Gotland Game Conference, 25-26 May 2012

Gotland Game Conference is all about your potential to make a living doing what you love!

We will be exploring creative business models and learn how to invent new ones. We’ll try to pin down the future of web- & mobile platforms, the experiences they enable and markets they provide. We’ll meet with some of developers experimenting (and thriving!) in these fields.

No matter your goal; education, employment, getting published, or setting up your own thing – we’ve got your back! Check the Schedule for an overview of the conference content.

Register now! Tickets and exhibition space are limited.

GAME hearts the Netherlands

A chunk of the GAME department just came back from a week long tour through Utrecht and Lee- uwarden, where we visited game developers, educations and their surrounding support systems. We met with staff from Game and Media Technology at Utrecht University, students and staff from Communication and Multimedia Design at NHL. We visited the GameShip multimedia studio and spoke to local indie developers such as Grendel Games, Infinity Lane and Triangle Studios.

We’ve run into some of these at conferences all over the world, but now finally had an opportunity to visit them in the Netherlands to see how they do their stuff. It’s been an intense week, made so much better by the amazing hospitality of NHL. They went out of their way to take care of us during our stay in Leeuwarden; making sure we got to play with some very unique tech and meet a lot of equally inspiring people.

Thank’s to everyone who took time out of their days to meet with us!

… our island is very nice during the summer months. *hint hint*

Presentation at Fryshuset

Adam Mayes and I (er… Ulf Benjaminsson, that is.) went to Stockholm last week to present for the Game Development students at Fryshuset. We’d been ask to talk on the topic “Setting up an Indie Studio in 2015″.

We shared the day on stage with Microsoft, DICE and several game educations from across Sweden. We felt that it went very well, the audience was genuinely interested and we had such a good time on stage that we ran over. A lot.

Anyway – we wanted to share the story with you but just as we were about to do this writeup a letter arrived. It’s from a student who was in the audience that day.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: About Fryshuset gymnasium lecture
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:02:16 +0200
From: *REMOVED*
To: Adam Mayes


I just wanted to mail you saying thank you for showing up at my school and having a lecture about indie-game development.

Doing so has really helped me deciding towards what högskola I want to attend to in a years time when I graduate. You could really see what kind of serious school HGO is as you stood there talking. It is too bad you did not get more time as I could have sat there and listened all day while the other schools who were there just held presentations that were plain boring and seemed to have been scraped together ten minutes before they started. They were not interested in what they were talking about and didnt show any passion, it also felt like they were just making bad attempts at trashtalking other schools instead of showing what their’s had to offer.

But for you, you really stuck to the subject and gave great tips about how to start up our own companies and you were the only ones with some serious content that was helpfull. The other schools stood there talking about basic stuff about starting indie-game companies that we can figure out ourselfs as they tried to cover up that, frankly, they do not know how to do it.

Once again, thank you Adam and your friend whose name I do not know (maybe you can forward this to him?) for coming to Fryshusets Gymnasium.
I hope I will be seeing you again in the near future, but then I hope it will be in your school.

-------- EOM --------

Being Swedish and thus genetically opposed to boasting, we’ll just leave this here… and allow you to soak in the greatness of Tag Team Terror.

Our slides are available through Google Docs.

Huston; we have t-shirt

Well. We’ve always had t-shirts, but this design is new. Code-literate people would read these as “Gotland University – Game Design AND Programming OR Graphics” – mirroring the structure of our educations (game design major, art or code minor).

… programmers will then likely realize how silly it is to do Boolean comparison when clearly we’re aiming for something like a bitwise assignment.

The shirts are for sale in the university reception (plastic only people!). GAME students can sign up here to allow us to restock.

Gamex 2011

We’ve just returned from this years Gamex. We invested in a large booth and exhibited 60 sqm of student projects – Carnage, Clockwork, Fields of Glory, Robotorusama, VeloCity, Victorious Skies and Walkabout – allowing us to meet and talk to thousands of people interrested in game development- and design.

It was great to see how well represented Gotland was; with Three Gates showing off Aethereus and Zeal Studios exhibiting together with Paradox, 6% of Swedens largest game tradeshow was from our island.

Swedish Game Conference

We went to Swedish Game Conference this week, to talk about how Swedish game educations and the Swedish game industry can improve their use of each other. There were some interesting points made, and some very cool data shared – and we will surely spend a lot more time analyzing it all when we get back to the island.

One of the problems discussed during these days was that only 1 out of 4 game development graduates (eg. those who actually complete their studies) end up working in the Swedish game industry.

… that seems pretty good actually?

We must realize that the Swedish game industry is a super small subset of the places you might want to go after studying game development. Many of our students find work abroad. We know that we have alumni working in Germany, England, New Zealand, the US, Iceland and Norway! Our students commonly start their own business and others find work in one of the many successful independent studios not counted in the above stats; Frictional Games and Mojang are two examples you might’ve heard off…

The real problem I see in this data is the huge drop-off between students being accepted and students completing their studies. I can see several causes of those stats, but that’s a discussion for another post; we have to catch the ferry back to Gotland now. I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures from the past two days!