The department of Game Design at Uppsala University, campus Gotland
Category: Blog
This is the highly informal blog of the GAME-department. We use it mostly to document the things we do outside of running one of the worlds strongest game educations. For information about our education, programs and courses, check the official site at Uppsala University.
Posted on - Comments Off on Guest Lecture: Kali Fontecchio, on Character Design CategoriesBlog, Guest Lectures
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!
Posted on - Comments Off on GamezFestival 6.0 – “Post Mortem” CategoriesBlog Tagsoutreach
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 bullyconvince 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:
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!
Posted on - Comments Off on Master Programme in Game Design CategoriesBlog
Ever considered advanced studies? We now have an honest-to-god Masters programme in game design on Campus Gotland! It’s 2 years and meets the entry requirements for PhD studies in human-computer interaction and neighboring subjects, both in Sweden and internationally.
The Master Programme in Game Design provides you with the knowledge and skills required for advanced work in the game industry as well preparing you for continuing an academic career in the area of game design.
To be eligible you need a bachelor’s degree with a field of study specializing in games or gaming (e.g. game design, game development, game programming, computer and systems science, information technology). Knowledge of English corresponding to English 6 is also required (a Swedish bachelor’s degree meets the requirement for English).
The programme leads to a Master of Arts degree (Master of Arts, 120 credits) with game design as the main field of studies.
