More GAME students on the Switch!

Defunct was originally developed as a student project back in 2014 and has been available on Steam since 2016.

Today this team of former students are joining Niklas Hallin and his “Yono and the Celestial Elephants” with a release on the Nintendo Switch!

Well played and congrats Robert Graff, Jonatan Keil, David Forssell, Mikael Karlsson, Simon Öqvist, Petter Vernersson, Anders Hedström!

Pump the Frog at Tokyo Game Show!

The Tokyo Game Show is one of the worlds largest game exhibitions – seeing nearly 300 000 visitors each year. Pump The Frog – a 2017 student project from Gotland – was there last week and was ranked among  the Top 6 Indie Games of Tokyo Game Show 2018!

The team spent their summer participating in (and winning!) a “Sense of Wonder” – a competition hosted by TGS for game developers to win a free both in the indie area.

Now that the team is back on Gotland, here are some of their take-aways:

  • The people we met mostly don’t speak english, though sometimes they can understand it. If given the choice, they prefered our broken Japanese over their limited English. We recommend you learn some basic Japanese and make sure all your materials are available in both English and Japanese!
  • Japanese people seem shy, and even more so because you are a gaijin. You have to invite them to the booth, they won’t approach on their own. To get them to play; wait until they show the slightest bit of interest, then invite them.
  • The venues in Japan all had aggressive air conditioning. It’s cold and your throat dries out quickly. Luckily there are vending machines everywhere with water, tea and soft drinks.

The Pioneers 2018: celebrating the schools that do things differently

“Creative education is vital. But creative education is, in places, broken.”, WeTransfer says. In order to support new, better, types of programs they teamed up with Lecture in Progress and developed The Pioneers listhighlighting schools around the world who deserve credit for doing things differently. They recently visited us on the island and spoke with our Director of Studies, Jakob Berglund-Rogert which led to this great write-up on how we approach game design at Campus Gotland!

The Pioneers 2018 Uppsala University Department of Game Design, Sweden

“A lot of departments look at game design from a media studies or from a computer science perspective, but we have an actual subject that is called games design,” Jakob explains. As part of the university’s faculty of arts, students sit alongside those from gender research and philosophy, narratologists and pedagogists, giving designers and developers the opportunity to work in areas such as medicine and psychology. The university also hosts a summer school in serious games where they teach the likes of biologists and physicists – “People with skills that can actually save the world,” Jakob says. […]

So if games themselves can serve as teaching tools, how do you teach aspiring game designers to do this effectively? For Jakob, one of the most important things students need to be equipped with is “some kind of ethical backbone.

“Since you’re making a mass product, you have a responsibility toward the world that you are communicating with. If you’re going to disrupt order you need to have thought about it long and hard. Game design is such a craft that a lot of students focus on the creation, but sometimes we forget to reflect on why we’re making something.” […] So right from the outset, students are taught to design with intent

[emphasis added]

Click through to read the rest of the interview with Jakob.