Story: Siru-Emilia Määttä, Media Production '07     
In February 2009 a project started in Demola, where the goal was to produce a demo of online game platform. The game platform was created for a television program Summeris’ (Finnish Broadcasting company YLE) website. The target audience for the program is youth between 9 and 14. The idea was to create a game engine that allows users to customize the content of a game or an animation.


In the project group there were three students from TAMK School of Art and Media and two students from Tampere University Hypermedia Laboratory. The project group got fairly free hands for the project, but the key frame for the project was to create an online game engine where the users could customize the textures of a game or an animation made with Flash. For the group an important aspect was the social side of the game engine. Users can customize a game, and embed it into for example their blog.

The main goal of the game engine “Tuunaamo” was to produce something new, different and interesting for the Summeri website. The target audience itself is very demanding, and kids these days use the internet very fluently. The project group wanted to create something that would be easy and fun to use, but does not underestimate the skills of these users. Another key thing was to make an easy and fast tool for the reporters to produce content for the website.

The finished demo was ready in May 2009. The original idea changed a bit during the project. The demo was a “frog spawn”- game, where the user could customize the texture of the game. The demo is only a start for this project and there are plans to develop this online platform further in the future.
   
Picture: A plan of the Summeri Tuunaamo
Made by: Niko Kosonen, Antti Tolppanen and Vilja Heinonen