GAMEX 2013 Report - Other Higher Educations

Uppsala University Campus Gotland where not the only high education seat that was present at the expo. Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (Blekinge Institute of Technology) and Högskolan i Skövde (Skövde University) were also present at Gamex with their game educations.

Even though I did not manage to get much good images from Skövde's booth, I still managed to get the image below from the game Grief. The game is also made with the multimedia library SFML, which is what we learned to program with last spring at Gotland University, so it's nice to see that we have some similarities in our education. However, one big difference from Gotland is the size of the team. As I managed to learn at an after-party we game educations had on the Saturday, apparently 15 people had been working on Grief. And I thought that my group of 8 persons was big... I didn't get a chance to try Grief, but it is an platform game where the main character (a child) has lost his father in cancer and he's going through the five stages of grief. It looks really nice from what I managed to see, but as I said, I didn't get a chance to try the game.

I would like to see more than one game from Skövde though. I'm fully aware of that it may be so because they had a smaller booth compared to Campus Gotland and because of other factors, but if you really want to show of what you can do at your education, don't just bring one game. For example Coffee Stain Studios, the creators behind the game Sanctum is originally from Skövde, so it's not like Skövde doesn't create good games.




















Grief

Blekinge had a bit more to show in their booth. One game that they showed was Epigenesis (who's art-style is clearly inspired by the game Sanctum). I would describe it as handball meets FPS meets base-conquering. That's what the game is about, the game is a FPS where your team can win in two ways. Either by taking over all the bases on the level before the time runs out or by having scored the most points at the end of the round. When you are carrying the ball, you cannot use any weapons.

Epigenesis

The version of Epigenesis that I tried at Gamex was an alpha build, so it will certainly improve as development goes along. My thoughts about the game was that  the concept was an interesting one, but some things in the game wasn't  100% clear. For example, I didn't know you could win the game by taking over all the bases on the map, I played the game as you could only win by scoring the most points. But once again, it was an alpha build, and I'm sure that it will improve later on.

Other than that, they showed an point-and-click game that was intended as an art-prototype. The art was nice, but otherwise I don't know what so say about the game since I don't play many point-and-click games. They also showed some interesting technology, where they had done a plug-in to a 3D-program called Maya that enabled them to see how the models was going to look inside the game engine that they had. Really cool idea if you ask me.