It's about time we introduced ourselves, the new people rolling our daily magics behind the bytes! As you all (should :D ) know by now, Teemu Haila / iNF (me, that is) took over Miikka during the summer. I got a huge load of cr- ...unfinished tasks right in the beginning to sort out. But that's all well and good, since (imo) we are definitely now in the better part of top-5 IGDA sites worldwide! But let's get on with it to the real people: #Lead Coordinator - Jyri Ranki He might be "just" a general leader, but all our bigger decisions and designs go to him before you guys. Never forget the ones in charge!

#Coordinator - Miikka Luotio Our very own coordinator and ex-webmaster QA's anything and everything done to this site. Every word in this text is 100% Miikkaâ„¢ Approved! Miikka is also updating our blogs with content from sources like volunteers.

#Webmaster - Teemu Haila Webmaster/admin/root/team leader... what ever suits you best! I'm the creative face directing our current progress and the one in charge of making sure everything works around the clock. As if that could be possible in Internet. While I do most of the stuff alone, I'd like to highligh two people:

- Juho Hartikainen He has been a spiritual support (sob) during the darker hours of intense labour and also did our wonderful new logo! Huge kudos for that.

- Niko Kosonen While he hasn't yet participated in any (visible) way, he will be developing some freezingly cool ajax magic for us. Tip: it's something we won't talk about in advance, but you'll love it!

So that's about it for the crew. I'd ramble here all night, but Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin got me addicted (again) and I can't risk leaving it alone. See you in the meetings!

Mailing list engine update!

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Yes, we updated our mailing list engine due to some problems people have been facing in the past! From now on all our invites will be coming from "admin" at "webmaster@igda.fi", so please make sure your spam filter knows to let it through. If you still don't get the next invite and you know you should, please mail to webmaster@igda.fi with your name and email, so we can check if your infos are correct in our lists. Alternatively, you can just update your infos at our monthly meetings at the door.

Gallery section updated!

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Greetings visitor! Gallery

IGDA Finland Gallery section that holds photos from all IGDA Finland events & gatherings has been updated and tidied up. You can now see a thumbnail photo of each event with a short description! There is also a new slideshow feature and now you can view the large image just by clicking the thumbnail!

Go on, have yourself a moment of nostalgia ! :)

Website engine update

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Wordpress 2.3 has been out for a while now and tonight we feel like it's time to upgrade! There will be some minimal downtime, so we will do our magic during the night. *edit: update was a success, but our old template died. While we fix it, you are propably looking for...

-> FORUMS

*edit2: looks like it'll take some sleep to figure out everything. My apologies if you are offended by the current temporal look of the site. You all can look forward to some nice importable calendar action and a proper image gallery when all this is done!

*edit3: Since we lost our previous style, the website team has decided to make a design refresh to the site, please give it some time to develop to it's final shape.

*edit4: Heavy maintenance over. Please enjoy our new look while we tweak out small stuff. A more complete post of the coolest features will be made when we feel like it's complete enough to be called version 3!

New coordinator and webmaster!

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Greetings everyone! It is my pleasure to announce that IGDA Finland has gained two new members in their ranks! Sonja Kangas and Teemu Haila!

-Miikka Luotio

New webmaster - Teemu Haila:

Teemu Haila is a finnish student soon starting his second year in TPU (Tampere Polytechnic University). Teemu's major is interactive design, which basically includes a little bit of every aspect of creating interactive media, from graphics to script writing. Aside from his studies he likes the occasional doze of drawing, playing drums, taking pictures of the life around, bicycling, chilling out with friends and doing purely nerdy stuff. He is also propably listening to (DRM-less) music while doing any of the previous.

New coordinator - Sonja Kangas:

Sonja (Kangas) is working at the EGET as a game designer. She also does research and process development at her own company SoupLaLa in cooperation with game developers, console manufacturers and media houses. Sonja was asked to join IGDA Finland crew to organize IGDA Finland Presentations because she is one of the most acknowledged game researchers in Finland. She was an editor of first book about digital games written in Finnish (Mariosofia - Elektronisten pelien kulttuuri). She also did an extensive benchmarking study on mobile entertainment comparing Europe with North America and APAC in 2003. IGDA is about having fun and networking but it can also be an opportunity to learn from other professionals of the industry. Sonja sees IGDA as an excellent forum to reinforce the creative power of game developers and improve the industry.

Site updates - November

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Greetings igda.fi readers! I am pleased to announce the following updates/additions to igda.fi site:

Featured "Insider" articles

We will soon have original content specifically written for this site. Igda.fi is going to feature a series of "Insider's look at Finnish Game Industry" articles! These articles will cover Finnish game companies, Finnish game industry figures as well as game developed in Finland. These articles will be written by IGDA Finland volunteers and will only be available on this website.

You can send your suggestions for which game, companies and personalities to feature in the future to: editor@igda.fi

If you want to become one fo the volunteers writing these articles, contact liz.fahey@igda.fi

Educational facilities added into Industry page

A list of educational facilities providing game industry training & education.

RSS feeds!

Now you can get truly live with igda.fi! Get live RSS feeds of the news feeds at igda.fi!

-Miikka Luotio, Webmaster