Olle Wästberg, Director for The Swedish Institute

Olle Wästberg (photo: bisonblog)
Olle Wästberg is a former member of the parliament and former state secretary for finance and budget. He has been CEO of several companies in the information sector and editor-in-chief for the newspaper Expressen. Olle Wästberg was Consul General of Sweden in New York 1999-2004, and is currently serving as Director-General of The Swedish Institute

Olle will be kicking off our brand new course “Human Rights and Diversity in Serious Games“!

Throughout this course – every friday, weeks 35 to 44 – we will invite some amazingly experienced and influential men and women, to discuss human rights and diversity in the context of modern interactive and ever more social technology. All lectures are free and open to the public!

Time: Friday, August 28, 13:00 – 15:00
Location: HGO, lecture hall E31

Want to take the course? The application date has been extended to 18th of September.

Pure Data – A Teacher-Teaching-Teachers Workshop


It might be summer and all the students are long gone; perhaps at the beach barbecuing and enjoying the so famously supreme weather of this island. But we the staffever the diligent and hard working people that we are – obviously stay on board to deal with the summer courses and preparing the autumn semester.

This week we had another superb reason to stay indoors, as Iwona had invited Marco Donnarumma to do a two-day Pure Data workshop with us. Pure Data (Pd) is a language for collaborative real-time graphical programming, with a special focus on hardware interactions and audio / video processing.

Pd is free, platform independent and fundamentally different from anything we’ve ever worked with before; and that includes Blender Gamekit (graphical programing ni Python) and Kismet (graphical UnrealScript). It’s a real-time language, which means that your program is running while you’re building it! And the syntax – the graphical representation of the language – is also your GUI.

Objects like “number”, “dsp”, “slider”, “colorspace”, “toggle” and “checkbox” are both instances used in the logic, and actual GUI-components that you can manipulate! The editor therefore has two modes: one for programming and one where you manipulate your program’s settings and inputs. But everything is running all the time, so the modes are mostly a convenience.

Platform independence was not a joke either; we were five Apple machines, two Ubuntu installs and a mix of Windows XP, Vista and 7 attending the workshop. It took 10 minutes for us all to install and have hardware accelerated rendering (OpenGL), high-precision audio and low-level access to webcams, microphones, network and practically any kind of input you could imagine.

Pd is an incredibly powerful tool, for the right set of problems. Though I’m not an artist like these people it has been extremely interesting and great fun to learn, and the experience left me marginally less envious of my summer-celebrating students. 😀

Penalty of Heroes

Penalty of Heroes is an old school side scrolling hack ’n slash game much like Golden Axe mixed with Secret of Mana. It takes advantage of the power of the Xbox 360 in order to show off a mix between 2D and 3D, using modern shaders and effects.

Penalty of Heroes takes place in the world of Nimo where you control four young warriors, either by yourself in single player mode or with the help from up to three of your friends in co-op mode. Fight your way through ten levels containing hordes of enemies, big bosses and an engaging narrative. You will have unique characters with different magics and weapons, as well as a customizable powerup system to aid you on the journey to find out the price of becoming a hero.

Penalty of Heroes won “Best Exhibition” at the Gotland Game Awards 2009.

Team:
Håkan Mattsson, Nicklas Johansson, Andreas Malmberg, Johan Rundkvist, Jens Eggert, Kristofer Berglin, Jakob Tanentsapf, Johan Norberg, Jona Marklund, Tobias Källkvist
Website: http://www.penaltyofheroes.com/

Ghost Written

Ghost Written is an educational adventure- & role playing game where the main focus lies in helping swedish children ages of 12-15, improve their English. To restore balance to the dimensions a lone boy ventures into the unknown. By his side he has a curious little creature to aid him, hoping that in return, the boy will be able to grant it its own wishes to come true. The World of Ghost Written is rich in detail, colour and imagination. Populated by characters with their own wishes, pasts and futures for the player to become part of.

Ghost Written was awarded Best Presentation, Best Serious Game and the Almedalen Library Award at Gotland Game Awards 2009.

Team:
Pernilla Sparrhult, Emma Ströberg, Richard Jakch, Christoffer Schedin, Jenny Nordenborg, Lotta Tjernström, Niklas Åhs, Anna Holmgren, Magdalena Lepp (external)