During the summer, 18 people (4 teams) from three different programs of TAMK have been working on five games during five weeks, five days a week and five hours a day. You can see the finished games at http://score.igda.fi/5d . The summer project was organized by game development club Score.

The 5D team has landed home from the adventurous occasion of Summer Assembly 2013. During the four days on 1 through 4 August, our quest was full of wonders of the party place itself, but we also brought our own creations to the table for others to enjoy. At our TAMK presentation stand, desks were full of computers and devices running our games, and people steadily gathered around to take a curious look at what was being showcased. Some stayed for longer chats and exchanged contact information with prospective game developers from our team.

The main attraction were naturally the demo competitions and short films. Many agree that the 4K entries stole the show this year with their cunning ideas, but the Real Wild demos were not left far behind, if at all. One does not simply forget a demo made using an ancient electronic train schedule board (complete with music made using snippets of the original train station announcer voice clips), or a graphic calculator screen for that matter. The slight disappointment that the Oldskool demos were dominated by a single entry, was quickly forgotten, thanks to the many amazements from other categories.

The game development competition awarded second place for a TAMK student! Congratulations go to Lukas Kallenbach for creating Pölkky, a computer version of a certain famous summer cabin yard game!

Also shown on the biggest screen in Finland was the live-commentated grand finale of ASUS Republic of Gamers StarCraft 2 tournament. The match was between two young Asian master players, Taeja and San. After recovering from a dreadful start, San managed to win one game and start strong into another, gaining the applause, support and enthusiasm of the crowd. Eventually Taeja defeated San however, but it was very exciting to watch nevertheless. Taeja's prize was a boggling 10 000 dollars!

Elsewhere, fighting game tournaments were held with Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and Street Fighter IV. Two of our team members entered the SF4 competition. Opposition was strong and ultimate victory came only to those deserving, but nothing seemed to bother the calm yoga cool of this Dhalsim cosplayer. It seems drinking energy drinks was one of his new special moves.

ARTtech presented the crowd with several seminars covering topics from gaming industry business to actual tips for programming. On the same spot, another smaller game music concert was held. Always nice to see and a good effort. But next year, Assembly: let's get some really good singers for the job, okay?

2800 computer places all sold out – that says something about the magnitude of this event, and I believe we can all agree that it was amazing! The whole trip was so crazy that in order to avoid burgers and 8-euro pizza slices most of the time, we invented some devious, nutritious new foods like banana-rye bread. The little sleeping that we did was tough for some of us at first (my air mattress was taken from me at the door), but soon the constant chiptune raving and concrete floor couldn't stop us from falling asleep and regaining power for the next day. Many of us were here for the first time, and for myself I can say I will surely come again next year. A big thanks to organizers both at Assembly and TAMK!

Written by Matias Lehtoranta

Sound designer in 5D, student of music technology at the Pyynikki campus

PS.

We were also invited to a sponsor sauna by the organizers of Assembly but strangely, we do not have photos from there!

Nordic Game Conference 2013 was organized 23.-24.5 in Malmö, Sweden. NGC celebrated its 10th year anniversary and I was very happy to be part of it!

NGC consisted of great presentations, keynotes, networking, exhibitors.. I wish I had the time to be part of everything organized at the conference! The presentations were categorized by Production, Creation, Handheld, Business and Technology.

Keynote by Tim Schafer - Inspiration Driven Development

The conference was opened by Tim Chafer from Double Fine (Psychonauts, Brütal Legend), who gave an inspiring presentation on keeping your own creative rights and designing with passion. "If you're not making games out of love, I wonder why you are doing it?" - was the most powerful quote from him. Coming from LucasArts, he went through the reasons on wanting to keep all his creative rights and setting up a studio where they can work on what they want.

Matthew Boch - New Normals

Matthew had a very interesting lecture on defining gender roles, sexuality and racism. Using examples from Mass Effect and Dragon Age, he explained with examples how the female and male shepard have differences and also went in depth on how the game world should be creating normals. What if the player's behavior toward's certain game races were acts of racism? It was a great presentation which made people think a bit before using the clichés and way game design has used so far.

Susan O'Connor Play It Again, Sam: How To Connect With Your Audience

Probably one of the best presentations. BioShock writer went in depth with story writing and how it affects the player. O'Connor thought on ways to make the world more fascinating and how to qrite interesting stories that make the player feel immersed. She felt like there is still a long way to go in developing stories in games -- but we're on the right track with the indie games scene growing bigger and bigger. 

Richard Lemarchand - Life of Play, Life of the Mind: What Game Design Can Teach U

Naughty Dog Game Designer (The Uncharted Series, Jak & Daxter, etc.) spoke on his decision to stop working in the gaming industry and moving to teach game design in USC, the ranked #1 game design school in North America. Going through methods from doing paper prototypes to engaging people to talk to eachother honestly,  Richard was sure there are much more ways to learn game design than many people think.

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The Nordic Game awards was organized after the first conference day. Nordic game companies took homw prizes from different categories, such as best Nordic Game, Best Children's game, best artistic achievement, etc. Supercell's HayDay took home the prize from Best Handheld Game.

Work hard - Play hard. After a long but very exciting and interesting first day of the conference we were transferred to a secret place to network and take it easy in between the conference days. There was a great chiptune-gig for a few hours in one of the spaces, needless to say it was packed with people dancing to sounds from the Game Boy.

All in all, it was a great and succesfull event, I made tons of new connections and got inspired by the amazing people from the industry. (now to just sort out all of these business cards..)

Minna Eloranta

Student of Degree Programme in Media, Game Development Club Score