Nordic Game Conference 2011
Tuesday
Nordic Game Conference 2011 was the first conference I had ever attended. From Copenhagen's huge airpoirt, it was only a 30min train ride to Malmö and to the conference. We dropped our stuff at the lovely Formule F1 hotel which echoed the golden years of Formula F1 racing. We attended the Indie Game Night tuesday night. 8 finalists of the Copenhagen Game Collective's indie game competition were introduced. One of these games will win the "Indie Sensation" -award wednesday night.
1916 - Der unbekannte Krieg introduced an alternative World War I, in which you avoid dinosauruses in trenches. The game is made with Unity and it is hard and highly distressing. You can play it here: http://www.kongregate.com/games/magnussen81/1916-der-unbekannte-krieg
Cobalt is a 2D-platformer, that combines all that is good in the genre. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJTLHxFLOdI
Jesus vs. Dinosaurs saw it's first iteration in the Global Game Jam 2011. This was my favourite. Build a car out of tetris blocks and get it to drive to the other player's end. Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmvsFswZmtQ Download: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=18142.0
Mobiloid is a physics based puzzle game. Build your vehicle out of different parts and survive the complex levels. Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1nLBQNzIQI
Nimbus is a game where you control a rocket with depleting thrust-force. Video: http://vimeo.com/15952963 Ostettavissa: http://store.steampowered.com/app/50000
Paul & Percy rotates the perspective of a platformer 90-degrees counterclockwise and makes you think with mirrors. http://paulandpercy.com/Wordpress/
Spirits is a modern iteration of the classic Lemmings -game and delivers some artistic style too. More info: http://www.spacesofplay.com/spirits/
This years Indie Sensation: Vikings on Trampolines was made in six days as a side project and the name could not describe it any better. Site: http://www.roflgames.com/gamepagevikingsontrampolines.htm
In-between the presentations, Petri Purho and Oxeye Game Studio gave a funny analysis on Super Mario and jumping.
Wednesday
Ed Fries started his keynote about creativity and constraints. He had made the Halo game onto Atari 2600. He presented numerous tricks on how to push everything out of Atari 2600. He told about realism in art. Once painters could recreate an image almost 1:1 they invented to apply constraints to foster creativity. This is how pointillism was born. Ed Fries' Halo looked horrible and was a boring game but it was amazing because of the constraints that Atari 2600 facilitated. Minecraft is a great example of an innovative game constrained to only square blocks.
The next lecture was by Niklas Nygren and he shared tips on how to achieve big games with small teams. The presentation included a lot of practical tips like: keep your microphone and digital camera always with you, since the next sound effect or texture could be just around the corner. Programming tools to artist and improving workflow is essential, if you want more polished assets.
I also attended a lecture on funding games. Some parts of the businessjargon went over my head but what I learned is that, funders are looking for good teams, teams that "get things done". The use of money must be clear and game studios should have many different funding options going on at the same time. The contracts can vary a lot. Some of them include immaterial rights, share revenue or some ownership of the game studio.
Codemasters' VFX-lecture tasted a bit like a commercial. In-between trailers we were shown a useful tool for controlling particle effects. One could animate and feed different kinds of sine wave to the particles. We watched slow-motion explosions from Operation Flashpoint: Red River and car crashes from DIRT 3.
Next up was the Nordic Game Awards. The winners will be given funding to develop their games further. You can check out which games have been given funding in the past here: http://nordicgameprogram.org/?action=grants I was sitting with some interesting people: Jari-Pekka Kaleva, a project manager at the European Games Developer Federation, Neogames' Koopee Hiltunen and game design researcher Jon Manker from Södertörn's university. Jari-Pekka works to advance the interest of game developers inside the EU. KooPee told us that there were around 70 students from Finland attending the conference, that's a huge number. Jon Manker is interested in education gamification. (Find out more here: http://gamification.org/wiki/Gamification ). Education could be enhanced with gamification to achieve engagement, loyalty and fun. We had a mutual understanding that this could give great benefits to students but if done wrong, could feed unhealthy competition between students. The night went on enjoying myself and talking to random people.
Thursday
Thursday's first speaker was Jordan Mechner, the creator of Prince of Persia. He went through the development of the original Prince of Persia and speaked about the possibilities of transmedia. Prince of Persia -the movie is at the moment the highest grossing movie based on a game. This spawned toys, comic books and novels. Games have matured as a media much faster than movies or music. The intellectual property can have a new life in different medias. Jordan has studied movies and through making games, he could realize his visions. The original Prince of Persia has big characters and movie-like animations.
Stefanía Halldórsdóttir's lecture on managing creative people examined the mindstates of employees in the gaming industry. She categorized employees into three states: the Adult-, Child- and Parent-state. Child-state is the most creative out of these three. In Adult-state, people make decisicions based on facts and logical rationalization. In Parent-state people can be overly controlling. Managers should be transparent in their decision-making, "no bullshitting". Designers should be given autonomy over their creations. Also when arraging work groups, it is wise to hire a professional to do a profile on the employees and then divide them so that each team has the right amount of creativity and "getting things done".
The last lecture I attended was Trond Bugge's and Markus Montola's peek into the future of mobile software. Trond highlighted the unpredictability of IT-business and showed off some innovations made possible by location-based software. Mobio in Turku is doing something similar to this: http://www.mobio.fi/ In Japan, an application named iButterfly struck gold with it's augmented reality butterfly-catching game. Markus Montola lectured about the challenges of location based gaming and referred to a book he has been involved in writing: http://pervasivegames.wordpress.com/the-book/ If a players geological location defines the player's resources, the game might set out to be really unfair.
The Nordic Game Conference finished with a debate in what the crowd could take part in. A nordic game was faced against a non-nordic game on a given theme and two spectators were assigned to defend the game they picked. For example: GTA4 versus Minecraft on expressiveness. One guy from the crowd noted that you could practically do anything in Minecraft, since you can build logic circuit in Minecraft and build a game inside a game. The last words were given by Erik Robertson and Jacob Riis hoping that next year the conference would be as good as this years. The Nordic Game Program's funding is set to gradually decrease the next five years.
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