Finnish Game Jam 2012, Part 3

Sunday, 29th January

Final day starting at Tampere.

The last day of FGJ 2012. All the time left was about finishing the game in time and prepare them for the judges. It didn’t take too long that the time finally ran out and the games were uploaded to the GGJ web page.

Quick polishing before the deadline.

The judges, Suvi Latva from ManseGames and Markus Hirsilä from Gamereactor, walked around, listened to the teams’ introductions to their games and asked questions. There were 18 teams in total; I bet it wasn’t easy to pick the winner! All the games were unique and interesting in their own way.

Judges starting their job.

This is what happens when you loose.

An inventive game idea, ARoboros.

Other jammers viewed the games through the stream.

Convincing the judges is a hard job. 

Eat others! Be the largest bacteria!

Suvi really liked this game's graphics.

The winning game in Tampere was the game Guardian of the Living Maze. Description from the team:
“Guardian of the Living Maze is a two-player game made for computer and iPad. Player one controls a wizard, who tries to snatch an ancient artifact from the maze's center, while the other player is the Guardian, who tries to stop the wizard by placing traps for him. However the Guardian have to place gifts in order to place traps, and the wizard has to use levers and find a key in the maze to get to the center, while trying to keep himself alive using the gits placed by the Guardian.”

The winning team.

Judges will also decide the best game in Finland. This will be announced in the next IGDA meeting in Helsinki.


All the games in Tampere can be found here. Some of the games are either not finished, board games or need special equipment, so all of them aren’t available online to play. Some of them have gameplay video online, so just click on the Youtube icon to see how the game’s are!

This year two board games were made.

The Global Game Jam was finally in many many different countries. This is a nice way you can visualize how large the event actually was.

In the evening some brave people (some of whom hadn’t slept since Saturday) went to Plevna for the after party. It was a really nice experience to spend the last few hours after the whole weekend together with a bunch of nice game developers. It was the perfect way to finish the event and wait for the next year’s jam. I can’t believe it’s all over now.

After party at Plevna.

In conclusion I would say that it is really interesting to participate in making games. But by organizing you can also see everything close and feel the atmosphere of enthusiastic game development around you. I’m glad I got to the organizing group this year instead of making games like last year. It was an awesome experience! Let’s see what happens next year.

The person behind the stories and camera :)

I would like to thank especially Annakaisa Kultima for being the main organizer and coordinator! All in all, great job, everyone! See you all next year!

Story and photos: Emma Kiiski

Emma Kiiski is running Score Game Development Community, also a student of our Media Programme.
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Art Café ERO at Ikuinen Gallery

Ikuinen Gallery turns into an artcafe at Feb 4th 2012. Graduating art students invite you to taste baked goods and see some art. Masterpieces in form of cheesecake, carrot cake and chocolate cake available! Come to meet artstudents and enjoy the atmosphere.

Art cafe ERO gives you a taste of upcoming spring.

Opening hours: 10.00am- 18.00pm

Cash only, please!

ERO is a part of Restaurantday:

http://www.restaurantday.org/?r=taidekahvila-ero

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Ikuinen gallery is a contemporary art project space located in the old factory complex Finlayson in central Tampere. The gallery is run by a board of fine art students in Tampere UAS School of Art and Media as part of their study program.

Ikuinen gallery’s main focus is in presenting interesting and high quality student work, whereas work from other art school students and teachers as well as visiting artists are regularly also at show.

Ikuinen Gallery

Demola Academy Graduation Event

On Thursday afternoon the first ever Demola Graduation Event began. In the event the Demola project teams pitched the ideas they had been developing since last autumn. The teams consisted of students from all of the three universities of Tampere: TAMK, TUT and UTA.

Teams eagerly waiting for the pitching to begin

Bernard Garvey officially launching the event

Over 30 graduating teams were divided into several pitching groups according to their development areas, for example Games and Machinery. Every team had 5 minutes to convince their audience that their pitch was the best, and after that people could ask questions that had arisen during the pitch. Finally, after all teams had had their presentations one winner was voted by all of the teams within a single pitching group, and the Demola staff picked three more Wild Cards to join the most voted teams. Some of the choices were quite surprising, but made rest of the evening more interesting.

Live-Manual ready to demonstrate their product

After the Demola staff had given some last-minute instructions to the finalists they were left to polish their pitches for a few hours before the evening Gala. You could feel the excitement fill the halls of Demola. The evening finally continued at six o'clock one floor above the normal working spaces.

Team Mini Mega Fun discussing how to improve their
pitch for the last round

At the Gala we, in addition to the great pitches, heard one keynote about Crowd Sourcing. All of the finalists were great, my personal favorite was Mini Mega Fun's presentation. Other members of the audience seemed to think so too according to the amount of cheering! After all the teams had pitched their projects a special panel of judges had a meeting over who should win. Surprisingly a wild card team Live-Manual was announced as the winner of the event and given the Grand Prize of 2000€. Congratulations to the winning team and all Demola Academy Graduates!

Winner of the day: Live-Manual

Thanks to the people at Demola for arranging this great event, let's hope the next one will be even grander!



Story and pics: Heidi Mäenpää

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Finnish Game Jam 2012, Part 2

Saturday, 28th January

The second day showed that the jammers should get some sleep during the weekend. At least a little bit. There was no real hurry at this time yet. All the programmers’ problems and graphical dificulties look a lot better when you take at least a couple of hours of good sleep in the back of New Factory area, Protomo. It was silent in the night for a few hours that people could sleep on mattresses and sofas.

Frontside Ol -- snake.

Maipop!

The best team photo!

Last and first man.

They know FGJ is awesome!

Testing is necessary for board games, too.

In that place were also recorded some totally cool sound effects! One game needed death shouts and screams, preferably also in other languages. The organizers could join too. Ever wondered how it sounds when Andy shouts in German? Let’s see how this will sound in a game!

Andy and the FGJ Tampere mascot.

Be sure to check out some other videos as well, all from FGJ! Be warned, many of them are hilarious! Click here!

This man approves the videos.

In the evening we got a crazy idea to take a group order from Subway. Collecting all the information (what everyone takes and pays) took a lot longer than expected. We almost didn’t get anything because making the orders took so long! In the end everyone got their late night snacks, phew.

Where's the team?

After being in the center of all this hassle, I have to consider my opinion. Is it really worth it to be organizing the event? It would be so easy to just be a jammer; eat, drink and make games. But then again, after going through all this stress about organizing food for people I can tell how precious these actions are. In the future I will definitely appreciate the organizing team’s work a lot more than I did before.

Info desk!

There was also a reporter from a Finnish magazine, Ilta-Sanomat, to interview Annakaisa Kultima and Suvi Latva about the event. Then the reporter walked around to film the teams. It was a really nice thing for the publicity of the event and the organizers. By the way, the video can be seen in here already. Only in Finnish, sorry!

Ustream from other sites.

Organizers need some rest, too!

In the evening of Saturday there's a little bit of hurry. The time is slowly running out! Sunday is near. Will everyone finish their awesome games on time? Stay tuned for the third and final report of Finnish Game Jam in Tampere!

Story and photos: Emma Kiiski

Emma Kiiski is running Score Game Development Community, also a student of our Media Programme.
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Finnish Game Jam 2012, Part 1

Friday, 27th January


This is it. It’s starting. The largest global game developing event. This year we expected even 10,000 jammers to create games in 48 hours. It's a huge number of people! About 44 countries all over the world at the same time. Already in Tampere site, there were at least 60 jammers in the New Factory premises, ready to create the best games and have incredibly much fun over the weekend! Finnish Game Jam for the win!

All the jammers gathered in the early afternoon.

After registration, the event got launched with some presentations. The Tampere site host, New Factory, was presented with new cool Demola projects by Antti Salomaa. There is going to be quite many game projects this time. Especially interesting were the three cases from Wooga, a game company in Berlin that creates mainly Facebook games with huge success. Two important Score members, Teemu Haila and Eevi Korhonen, are by the way working at Wooga at the moment!
The main coordinator in Finland, Annakaisa Kultima, also shared a couple of words as usual. She also made a nice greeting video for whole Finland to see a bit later, presenting this year’s theme for the games.


The theme was something quite new this year: a picture. It usually has been a word but this year they wanted to give a brand new challenge to the jammers. I find this change great, it gives a different approach to the theme and can be understood in so many different ways, making it possible to create loads of awesome ideas!

And then something quite different. We had awesome Pecha Kucha presentations by various people, including one of our organizers and some people from the Tampere game industry. The presentations were really enjoyable and fun, created with delicate taste of humor!

Sohvi Sirkesalo telling her amazing story about intuition in decision making.

How to grow chili peppers by Timo Nummenmaa.

Karoliina Korppoo told us about lol cats!

Time travel is possible. Henri Sarasvirta.

We watched the global keynote that had four speakers from all around the globe. They gave really nice tips about the event and game development in amount. The video can probably be found in Youtube if you’re interested!


It wouldn’t be FGJ without social exercises. This year there were a couple of new ones, one of which was speed dating. The point was to write the thing that makes you tick about games, like game mechanics, explosions or whatever! Then everyone got into two circles around demola and started dating; telling about their favorite things about games and trying to combine those two together into a game.

Speed dating!

Are you sure it'll work?

Janne's style impresses us all.

The arriving of these huge pizzas disturbed some jammers' idea creation process.

Some jammers were working hard anyway.

Designing an awesome idea!

Out of ideas or just resting a little?

In the end there were a great amount of cool ideas on the wall.

After pitching everyones’ ideas, all the jammers had to find their group. For some it was easy but some had to think real hard whether the idea was good enough or not.

Is this idea good enough?

Searching for the perfect team!

Groups formed and everyone on their places. The games didn’t have to wait too long to be created. All the jammers were enthusiastic about starting and many continued late in the night, even though the brain might not work so well after staying awake for so long.

Jammers at work.

The coolest FGJ jams!

You can watch us at Ustream through the weekend, just click here! Let’s see if we do something crazy!

Story and photos: Emma Kiiski

Emma Kiiski is running Score Game Development Community, also a student of our Media Programme.
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Game Schools in Tampere and Around the World

A whole new course complex on games is starting at TAMK. I was thinking of game studies here and elsewhere.

Tokyo Game Show

Last September I got to visit a very special event: Tokyo Game Show in Chiba, Japan. One of the things that attracted me to the event was the huge amount of local game school exhibitions. I wanted to see how different the scene in Japan is from our cozy little study circles in Finland.

The school booths were almost as fabulous as those of the big game
industry names

It was very different. Naturally they have more schools than we do, so there was a whole section of one of the four halls reserved for the schools to present what they had done. They had many different projects to show, many new ideas and even wacky shows. People could try their demos and admire all the wonderful art made by students. All of them had eager staff giving out brochures their schools.

Tokyo Communication Arts and their playable demos

The event, even though they say it has become smaller and some big names skipped the whole thing, was huge to my eyes. There were almost 200 exhibitors with over 700 titles. There were so many people it was hard to stop or turn around. To be exact, 222 668 visitors in 4 days. Navigating through all the large halls was a good workout. Dragon Quest seemed to be popular.

Enthusiasts lining up to play the new games

One of the halls at Makuhari Messe

This year it was nice to learn of the new game study module right here in Tampere, arranged between our Media programme and the Business Information Systems. There are three parts in the module, each doable separately or as a whole.

• N-AM81 -2000 Game development (10 cr)
• N-AM80-2000 Game design and production (10 cr)
• N-AM82 -2000 Game project (10 cr)

Game design and production (kickoff today) looks at games from the perspective of storytelling, of the meaning of characters and teaches game mechanics and rules you need to know when designing a game. Game development concentrates on techniques and platforms and teaches the student about different skills needed in producing a game, such as programming, graphic art, animation and sound design. Game project is independent work on game design and production.

I have already had the pleasure of doing 15 cr worth of game studies before this new module. Last summer we did the 5D3 project where 3 total newbies and a sound guy produced 5 whole games in just 5 weeks. I hope there will be 5D4 this year! There are already a few existing themes around which it could evolve, emerging from the projects we have had so far and connections we have made with new partners during this year. There were also some gamifying projects and some really interesting Wooga internships available at Demola this spring.

Our school advertised itself as a game school at Summer Assembly 2011 next to KAJAK, and 5D3 was strongly present. We only had one iMac with all the games of two previous 5D-projects and no posters, though we did have a flyer for Score. Ramine Darabiha (who used to study at TAMK, btw) from Rovio came by and played our games and encouraged us to apply for a job in their team! For next time me and Emma thought we could steal the idea from some other sponsors who had graphic artists doing concept art while a mirroring screen was arranged so that passers by could stop and marvel at the progress.

How to sell games 101

Every booth at the Tokyo Game Show had girls in skimpy costumes promoting their products. One even had pole dancing and a ninja! Usually the girls were dressed as something from the games, and they sure attracted a lot of photographers. Of course some of the visitors were also cosplaying (surprisingly many of them young men in maid costumes). Even the schools had their own cute promo girls. I wonder if our game projects will copy their Japanese counterparts in this marketing strategy? Could Score use a team of cheerleaders? In any case, it would be great to see such concentration on the appearance of our projects at future gaming events.

Higashi Nihon Computer & Design College and the promo
girls from Arts College Yokohama

Global and Finnish Game Jam starts at Demola today!


Story by Johanna Lievemaa
Johanna is student of our international Degree Programme in Media
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