10 weeks of Project Runway brutal production starts today.
We’ve got 15 first year teams, 12 in the second year. The third year is mostly doing thesis work, so we’re expecting 2 games and a massive art gallery. The fourth year is still shrouded in myth and mystery.
The countdown has started; it’s time to earn that spot in front of the jury and on the showfloor.
Houston; we have t-shirt
Well. We’ve always had t-shirts, but this design is new. Code-literate people would read these as “Gotland University – Game Design AND Programming OR Graphics” – mirroring the structure of our educations (game design major, art or code minor).
… programmers will then likely realize how silly it is to do Boolean comparison when clearly we’re aiming for something like a bitwise assignment. 🙂
The shirts are for sale in the university reception (plastic only people!). GAME students can sign up here to allow us to restock.
Gamex 2011
We’ve just returned from this years Gamex. We invested in a large booth and exhibited 60 sqm of student projects – Carnage, Clockwork, Fields of Glory, Robotorusama, VeloCity, Victorious Skies and Walkabout – allowing us to meet and talk to thousands of people interrested in game development- and design.
It was great to see how well represented Gotland was; with Three Gates showing off Aethereus and Zeal Studios exhibiting together with Paradox, 6% of Swedens largest game tradeshow was from our island. 🙂
Swedish Game Conference
We went to Swedish Game Conference this week, to talk about how Swedish game educations and the Swedish game industry can improve their use of each other. There were some interesting points made, and some very cool data shared – and we will surely spend a lot more time analyzing it all when we get back to the island.
One of the problems discussed during these days was that only 1 out of 4 game development graduates (eg. those who actually complete their studies) end up working in the Swedish game industry.
… that seems pretty good actually?
We must realize that the Swedish game industry is a super small subset of the places you might want to go after studying game development. Many of our students find work abroad. We know that we have alumni working in Germany, England, New Zealand, the US, Iceland and Norway! Our students commonly start their own business and others find work in one of the many successful independent studios not counted in the above stats; Frictional Games and Mojang are two examples you might’ve heard off…
The real problem I see in this data is the huge drop-off between students being accepted and students completing their studies. I can see several causes of those stats, but that’s a discussion for another post; we have to catch the ferry back to Gotland now. I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures from the past two days!
