The department of Game Design at Uppsala University, campus Gotland
The summer holidays has just begun and many students return to the mainland for some well deserved rest and relaxation after the trials of Gotland Game Awards. Sundsvalls Tidning did a piece on local girl Tove as she got back from her first year at GAME – follow the link to read about her experiences.
What do you get if you gather all political parties, all lobbyists, non-governmental organizations and more than 350 journalists and television crews in one place? You get Almedalsveckan (The Almedalen Week) – Sweden’s annual rock festival for politics – right here in Visby. 😀
With 2010 being an election year the city will be absolutely packed for next week – there’s already more than 1041 events on the program, one of which happens to be GAME and our drop-in exhibit of the Best Of Gotland Game Awards.
Our Motion Capture studio will be open for the public 16:00 – 20:00, Monday to Friday. We’ll be showing Abzolium, Chubby Chase Race, Colorless, Fumbies, Gods of Steel, Midnight, Pawns, Sage & Walkabout. There will also be a drop-in cinema showing computer generated animations and movies.
The exhibit will be manned by our students so whether you’re interested in studying here or just want to take a break and play some games or watch some movies – you’re very welcome.
Drop in for games, movies and some tasty popcorns! 16:00–20:00, Mon 5th – Fri 9th July
DreamHack – with it’s more than 12 000 participants – is the worlds largest computer festival, held right here in Sweden twice a year. DH Summer 2010 is underway as we speak, and as always we have a bunch of students displaying their work and representing our education at the DreamHack Expo. Make sure to drop by, try our games and hang out if you’re at the event.
And if you’re not (for whatever reason…) in Jönköping right now – don’t fret! Swedish Television is broadcasting live from DreamHack and the stream is available online! Daniel Hagström – one of our first year programmers was interviewed yesterday and did a great job! Check it out for a glimpse of what we do and were this education can take you.
Starts at 00:52:20. The interview is interrupted for a segment about game music, and continues at 01:24:00.
Unfortunately no subtitles for our international visitors. 🙁
Want more DreamHack goodness? Check out their Flickr stream and YouTube channel!
The 2010 edition of the Swedish Game Awards is over. The winners were announced at the Grande Finale on the 12th of June, and the prestigious Game of the Year went to GAME students!
Dwarfs is a third year project, an arcade strategy game for PC and Xbox360 putting you in charge of helping a computer controlled tribe of Dwarfs to excavate randomly generated mountains. You must help them gather juicy minerals and valuable gold, all the while protecting your Town Hall from harm. The SGA Jury motivation read: “Charming graphics, well thought out and fun. An overall solution that really works with an excellent tutorial that introduces a fun, tactic and strategic gameplay.” .
GAME has never had a big presence at SGA, largely due to scheduling conflicts. Our students are smack in the middle of production when SGA requests final submissions. But every now and again student teams have an early playable ready in time and enters the national competition. Thus Dwarfs can proudly join Promqueen (2005), Sumo (2006) and Vertigo (2009) in the list of GAME productions recognized at the Swedish Game Awards thus far.
Well done everyone!
PS. It might be worth noting that the Game of the Year-award came hot on the heels of the team’s well deserved Pwnage Award at Gotland Game Awards less than a week ago. 🙂