GAME hearts the Netherlands


A chunk of the GAME department just came back from a week long tour through Utrecht and Lee- uwarden, where we visited game developers, educations and their surrounding support systems. We met with staff from Game and Media Technology at Utrecht University, students and staff from Communication and Multimedia Design at NHL. We visited the GameShip multimedia studio and spoke to local indie developers such as Grendel Games, Infinity Lane and Triangle Studios.

We’ve run into some of these at conferences all over the world, but now finally had an opportunity to visit them in the Netherlands to see how they do their stuff. It’s been an intense week, made so much better by the amazing hospitality of NHL. They went out of their way to take care of us during our stay in Leeuwarden; making sure we got to play with some very unique tech and meet a lot of equally inspiring people.

Thank’s to everyone who took time out of their days to meet with us!

… our island is very nice during the summer months. *hint hint*

Speakers and Jury (GGC 2012)

A huge chunk of the GAME department is traveling to Leeuwarden (Netherlands) tomorrow, to hang out with our friends at NHL Hogeschool for a week. Before leaving (which we do in… you know. five hours?) we wanted to publish the list of confirmed speakers and jury members.

With apologizes for the passive-agressive formatting, lack of titles, contexts or even logos. But hey; names and companies. More t/k. 😀

Speakers

Jury

Partners

Presentation at Fryshuset

Adam Mayes and I went to Stockholm last week to present for the Game Development students at Fryshuset. We’d been ask to talk on the topic “Setting up an Indie Studio in 2015”.

We shared the day on stage with Microsoft, DICE and several game educations from across Sweden. We felt that it went very well, the audience was genuinely interested and we had such a good time on stage that we ran over. A lot. 😛


Anyway – we wanted to share the story with you but just as we were about to do this writeup a letter arrived. It’s from a student who was in the audience that day.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: About Fryshuset gymnasium lecture
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:02:16 +0200
From: *REMOVED*
To: Adam Mayes

I just wanted to mail you saying thank you for showing up at my school and having a lecture about indie-game development.

Doing so has really helped me deciding towards what högskola I want to attend to in a years time when I graduate. You could really see what kind of serious school HGO is as you stood there talking. It is too bad you did not get more time as I could have sat there and listened all day while the other schools who were there just held presentations that were plain boring and seemed to have been scraped together ten minutes before they started. They were not interested in what they were talking about and didnt show any passion, it also felt like they were just making bad attempts at trashtalking other schools instead of showing what their’s had to offer.

But for you, you really stuck to the subject and gave great tips about how to start up our own companies and you were the only ones with some serious content that was helpfull. The other schools stood there talking about basic stuff about starting indie-game companies that we can figure out ourselfs as they tried to cover up that, frankly, they do not know how to do it.

Once again, thank you Adam and your friend whose name I do not know (maybe you can forward this to him?) for coming to Fryshusets Gymnasium.
I hope I will be seeing you again in the near future, but then I hope it will be in your school.

-------- EOM --------

Being Swedish and thus genetically opposed to boasting, we’ll just leave this here… and allow you to soak in the greatness of Tag Team Terror. 🙂

Our slides are available through Google Docs.

The first concept pitch

A week has gone by and it’s time for the first year students to pitch their arcade concepts to the department staff.

Stand your ground!

Koala Corps. storyboard
Koala Corps. storyboard

Marcus Ingvarsson – the primary instructor of the first year students – claims these people (his people) will kick the teeth out of every other year this education ever saw.

Not that he’s partial or anything. 🙂