(Part 1) Swedish Game Awards Conference 2014 Report

Last weekend, Swedish Game Awards Conference 2014 took place in Södertörns Högskola, Stockholm. Me and a couple of other students from Campus Gotland was attending the conference. In the next coming posts, I will give my impressions on the Conference.

I will talk about the talks that was given in the upcoming posts, because there is a lot that can be said about those. The reason to why there aren't many images in these posts is because my phone decided to live it's own life, causing me to lose most of the pictures that I took. And just because I tried and fix it before Day 2, it still didn't want to work on Day 2. Technology...

Student Showcases

One thing that SGAC did this year was to let students at universities in Sweden showcase games, prototypes or demos that they had been working on. I didn't get a chance to play all of the games here, but if those that I managed to play, there were some really good gems. One of the games was the platform game Grief, that I've talked about previously. I still think the games looks great, although I yet again did not manage to play it.

Another games that I saw potential in was a 3rd person action game called Root Force. It was a game where you are playing as a tree stump, and you try to bump out the other teams tree stumps from the map. You can also pick up power-ups, which can make that a lot easier. The game could need more polish, but it still shows potential in the concept.

There was also a 2D puzzle-game that I don't remember the name of, but the idea is that you are playing as a robot that gives instructions to other "dummy robots", and the goal of the game is to rescue a certain amounts of robots. The aesthetics of this game looked really nice, and I really liked the puzzles of this game, although some improvements on the technical side of things could be necessary.

Partner Showcases

Students was not the only ones who was showing stuff during the conference. Other companies was present at the conference as well. This is my impressions of the companies that I managed to get a chance to talk to/visit.

Arrowhead Studios (makers of Magicka) was showing up their new game Helldivers for the PS4. Although the game was fun to play of what I manged to play, I just don't like the PS4 controller. I can't even play 5 minutes without starting to feel weird pains in my hands.

Code Club is the developer of the sandbox game Wurm online. Although they did not show the game, they still talked about it and it looks like they are at least trying to make something new with the sandbox genre that has exploded in the recent years (with games like Minecraft, Terraria and Atarbound).

Fondia is a company that helps persons and companies with legal matters. In addition to having a booth on site, they also had a talk about legal matters in games. More about that in an upcoming posts

King was one of the sponsors of the conference, and they also had a booth at the conference. In addition to showing of their games, they had several employees present at the conference (at least 4 of them), and they were all really nice to talk to.

Although Rovio was present at the expo as well, I think I managed to get the worse timings to meet up with any person from Rovio, as their talks was going on at the same time as other talks that interested me more was going on at the same time, and I didn't managed to find any developer at their booth when I was there.

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.