Guest Lecture: Kali Fontecchio, on Character Design

Kali Fontecchio has designed characters and concept art for Emmy award winning Micky Mouse shorts, Lego Movie 2, SpongeBob as well as color designing for Rick and Morty.

She’ll talk about character design, concept art and the importance of color from the perspective of her career to date.

Throughout, she’ll use examples of her work to illustrate these themes, take questions and will end the afternoon with a live demonstration.

When and where: E22, Wednesday 21 Nov, 13:00-16:00
For whom: Open to the public! Primarily useful for artists, and designers that lean towards art – but anyone with an interest in visual design!

GamezFestival 6.0 – “Post Mortem”

gameZfestival has been a 6 year event looking at the culture of game, play and gamedesign in Zürich, Switzerland. We (Adam and Ulf) met Tabea Iseli – indie developer and one of the event producers – at the Nordic Game Conference earlier this year, and were fortunate enough to bully convince her to extend us an invite to speak at the very last edition!

The event was hosted by the Department of Design at Zurich University of the Arts, which made us even more excited – making this an opportunity to meet educators that work very similar to us. Both our departments focus on core design, situated through a lot of practice. Students graduate with proper theoretical foundations and a solid portfolio of finished games. 

Arriving a day early, and even though we had turned up very late in the day, their undergraduates were impressive and patient in equal measure. They dropped work they were doing to show us their games; talk knowledgeably about them, and solicit feedback! Their masters students were doing fascinating research work – ranging from designing games to help young carers deal with the frustrations of caring for an older relative, to games for general depression, to examining enemy stereotypes to even building education on the principles of old record stores.

And, to top it off, all the research they do in the department is project, and product, based – creating designed, intentioned, innovative artifacts, and details on the design processes that created them. They are definetly ahead of us when it comes to research (our master has just opened up for the first class of applicants!) so the plan now is to return the favor and invite the Zurich Department of Design to the island for Gotland Game Conference 2019, and keep picking their brains. 🙂

As for the festival and our talk: with what we had seen from the students and faculty we knew we had to kick our presentation up a notch or three, so we went back to our rooms to rethink- and redesign. We ended up talking about building narratives through systems, and having story points that were playable. Our presentation was fairly dismissive of emergent narratives, which we had to eat a few hours later when we saw Tarn Adams talk about all the emergent narrative stuff in Dwarf Fortress. (one of the best talks we’ve seen, too!)

Tarn Adams at gameZfestival 6.0 in Zürich

Everyone was really worth listening to, so of course we live tweeted as much as we could! You can find the links after the break:

Continue reading “GamezFestival 6.0 – “Post Mortem””

Symbio @ Creative Gaming Award 2018

Symbio brought home the the Audience Award from PLAY18 - Creative Gaming Festival in Hamburg.

Symbio just returned from Hamburg and the PLAY18 Creative Gaming Award 2018. They brought home both the “Most Innovative Newcomer Award” and “the Audience Award“!

Symbio brought home the the Audience Award from PLAY18 - Creative Gaming Festival in Hamburg.
Symbio brought home the the Most Creative Newcommer from PLAY18 - Creative Gaming Festival in Hamburg.
Symbio brought home the the Most Creative Newcommer from PLAY18 - Creative Gaming Festival in Hamburg.

See all the other nominees and winners on the PLAY18 website. If you’re curious to try Symbio you only need to get yourself to Gotland – the game is on exhibition at the Almedalen Library until June!

Dataspel ska hjälpa personer med autism att få arbete

Ett dataspel, som ska kunna hjälpa personer som har svårt att få jobb för att de har funktionsvariationer i autismspektrat, håller på att utvecklas av studenter vid Uppsala universitet.

Tanken är att spelet ska få arbetsgivare och chefer att förstå bättre och att personer i autismspektrat ska känna igen sig, och få hjälp att förklara hur de har det. 

Sveriges Radio 2018-11-01

The course they are talking about is Product Development for Games, a part of our international Bachelor Programme in Game Design and Project Management. Are you interested in using game design to save the world? Apply to the program via universityadmissions.se! The international application deadline is 15th of January, while Swedish applicants have until April 15th.