Monday, 27 May 2013

Initiating 5D.5!

By Heidi Mäenpää

 
 


The 5th edition of the legendary 5D has started! 

Four teams of four consisting of artists and programmers (plus two awesome sound designers) will be making five games in five weeks, working five days a week and five hours a day (we sure love the number 5!). 

This week is all about getting everybody on board and going through the basics of 3D and 2D graphics, and also see which gaming platforms everybody wants to use in the following weeks. We will divide into the teams at the end of the week, and our aim is to have 20 games ready in July, and in August these will be presented at Assembly. Last year's 5D participant, the Score Lady Minna Eloranta has been organizing the project and made sure we have all the equipment and licences that we need to make brilliant games.

Today we had our first intensive lessons about Unity 3D and Blender. Jussi Salonen was our guru-of-the-day and he showed us basic level design in Unity and modeling&texturing in Blender. Tomorrow we will be continuing with these, and at some point the axes will be thrown at chickens. We'll just have to wait and see how that turns out!


Unity 3D level design/test made from Jussi's models

An axe we all had to model and texture* in Blender
*The axe's texture was made using this concept art piece. 



 Stay tuned for the first patch of games done by our great teams!

|||
The author is a student of the Degree Programme in Media
Read more stories by and about IMPs, the international media programme students
Read more stories about the Game Development Club Score 

Posted by , , , , , , , , , , ,
Edit This Post
Tuesday, 19 March 2013

Wooga Game Jam in Berlin, 15.-17.3


Wooga Game Jam was organized  15.-17.3. Two Score members, Andy and I and also 5 students from Kajak traveled from Finland to Berlin to create games during the weekend. We came a day earlier, so we even got to see some of what Berlin had to offer!

The Game Jam kicked off at Wooga's office on Friday. Their office was amazing, and we had some presentations at their newly opened auditorium. After that, we split up into groups and started jamming. I grouped up with 4 Kajak students.

Our coolio team 

Our jamming went pretty smoothly, especially since Wooga offered us drinks and food for the whole weekend (and our workplace was right next to their kitchen..)
We developed on Windows Phone, which was a new platform for me. Our awesome programmers Petri and Olli-Matti did a great job in developing and polishing the game. 

Our protagonist, Luchador


Creating the menuscreen with our programmers in the background



Our to-do list in our working lab, programmer Petri and the producer/game designer Julius 

After two days of working around the clock, our hard work was rewarded by the winning prize! And most importantly, we had tons of fun!

 Minna, Elsa, Olli-Matti, Petri and Julius, the happy winners

Here's some gameplay video:



- Minna

http://www.facebook.com/ScoreGameDev

Posted by , , , , , ,
Edit This Post
Thursday, 24 January 2013

Checking out the Game Industry in Germany!

It’s almost 4 months ago I left Finland to see what the games industry in Germany has to offer. This meaning I’m currently doing a part of my practical training aka internship at one of the world’s biggest social game developing companies, Wooga. Right now I’m also working on my thesis and got my original plan of 3 months extended to 8 in total. I’m not the first Finnish student here, not even the first TTVO student. I’ve also met some guys from Kajak, which is really cool.


All in all Berlin is a really nice and international city. Knowing German helps a lot but you can get things done with English as well.
Big things happen at Wooga! Releasing a game is worth of setting up
 a huge banner on the side or the office building!
At Wooga the language is English. There are a lot of people from outside Germany so it is kind of natural that everyone should speak the same language. In the game industry English seems to be the main language anyway. I think that is great; it makes it easier for people to move from a country to another!

Wooga is not like any other company I’ve seen so far. They have quite an awesome spirit here and I really like it. It is serious business in developing games but the people have still good humor, are friendly and enthusiastic about games.
Strange stuff happens at Wooga. Especially on Halloween!

If you have a chance to go abroad to work, maybe an internship or something else, I highly recommend it. The experience you get is valuable both on your CV and in your life.  

Be active. That takes you far!

 Story by: Emma Kiiski
Emma Kiiski is a member of Score Game Development Community, also a student of our Media Programme.
Read more stories by/about Emma
Read more stories from/about IMPs, the Media students

Posted by , , , , , , , , ,
Edit This Post