GAME – Page 162 – The department of Game Design at Uppsala University, campus Gotland

2011/10/31 - Mon2011/10/31 - Mon - Comments Off
Publicity

IndieGames.com: Secrets of Grindea

Three of our students – Fred Ström, Teddy Sjöström and Vilya Svensson – earned some publicity (and a lot of praise) from their spare time project Secrets of Grindea. It got picked up last week from their devlog over at tigsource. Both IndieGames.com and TwoFedoras.com wrote about them. Here’s a quote from IndieGames:

Oh, hello there! What’s this? Old-school RPG aesthetics? Zelda-esque gameplay? A deeply complex character customization system with no level caps? Support for four player co-operative play? Say no more. Where do I sign up? Secrets of Grindea is an upcoming action-RPG with big promises, lush pixel art, an eye for detail and, all things taken into consideration, a surprisingly simple premise: became a famed Collector and acquire the most precious ‘rares’ in the kingdom.

It looks like Secrets of Grindea is being helmed by a three-man team consisting of Fred Strom, Teddy Sjostrom and Vilya Svensson, all of whom were once previously involved in Trashtalk, a Swedish development studio located in Gotland.

So Fred, Teddy and Vilya – keep up the good work!

IndieGames.com: Early Gameplay Footage of Secrets of Grindea
TwoFedoras.com: Secrets of Grindea, more like secrets of unlocking my heart
Devlog
YouTube: Secrets of Grindea – Sight Seeing in Startington

2011/10/14 - Fri2011/10/16 - Sun - 1 Comment
Guest Lectures

Masaki Hayashi: Text-To-Vision and TVML

T2V is a technology that converts text to vision. It enables a user to create computer animation by simply typing in a script on a PC. We developed a PC application named “T2V Player” that interprets a user’s script to produce animation in real-time by using real-time computer graphics (CG), synthesized voices and other techniques.

In his presentation, Masaki will first explain the basic concept of T2V and TVML and show some demonstrations with T2V Player actually in working and introduce available functions of T2V Player. Then, he will introduce number of activities so far and related developments. Lastly he will discuss the future prospect and research theme examples based on this technology.

Masaki Hayashi received his B.S., M.S. and Dr. Eng. in electronics engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1980, 1983 and 1999 respectively. He has engaged in research on CG, image-processing, image compositing systems and virtual studios. He is currently involved in research on automatic TV program generation using scripting language TVML.

Masaki Hayashi on the web.

Time: Monday, Oktober 17th, 10:00 – 12:00
Location: B51

This workshop is open (and strongly recommended) to all GAME programming students!

2011/10/10 - Mon2011/10/29 - Sat - Comments Off
Guest Lectures
human rights

Jonas Thente: Can Gaming Increase the Awareness of Human Rights?

This lecture is part of the Serious Games for Human Rights. It is open to the public!

As digital games are becoming one of the major platforms for storytelling and actual interaction between players from all over the global community, games producers are struggling to answer the call for sophisticated and borderless narrative. Common denomitators of being human comes to play.

Jonas Thente is a literary editor and critic at Scandinavias largest morning daily Dagens Nyheter. He is also the editor of the papers games section and a doctoral student at the department of literature, University of Lund.

Time: Friday, Oktober 14th, 14:30
Location: E22

The rest of the programme:
13.00 Lecture by Daniel Nord
“Why international law matters in creating more challenging games”
14.30 Lecture by Jonas Thente
“Can Gaming Increase the Awareness of Human Rights?”
16.00 Panel debate with the speakers, Anne Duse from Gotland University GAME and game designer Ernest Adams.

2011/10/06 - Thu2013/08/23 - Fri - 1 Comment
Blog
outreach

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!