(Part 2) Swedish Game Awards Conference 2014 Report - Talks

Another thing that also happens during SGA Conferences is talks from various people in the game industry. Below is a short summary of the talks that I could attend.

Romi Gråhed from DICE had a talk about development of games in general, what pitfalls a developer might run into and some general tips and tricks for better development of games.

Linnea Harrison from DICE has a talk about something that DICE calles Levolution. In short, it's how you can change a level in (for example) battlefield that isn't necessarily destruction. She also decided to talk about how they had applied that in a Battlefield 4 level called "Do the Dish", as well as some development tips in general. This talk made me get some inspiration for potential game design ideas as well.

Ida Häggström & Jenna Sourander from Fondia has a talk about legal matters in games. This was a really interesting talk, as you might not be aware of all the legal regulations that exists when you are making games. If you are going to develop games, make sure that you get help to sort out all legal matters.

Martin Lindell from DICE had a talk about the preservation of games and what challenges that it possess. This was a really interesting talk; as it highlighted what makes preserving games hard compared to preserving music for example; as well as some legal problems behind doing just that.

Lead by Angelica Norgren (P3 spel), there was a panel discussion on the Saturday with Josef Fares, Novi Flink and Roger Tónlist about gender issues in games. It brought up a couple of interesting points of discussions, especially from Josef Fares(despite that he contradicted himself a good couple of times)

Johan Pilstead from Arrowhead Studios had a talk about game development in general. He also brought up some general experiences from Arrowhead's own experiences. A really good talk that everyone should listen to if they can.

Daniel Ström of Guru Games had a talk about a concept called Agency. In short, Agency is about being able to make choices in your life and how that could be applied to video games. He also talked  about how agency was applied in their own project called Magnetic.

Timea Tabori from Rockstar North had a talk during the lunch on Sunday. She talked about how she went from being a university student to become a programmer at Rockstar, and also giving tips to other who want to do the same.

Daniel Thronström from Avalanche had a talk called "Why AAA is the new indie". The talk was primary focused on what AAA developers can learn from indie developers and the other way around. General game development tips was also brought up and how the market has changed the past few years. If you ever get a chance to hear this lecture somewhere else, I strongly recommend that you do so.

Bonus: Campus Gotland Group Photo

Image comes from Simon Wulf

(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.