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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Tampere Art Factory kicked off

From left Sabrina Seidl, International Week project manager and
registering Lenno Veerhoog, Utrecht School of Arts
and Zsofia Ruttkay, Moholy-Nagy University
of Art and Design Budapest

The fourth edition of Tampere Art Factory kicked off yesterday with the International Week. TAF is a demonstration of the skills of TAMK art and media students. The International Week hosts 50 guests from South Korea to USA and Kanada and all over Europe.

The first of the ten International Week Workshops started yesterday morning, the series of six seminars will kick off today. The climax of the week will be the open day and opening of the exhibitions on Friday.

The week offers TAMK members and friends a good chance to be familiar with Finlayson degree programmes and many TAMK partner universities and institutions. Below please find a collection of events which wish you warmly welcome:

Seminars at Spede, Finlayson Campus 2nd floor

• Tue, Wed and Thu afternoons 1 to 4 PM Awesome Art&Media seminars 1 to 3. Topical talks about current art and media issues and partner university introductions
• Wed 9 to 12 AM Triple Helix - Innovation and Academic/Public/Private cooperation
• Thu 9 to 12 AM Higher education promoting social development
• Fri 9:30 to 12 AM Highway to Entrepreneurship - People and Stories Behind the Statistics (at café, 2nd floor)

Films, animations, games and web projects:

• Thu 4 to 6 PM Kino TAMK, Café
• Fri 10 AM to 5 PM Demos, games, animations, Donner and Café
• Fri 12 AM to 5 PM 12-17 Cinema screenings, Teatteri and Kuvaopetusluokka

Exhibitions:
P.S. a pic would be nice
Graduating Exhibition of fine art students of Tampere University of Applied Sciences
April 16 - May 3  Mältinranta Artcenter (Kuninkaankatu 2)
April 16 - May 15 TR1 Kunsthalle (Väinö Linnan aukio 13)

• April 7 - 17 Soft Values, installation, Ikuinen Gallery
• April 8 - May 15 Graduation exhibition of TAMK Specialization Studies on Photography students Tessa Ojala and Annu Salminen
• April 12 -15 The outputs of socialist advertising in Soviet Estonia by Evelin Urm (Tartu, Estonia)
• April 16 - May 15 Polyamoria, Gallery Nottbeck featuring works by students from Canada, South Korea and TAMK students

More information following the links:
International Week guest organisations and the workshops
International Week Seminars Tue-Thu
TAF seminar Highway to Entrepreneurship
TAF home

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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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's Battle Royale

 So far we've had the students of IMP (international/interactive media program), TIKO (computer science), VISU (visual design) and VUORSU (interactive media) take action in this massive battle of TAMK's domination.

Yes, I'm talking about the up-coming, free Megazone game night!

I have reserved a 50-minute Megazone session for 26th of April, 2010. The game starts at 6pm sharp, but it is required for everyone to be there no later than 5.45pm! There's space for 27, but only 17 have confirmed their spot. That means we're still looking for 10 more! So... Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk? If yes, just show up to Megazone at 5.30pm, and one of the spots might be yours!

Now why would I care to organize such an event?

Well, it's a lot of fun! What better way to network with the fellow students of other study programs than a friendly game of laser tag? When I asked each one attending the event to give their opinions and thoughts, many responded with a desire to bring back remote childhood memories. Some also thought that students engaging in such activites become more laid back and open, making everyone see them from a completely different perspective. And last but not least, these games encourage teamwork, mutual development and competition all at once.

All-in-all a great activity for a great bunch of students!

See you there! :)

Story: Anna Tikkanen
The author is  Degree Programme in Media student

More stories about IMP activities 

Photos: Megazone
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TiTeLAN LANparty @ Demola 9.-11.4.2010

Demola was also venue of Global Game Jam in January

Our own LANparty is here again! This time the party will be held in new premises in Demola, Finlayson and is on the whole weekend!

TiTeLAN is organized by Computer Systems Engineering students twice a year. Usually we have had around 70 visitors but this year since we got new premises the amount may rise close to 100 visitors. The event is absolutely FREE of charge and we welcome all TAMK students as well as our exchange students. Doors will open on Friday around 6pm and the event will be finished on Sunday afternoon.

To find out what is LAN party go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAN_party

The games which are usually the most popular in TiTeLAN are:
-BattleField: Bad Company 2
-Heroes of Newerth
-Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
-WarCraft3: TFT
-WarCraft3: DoTA
-StarCraft
-Left 4 Dead 1 & 2
-Counter-Strike: Source
-Day of Defeat: Source
-Counter-Strike 1.6

In TiTeLAN we will arrange tournaments in Starcraft (1vs1) and Heroes of Newerth (3vs3). If you are interest on these check the boxes while you choose your place.

More information can be found from http://titelan.net/index.php?site_id=5 or by e-mail markkinointi@titelan.net

Sign up is open already so hurry up and reserve your place! Go to www.titelan.net.

TiTeLAN is a LAN party organised by the students of TAMK Computer Systems Engineering Programme.