Lucky Media students experience GDC Europe and GamesCom

This years Game Developer Conference Europe and GamesCom guest lists included three students from our very own Degree programme in Media.  By winning the, Nokia sponsored, Demola organised mobile concept competition (read story ) we were able to choose any conference in Europe to visit!  Our choice was GDC Europe 2011 and the affiliated GamesCom trade event that were held during the same week in Cologne, Germany.  It was easy to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, and take part in both kinds of event on the same trip. With us travelled Bernard Garvey from Demola who seemed to enjoy our company.  For GamesCom Nokia were unable to finance our visit because of it officially being a separate event so TAMK very generously sponsored the extra nights needed to visit the trade fair.

There were the most people in the booth area during the pauses in GDC

GDC Europe is known and respected world wide as a large event in the gaming industry.  This year it included many lectures, parties and of course networking.  There were lectures from Monday to Wednesday on subjects ranging from business and marketing to game design, programming, visual arts and production.  We were of course able to choose which lectures we went to and most of the time plumped for those that seemed the most interesting.  Parties took place every night too.  From which you had to choose the best as well.  Networking was easier at parties because the feeling was relaxed and you were able to talk about more than just work.  At the end of the day my handbag was always full of business cards!

The humoristic lecturer told us about game design

It was fun to see that despite being at such a large event we were also able to meet other students.  We came in contact with, among others, German and Swedish students.  It was also brilliant to get to know people from outside Finland that are actually studying in the same area.  By sharing experiences and ideas you no doubt learn best.  On the other hand we also got to know some Finns from the games industry, which is handy when we come to think about internships.  GamesCom also had representatives from various Universities and that increased the possibilities for exchange studies.

Nintendo was pretty popular because their new 3DS console

We also succeeded in mingling with one of the biggest forces in the industry:ArenaNet!  The firm was presenting a demo of their new game, Guild Wars 2.  We were even able to test the game on Wednesday before the event even began as trade visitors and press had their own preview of GamesCom.  At the end of the week the gigantic halls we full to the brim with enthusiastic gamers.  Having been invited to the NCSoft party we got the opportunity to meet the actual producers from ArenaNet.  We got to know, among others, famous concept artists Kekai Kotaki and Daniel Dociu - a real once in a life time opportunity.  One of our group member's dreams came true when these legends came up with a surprising and unusual idea.  The next day at gamescom, on stage, Kekai was to draw a Guild Wars 2 tattoo onto none other than Anna's shoulder.  Of course you didn't need to ask Anna twice and she snapped up the opportunity what with being such a huge fan of the game.

Anna was very happy with her new tattoo

The journey was no doubt one that none of the group will forget! We are more than pleased with what we have learnt and found the whole experience really inspiring.  In the future we will no doubt be looking for even more promising opportunities, like this, to explore.

Story: Emma Kiiski
Translation Douglas Symon
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The three awarded students, Emma Kiiski, Douglas Symon and Anna Narinen are students of Degree Programme in Media
Read more stories from/about IMPs, the Media students
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TAMK at Assembly, Summer 2011

TAMK participated in the biggest game party in the country with few enthusiastic students from both Teiskontie and Finlayson. We got our stuff in the Hartwall arena and had a stand for everyone to come to ask about TAMK and what we are studying and look what we have been doing (game projects etc). For me personally this was the first time in Assembly so everything was new and exciting! Assembly is a great way to connect with students from other schools and some interesting people from the industry. It’s also an event to share knowledge, experiences, ideas, new technology and most importantly; having fun with all this!

Leaving from TAMK

The sea of computer screens in the arena looked wonderful in the evening when the lights were turned off and many of the gamers continued playing the whole night. Fortunately there was also a possibility to take a few hours sleep on the hallway to gather some energy. There was a band playing in the main stage before midnight and before that some very interesting game developing compo videos were shown in the big screen. Everyone in the event could vote for their favorite games in the compo. Some school projects had been shown as well as hobbyist game demos. It was really interesting to see that a university of applied sciences in Kajaani (KAJAK) was really actively presenting their projects and they had something to be proud about. It’s a shame there were no games in the compo from TAMK but let’s see if next year brings any new good games to be showed in Assembly!

TAMK's awesome stand

There were many interesting seminars about new online game development. For example Mozilla was presented in browser-based developing. It’s already quite amazing what you can create with only the browser’s 2D (Canvas) and 3D (WebGL) tools.
There was a presentation from Supercell (a game company) where they presented new and light game technology with a quite old tool Flash. The game looked pretty good and was light to run with the browser. In amount the seminars were really interesting and inspiring. It wasn’t all about game development; some of the topics covered for example game music. There was a lot to choose from for everyone.

The event has offered graphic contests and game tournaments which are a fun way to spend time in between of playing in the middle of the sea of computers.

Angry Birds - live version

At some point a former students from TAMK’s international business programme came to talk to us. He works now in Rovio with Angry Birds and was really positive about TAMK students to get to work over there too. That would be a really good chance for internship. It was nice to notice that TAMK is a good school to jump from into the industry.

I left in the Saturday evening so I wasn’t able to join the fun on Sunday. But next year I will for sure participate in the event and promote TAMK and our awesome game projects! It was a really great trip and taught me a lot; I hope the others enjoyed too!

Story: Emma Kiiski
The author is student of Degree Programme in Media
Read more stories from/about IMPs, the Media students
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Assembly Summer 2011
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Game Design Summer School report

Click cartoon to enlarge

The Engage Newsletter published a report on the successful international game design summer school hosted by Demola and our Degree Programme in Media last week:

The ENGAGE Game Design Summer School for Students and Young Designers was successfully held at the Demola Centre for Innovation in Tampere, Finland. Sixteen enthusiastic game designers worked hard, sometimes long hours, to complete professional concept documents for games designed for learning.

Professor Dr Maja and Paul Pivec from FH Joanneum, accompanied by Euan Mackenzie from 3MRT, lectured on topics ranging from Target Audience Analysis to Project Planning and Budget estimation.

Four Industry experts provided question and answers via video conferences from all parts of the globe. Roni Linser from Fablusi spoke from Israel on Simulations versus Roleplay games, Lucia Pannese of Imaginary in Italy discussed didactic issues and learning outcomes, Lewis Johnson of Alelo in California spoke about target audience design and cultural aspects, and Jurriaan van Rijswijk of Games Factory Online connected from Suriname to provide the students with valuable insights into the business aspects of game development.

The school was hosted by Cai Melakoski at the Demola centre with extra curricula activities being provided by the Applied Sciences University of Tampere and the SCORE Game Development club.

The reviews and feedback from the students were extremely positive. One student stated after the class “I just wanted to thank ENGAGE for organizing such a great and interesting week for us. I only wish our own teachers would be as good as you guys in holding classes!” The student work will be assessed within the coming weeks and designs will be eligible for the upcoming Golden Pineapple Awards. Further information can be found on the ENGAGE Portal.

Read the Newsletter
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The Game Design Summer School starts today

Demola will this week be the venue for the Engage Game Design Summer School. The  international Summer School will tackle issues related to game design as well as how to embed curricular topics in the game design.

It will give designers and creative students insights and knowledge of educational game design e.g. creating educational games for the target group, embedding curricular topics and stealth learning, providing accurate information, consulting on one hand teachers and on the other hand the target group; asking the right questions and embedding these answers into the game.

The Game Design Summer School is organised by the Engage Learning Network and coordinated by Joanneum UAS in Graz, Austria and hosted by the Degree Programme in Media of Tampere UAS (TAMK) and Demola.


Pictured: New Zealander Paul Pivec and Slovenian Maja Pivec are the main organisers of the Summer School

Engage Summer School home
Engage Learning Project
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From Assembly with Love, vol. 3

Saturday was the third and the second last day at Assembly, so I thought that this would be a good time to shed some light over the culture of Assembly to the readers of this blog. Today we'll have the highlight of the whole event i.e. democompos (compos = competitions). Demos mean in this context audiovisual workds created through computre code, and these are the foundation of the whole Assembly event. Demos are the historical core of the event, and even though Assembly has expanded into other territories, demos are still a very important day of the modern Assembly. Demo teams compete in different categories e.g. oldskool (only demos that run on platforms released before 1993 are allowed) and 4k (the whole file must not exceed 4 kilobytes). The winners of the democompos are real showcases of programming, which require the coordinated effort of several people.



Picture from yesterday's air guitar competition. The competition song was Lordi's ""Hard Rock Hallelujah"

There are several other types of competitions at Assembly. Unlike you might think, Assembly encourages its visitors to exercise by organizing basket- and floorball competitions. The computer lovers might be more at home with less demanding sports like disk and CD throwing. You can also compete more passively like decorating your computer or your computer place.


Here's an example of an interesting decoration of a computer case

Our booth still stands even though we've run out of sweets and other giveouts. The games have been popular (at least the people working at the booth have been playing a lot). The students from TiKo have shown their bravery and relentlessness (or madness and consumption of energy drinks) by stayng awake and watching over the booth on both nights. Spares us the bother of having to tear down and build up the stand every morning to keep our valuable equipment safe.

Tomorrow it's time to go so check the blog for the final report.

Text and photos: Eevi Korhonen, 09IMP student
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Assembly Summer 2010 
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From Assembly with Love, vol. 2

Eevi explains about the ArtTech seminar:

Today's big event for us was the ArtTech seinar we held together with the other schools titled"Game Development Education, Clubs, and Cooperative Organizations in Finland". Each school had 10 minutes to showcase their programmes and game projects and we finished with a shared 15 min panel on the schools' co-operatives and cooperation. I was represented our school on both occasions (though I didn't mean to). In the 10 min slot I told about our 5D2 project, even though as an afterthought it would've been good to spend couple of minutes going over the Media programme, too. But I think our marketing will speak for itself anyway (today I've dropped off about a hundred leaflets all over the Areena).

So, I accidentally participated in the co-operative panel too, even though my original plan was to quietly exit the stage after my talk. At the end of my part I just couldn't figure out a way to do that gracefully and there were four chairs at the stage (meant for the speakers while they were waiting their turn), and on top of it all, the vent was being streamed live to thousands of people over the Internet and at the Areena. I managed to get through the questions with anyone noticing my lack of real expertise in the area (the correct panelist for Tampere would've been the guy who was tasked with running the panel, so he couldn't both ask and answer the questions without it looking bit silly).

By the way, you can follow the Assembly live over the net throughAssemblyTV. I probably should've mentioned this yestreday, so you could've followed the aforementioned seminar, but I genuinely forgot that also those were being streamed on the AssemblyTV. But no worries, for according to my knowledge those recordings will be later put on their own Vimeo channel. So just be patient, you'll be able to see it sometime later.

Tero tells what's been happening at the booth:

People have been stopping by our booth throughout the day, playing games and asking questions about our programme. The Score games seem to be constantly popular, drawing in players and interested crowds (perhaps due to the comfy bean bags?). Some of the 5D2 games have also turned out quite popular, Elder Scrolls being the game of choice for many of the players.

We managed to kind of fix the touchscreen, or at least figure out why it wouldn't co-operate with our little interactive tour of TTVO. It seems the display doesn't quite interpret clicking and holding down the mouse button the same way it handles touching the screen and holding your finger in place. As a quick fix we noticed that touching the screen and dragging your finger does work, so although a bit tedious to use, the tour is now somewhat functional.


Text: Tero Koskela and Eevi Korhonen, 09IMP students

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Assembly Summer 2010 
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From Assembly with Love, vol. 1

Greetings from Assembly!

Finally I have enough time to blog about the first day's events, and because pictures equal a thousand words, I've used them quite a lot in this entry. Day started slowly, as we left off an hour later than planned, which was not surprising. We had to make a detour to our driver's home and pick up some gas before finally heading towards Helsinki. We made it to Hartwall Areena without further incident, and so we could start building the booth.

Our van was pretty full as the picture shows. We had e.g. four bean bags, a fridge and a projector screen.


We could not avoid small problems at this point: there weren't enough long LAN cables, we had to move our stuff away from the fire post, cables and backbags littered the floor and on top of it all, our original layout for the whole booth area had to be redone. Everything was sorted out eventually, and the booth is (and has been for several hours now) in full Assembly mode.



The highlight of our stand is the 42-inch TV the people from TiKo have brought. It's used to run their very own Swarms game for Xbox360.

And it is my pleasure to announce that the TTVO interactive tour has been released. Unfortunately we could not release it hear yet, as we didn't get our hands on the touchscreen until today, so we had no chance to test our little show before today. We found out that the movement didn't work as we intended, so we have to fix it before we can run it on the touchscreen. But I hope we get it fixed, because it would be so awesome!


This is the ASUS-sponsored touchscreen which will hopefully run the interactive tour tomorrow. Meanwhile it is showing the TAMK slideshow, which is not bad either..

Text and photos: Eevi Korhonen, 09IMP student
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Assembly Summer 2010 
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From Assembly with Love, prologue

There's only one day between us and the Assembly. We'll be leaving early on Thursday morning to be at the site building our booth before the hordes of nerds overtake the Arena. We'll be blogging all the way to Sunday, so this announces our at least four-chapter-long tale of booth watching, computers and gallons of energy drink. So stay tuned to this blog!

The preparations for this weekend's event are almost complete! We have finished our masterpiece: The Interactive Tour of TTVO! It's the website/fictional tour we made with Flash to showcase what's it like studying here in TTVO (from the viewpoint of a Media student). Beware, there might be some heavy caricatures and we also had to condense the campus into a single hallway, so your experience will be more of a metaphor than an actual virtual tour.

Above a screenshot as a little taste of what's to come. The website will have its Grand Opening at Assembly, so you'll have to wait a little longer to try it out yourself.

Text: Eevi Korhonen, 09IMP student
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Assembly Summer 2010
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TAMK goes Assembly

Next weekend Hartwall Areena is going to be overrun with computer enthusiasts as the summer's biggest computer and video game related event, Assembly, kicks off. And the students of Media and Interactive Design are going to right there among them. TAMK is one of the sponsors at the event, and the school's participation is being done as a student project, where the students plan and implement TAMK's marketing and presence at the event.

We aren't alone, however. We are cooperating with the Computer Engineering students from the main campus as well as other schools in Finland. TAMK is going to be represented along with other schools that offer game education, KAJAK and Turku Game Tech & Arts Lab. We have a common booth, where we will be showing and playing the games made by the students and giving information on the various programmes in the schools.

Even though this is the first post about the subject, we've been working on the project whole summer. We've been designing badges (see pic), fliers, even got ourselves a sponsorship from ASUS in the form of a touchscreen computer that we will use to run our interactive tour of  TAMK Finlayson campus. We're also going to have sweets and other give outs like any good booth.

If you're at Assembly next weekend, come swing by our booth and say hello! If you can't, follow the blog from Thursday to Sunday, we'll be reporting from the event here!


Story: Eevi Korhonen

Assembly Summer 2010

Welcome to Engage Learning Game Design Summer School!

Demola, the venue of the summer school, behind the TAF banner

The Summer School for students and young designers is to be held in Tampere, Finland, from 30th of August till 3rd of September in 2010 at the DEMOLA Centre of Innovation. The Engage Learning Summer school will tackle issues related to game design as well as how to embed curricular topics in the game design. The summer school (3 ECTS) will accommodate between 15 – 25 international students and game designers. For further information about the logistics and the application form, click on the links at Engage Summer School home

The Summer School is organised by the Engage project and hosted by TAMK/Media Programme. Engage is coordinated by our partner FH Joanneum in Graz, Austria.

This Summer School will give designers and creative students insights and knowledge of educational game design e.g. creating educational games for the target group, embedding curricular topics and stealth learning, providing accurate information, consulting on one hand teachers and on the other hand the target group; asking the right questions and embedding these answers into the game.

Lectures will be interleaved with practical work and will be provided by academic and industry experts. Topics will include:

• Game-Based Learning
• Game genres, platforms, and industry roles
• Gender issues and target audience analysis
• Design guidelines for successful games
• Concept documents and the development cycle
• Gameflow and usability testing
• Educational games and learning outcomes
• Game engines and development tools
• Marketing, packaging, and promotion

You will also need to prototype your idea and analyze the usability. This can be done on paper, as a mock-up, or by utilizing game engines provided during the school. This will obviously depend on the platform chosen for your concept.
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See the promo video
SummerSchool EngageLearning on Facebook
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FH Joanneum
TAMK Degree Programme in Media
Demola
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TAMK Designs Health Information, Visuality and Music into a Health Game

Science journalist Kalle Heiska reports about a health game project at TAMK:

TAMK University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) has designed and produced a game for teens incorporating health information, visual appeal and music. The game encourages young people to be sociable and take exercise. Progress in the game requires positive health choices and responses from the game figures manipulated in play. The Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Tampere was in charge of the development work on the health game.
Read the entire report

Photo: Roskis ( = “rubbish”) is a game figure. When the game starts he has had a poor diet for a long time. When a player makes the right decisions with his Roskis figure the diet becomes much healthier. When the game ends Roskis has obviously got rid of his excess weight.
Photo: TAMK

Score at Nordic Game!

Nordic Game is a two-day conference event focused on the game industry on the Nordic countries. Game Development Club Score, which is operating under TAMK, got sponsored tickets to the event from Neogames, the Finnish Center of Game Business, Research & Development. This year's event followed and almost coincided with Tampere Art Factory, so Score had their hands full of work. Fortunately, we got our business cards ready and organised our traveling schedule with TAMK's travel secretary Sirkku Teikari, big thanks to her. Nordic Game has now passed, and we would like to share some of our thoughts regarding the event and the trip in general.

One group of students traveled by plane (Niko Korhonen, Janne Jaakkola, Pasi Perkiö, Teemu Haila), while others decided to save money and the environment by using a ship (Juhani Hujala, Mikko Kähäri, Tuomas Järvensivu, Juho Hartikainen, Antti Salomaa). Even though the cruise path was consecutively longer and for example we journeyed the trip from Stockholm to Malmö in a bus for over 12 hours, this didn't demoralise any of us. The trip back to Stockholm went on smoothly as we got to ride the bus from Outokumpu Pelitalo, i.e. other game development students from Finland who conveniently stayed in the same hostel as we did.

Nordic Game in itself was really worth attending to. The speakers were cutting edge, so as listeners we just had to find our ways to topics that were most relevant to our interests, for there were a number of speakers and as such most of the seminars were being held simultaneously. Another key component of the event was networking among the game developers. Though we might have not gotten invitations to Norway this time, time will tell if the socializing sparks something concrete, either for the club or its members. At the very least, the coverage won't be hurting us the least bit.

The presentation from Unity 3D showed off their middleware game development platform and convinced many of us to lob it inside the School of Art and Media. The Degree Programme in Business Information Systems at Teiskontie Campus has already ordered 20 Unity licenses, so our wishes just might not be all that utopistic. Alex Evans, the developer of LittleBigPlanet shared some precious hints on how to structure a game development pipeline, and in turn, Bionic Commando Rearmed's development studio GRIN told their experiences with working on a remake from a classic game title. Besides these keynotes, the audience got to witness a vast number of different viewpoints concerning the future of game development, as well as other topics that were very relevant to us as students.

The overall supply that the conference offered got us thinking outside the box. All in all, we are very pleased that we got the chance to be part of an event like this, with little to no cost. During the journey, we also figured that in order to help the Nordic game community we must actively focus on enhancing the Finnish national game industry. It is somewhat ironic to go all the way to Malmö just to grasp this idea, but apparently this is turning into an annual trend, if we're to examine last year's trip to Nordic Game. Hopefully we can improve the matter until the next event!

Author: Juho Hartikainen, President of Score Game Development Club

The TAMK School of Art and Media students of the Score delegation. Juho Hartikainen on left side.
Photo: Teemu Haila

Game Project with Okayama University

TAMK and Okayama University students have a a joint game project. Our team went to Japan again in April, interactive media students from the TAMK School of Art and Media and students from the Degree Programme in Business Information Systems of TAMK Business School. Here's the diary:

We took off from Helsinki around half past five on a Sunday night, 5th of April. We first flew to Osaka and arrived there eight o'clock on Monday morning. From Osaka we took a Shinkansen to Okayama, and finally a cab from near the station to our accommodation. The place was a small hostel-like facility meant for visiting teachers at the Okayama University. We could use English there, as the receptionist spoke quite clearly considering we were in Japan.

After we all had settled in, we were told that there wouldn't be any presentations today. This came as a great relief, because most of us hadn't slept in over 30 hours. Our accommodation was really pleasing, and naturally everyone was ever so friendly. I tought this must've been the greatest culture shock to a grim and stiff Finn.

On Tuesday at one o'clock the university students came to pick us up and give us a tour around the Okayama castle and a nearby garden. At this point our communication wasn't really blazing, but we did manage to have a few conversations which lasted more than a minute or two. The weather in Japan was about the same as the Finnish weather during the highest temperatures of a typical summer. The pretty cherry blossoms were blooming and after the sightseeing we had free time, during which we all practiced a great load of cultural recognition each in our own way.

Wednesday was a game day and we started at ten o'clock in the morning (!). First we had a little tour around Okayama university, then lunch and then the presentations started. A Japanese professor had a presentation that really made our jaws drop. It was about teaching a task that requires great precision and coordination with robotics. To tell a long story short: First they see how a man who has practiced calligraphy 47 years does it, then they move to a novice. They followed, among other things, how the gaze moved as the person draw the lines, and how long did it take to draw each line. After this they attached the brush to a giant robotic arm which then guided the hand of the novice. The hand also reflected a red circle at the canvas to help anticipation. wat?

After the presentations of the Japanese professors and students it was our turn. The presentation went well, and after hearing a few comments it seemed that we were on the right tracks. After all the presenting we had a break and time to prepare for the party.

Soon after arriving at the university's canteen for the party, I noticed the mood was starting to be quite emancipated. We had all kinds of Japanese foods and drinks - including sushi of course. After the toast we gave the Japanese our gifts from finland and it was soon clear that the biggest bomb was definitely the Turkish Peppers. The peppers brought great pain and great fun at the same time for the Japanese. After a few beers and days together the Japanese turned out to be quite the conversationalists. Sorry to say the party ended our time together, which was too short as always. Luckily Heikki had the chance to visit a local ballroom dancing -student club and became the celebrated king for one night.

On Thursday we left to Nagoya and on Friday we visited Trident College of Information Technology, where they teach game design, programming, 3D, graphics and web-design. We presented our Imagine Cup entries and they presented theirs. The good people at the Trident seemed quite interested about a possible future collaboration.

Now playing Cherry Blossom Girl from Air as we soon arrive at Tokyo.

Story: Jani Palovuori

The delegation:
TAMK personnel
Perttu Heino, Ari Närhi
Project lead
Teemu Haila
Project group
Heikki Leppänen Jura Paatola Matti Särkikoski Tuomas Rinne Jani Palovuori Kaisa Kukkonen Nelli Telkkinen Jussi Salonen

Read the previous story about the project (School of Art and Media blog)

Score Teams Successfull in Imagine Cup

Two teams from Game Development Club Score have advanced to the second round of Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition! Thousands of competition entries were submitted from all around the globe to the competition, but only 150 teams continued to fight for the grand prize. Teams have now two months time to finish and polish their games before the second deadline in May. We wish great success for the Score teams and hope to see them in the finals in Egypt in July!

Did you know...

Score is a game development club founded in 2007 by interactive media students at TAMK School of Art and Media. Their goal is to promote Finnish game industry and helping students who hope to build career in games but don't know how. There are currently around 65 members in the club, mostly students from Tampere region. Score has also involved in organizing workshops with subjects like work flow in teams and agile development.

Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition is an annual global event in which competitors are required to create innovative prototypes. This year's theme is to promote the eight UN Millennium Development Goals, create potential solutions that address the toughest problems facing our world today.

There are many contest categories to choose between, robotics and algorithms for example. The Score teams are battling in game development category. The grand prize is 25 000 US$ divided between the members of the team, in addition to various development kits.

The successful games:
Unity
Villa Penguila

Ruffian Games Gareth Noyse comments the games

Imagine Cup
Imagine Cup Game Development competition
Score
UN Millennium Development Goals

You can try out these + other games and meet Score members in Demola during our Tampere Art Factory festival May 15-16.
Tampere Art Factory
Demola

Picture: Screenshot from Unity

Read about other activities of the School of Art and Media to promote the Millennium Development Goals

Game Development Club Score's New Website

Score, the game development club operating under TAMK's student union and from Finlayson, has recently published their new website. The visual design has been revised and the content has been updated. The site also states that there will be more sections in the near future. The site is run with the help of WordPress, the free, open-source content management system.

Juho Hartikainen
Score President

View the site
Earlier stories about Score in the School of Art and Media Blog