GamesCom 2010

We’re back again from the largest games trade fair in the world! One of the many ways in which we try to highlight our students and their projects from the Gotland Game Awards is to offer them floor space in our booths at various events. Largest of these by far is the annual Game Developers Conference and GamesCom. Let me throw some figures at you from this years event: 5 days and a total of 505 companies from 33 countries. More than 200 premieres. Over 4400 media representatives from 49 countries. A gross floor space of 120 000m² and a total of 254 000 visitors – 18 900 of whom were trade visitors.

Among them were 28 women and men from Gotland University, GAME. Our troop may have been somewhat smaller than for GamesCom 2009 but our presence was definitely not diminished. Our students got to build and man the 56m² booth right next to Blizzard, Square Enix, Crytek, EA, Bethesda, BioWare and LucasArts, where we showed off some of our most ambitious projects to date; Abzolium, Colorless, Fumbies, Gods of Steel, Midnight, Pawns and the game of the year-winner Dwarfs, alongside several monitors looping computer generated animations.

Jonathan Lester over at dealspwn.com concluded:

it doesn’t get any more independent than Gotland University [...] they’ve crafted some immensely promising experiences. Pay close attention, because these unsung games are quite unlike anything else you’ll see in the show.

Agreed.

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For more photos, check out GamesCom 2010 official photostream.

GDC Europe 2010

Game Developers Conference Europe 2010 was larger than ever with record high attendance not only from the industry and media, but from speakers and exhibitors as well. GAME – a seasoned veteran – shared the 650m² exhibition space with more than 40 companies from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, the UK and the USA. Our booth was right next to giants like Intel, Crytek, Bigpoint and Epic, and while it is called “GDC Europe” the 1,500 game professionals attending this year represented more than 45 different countries!

Speakers ranged from famed game developer Warren Spector of Disney’s Junction Point, to Hermen Hulst of Guerilla Games – the full schedule offered a selection of 170 international speakers, covering game development on PC, social networking sites, distribution, consoles and mobile platforms. 3 days chock-full of learning, networking, and inspiration – what’s not to love?

Video, audio, and presentation recordings from GDC Europe are available at the GDC Vault.
For more pictures, see the official GDC Europe photo set.
Gamasutra covered GDC Europe this year too.

Almedalsveckan & Best of GGA

What do you get if you gather all political parties, all lobbyists, non-governmental organizations and more than 350 journalists and television crews in one place? You get Almedalsveckan (The Almedalen Week) – Sweden’s annual rock festival for politics – right here in Visby.

With 2010 being an election year the city will be absolutely packed for next week – there’s already more than 1041 events on the program, one of which happens to be GAME and our drop-in exhibit of the Best Of Gotland Game Awards.

Our Motion Capture studio will be open for the public 16:00 – 20:00, Monday to Friday. We’ll be showing Abzolium, Chubby Chase Race, Colorless, Fumbies, Gods of Steel, Midnight, Pawns, Sage & Walkabout. There will also be a drop-in cinema showing computer generated animations and movies.

The exhibit will be manned by our students so whether you’re interested in studying here or just want to take a break and play some games or watch some movies – you’re very welcome.

Welcome!

DreamHack Live

DreamHack – with it’s more than 12 000 participants – is the worlds largest computer festival, held right here in Sweden twice a year. DH Summer 2010 is underway as we speak, and as always we have a bunch of students displaying their work and representing our education at the DreamHack Expo. Make sure to drop by, try our games and hang out if you’re at the event.

And if you’re not (for whatever reason…) in Jönköping right now – don’t fret! Swedish Television is broadcasting live from DreamHack and the stream is available online! Daniel Hagström – one of our first year programmers was interviewed yesterday and did a great job! Check it out for a glimpse of what we do and were this education can take you.

Starts at 00:52:20. The interview is interrupted for a segment about game music, and continues at 01:24:00.

Unfortunately no subtitles for our international visitors.

Want more DreamHack goodness? Check out their Flickr stream and YouTube channel!

Game of the Year!

The 2010 edition of the Swedish Game Awards is over. The winners were announced at the Grande Finale on the 12th of June, and the prestigious Game of the Year went to GAME students!

Dwarfs is a third year project, an arcade strategy game for PC and Xbox360 putting you in charge of helping a computer controlled tribe of Dwarfs to excavate randomly generated mountains. You must help them gather juicy minerals and valuable gold, all the while protecting your Town Hall from harm. The SGA Jury motivation read: “Charming graphics, well thought out and fun. An overall solution that really works with an excellent tutorial that introduces a fun, tactic and strategic gameplay.” .

GAME has never had a big presence at SGA, largely due to scheduling conflicts. Our students are smack in the middle of production when SGA requests final submissions. But every now and again student teams have an early playable ready in time and enters the national competition. Thus Dwarfs can proudly join Promqueen (2005), Sumo (2006) and Vertigo (2009) in the list of GAME productions recognized at the Swedish Game Awards thus far.

Well done everyone!

PS. It might be worth noting that the Game of the Year-award came hot on the heels of the team’s well deserved Pwnage Award at Gotland Game Awards less than a week ago.

Gotland Game Awards 2010

It has been done. GGA 2010 was bigger, bolder, better and beautifuller than ever before. There were arcades, games and movies. There were presentations, lectures and conversations. There were speeches, awards, winners and losers. There were drinks, foods and rock-n-roll. And there were fireworks, lasers and a party with no room to spare.

All pictures, videos and games will be uploaded during the summer – the dataset is absotively huge – please be patient and subscribe to our feed to be notified whenever they’re available! For now, please enjoy these select few pics from the exhibition and award show.

Photos from the mingle, award ceremony and party has been added (though they are, to be honest, not properly sorted yet…). The student projects are up, and I’ve added filtering functions, so you can now browse all 1st year, 2nd year, 3rd year and 4th year projects separately. Check out the tag cloud for more ways to drill into this site.

Oh, and here’s GGA 2009′s complete jury list.

(make sure you click the purple flashing symbol, for proper fullscreen viewing!)

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Work in progress…

Gotland Game Awards are three short days away. This is what a crunch looks like.

To our students a “weekend” is a purely theoretical concept at this point. For the rest of you; have a good one! We hope to see you all monday, at what will undoubtedly be the most impressive Gotland Game Awards yet!

It’s on like Donkey Kong!

Gotland Game Awards 2010 – the fifth in as many years – takes place at Wisby Strand next week, Monday 7^th and Tuesday 8^th. Admittance is free and open for the public! So if you’re passing by Almedalen make sure to drop in and test all games on display, watch some movies and win something.

Gotland Game Awards is an annual competition and price ceremony where our students gets to display their productions to a jury of industry professionals. The jury this year includes over 25 international members from the game and computer graphics industry; people from Lionhead, Microsoft, Starbreeze and Paradox (just to name a few) will come here next week to play and give feedback on the games.

The students are competing in 18 different categories spanning from “Best XNA Game”, to “Best Serious Game”. One of the most important awards is the UNICEF Award for Human Rights. There are also special categories for the students creating computer animated movies. Last year Disney Pixar attended GGA and held seminars and gave feedback on the students’ projects. This year John Klepper and Steven Ilous (who created the special effects for The Matrix Trilogy!) will participate in the event.

Our industry sponsors have donated prices totaling more than 300 000€ to award the students. These prices range from games and software licenses, to travels where the students will get to show off their games at some of the biggest game events in the world. All prices are handed out during the glamorous award gala of the second evening.

It will be a spectacular show with champagne, fireworks and frickin’ laser beams!