Nordic Game 2014

...Was the best! Is that enough for you? No? Ok.

It was absolutely thrilling to hear that we would get to attend The NordicGame Conference this year. I knew there was a lot of new and interesting stuff to be seen, but it was even better than I expected.

We took the plane from Helsinki Vantaa to Copenhagen Kastrup and from there we continued by train across the puddle to Malmö, Sweden. Even though we missed the first day of lectures and workshops, we still were in time for the ”Indie Game Night”- party. 

The whole idea of the party was networking and voting for this years Nordic Indie Sensation! The selected nominees had booths where you could test the actual games and chat with the developers. The games seen in the party were: Among the Sleep, Chronology, Else(Heart.Break()), Future Unfolding, Goat Simulator,Orbit, Savant – Ascent andShiftlings. 

During the next two days there were spectacular speakers, but I'm only going to mention a few of my favourites here. 

There was many interesting tech lectures, but two of them were especially interesting from the artist and designer point of view. Those were the ”Magic of Unreal Engine 4” and ”Snowdrop - A smarter engine for the next generation” both are amazingly user friendly engines for designers and they meet the requirements of next gen games. Sjoerd ”Hourences” De Jong talked about Unreal 4 and how they have used it in their new project ”Solus”. He showed the audience the demo and broke it into pieces to demonstrate how much you can do in Unreal 4 without writing a single line of code.

Massimo Guarini's ”LOVE ME, BABY - Quest for Emotional Design” lecture had really interesting

points about communicating feelings and using them as part of the game design. It's amazing how much you can communicate without using any words and how much people, who aren't even gamers, can understand of it if it's done right. In my opinion this lecture offered a great new perspective for game designers and how you shouldn't explain everything to the player. Let them feel it instead!

Check out the trailer!

 Nordic Game Gala Night and Dinner was very interesting and great fun. The award ceremony was interesting to see and I think that at least some of the awards went to the right people! Here you can see the winning nominees:

Best Nordic Game - “Resogun”, developed by Housemarque

Best Nordic Children’s Game - “My Little Work Garage”, developed by Filimundus

Best Nordic Handheld Game - ”Year Walk” developed by Simogo

Best Artistic Achievement - Themusic puzzle game “140”, developed by Jeppe Carlsen

Best Nordic Innovation Award - ”Device 6” developed by Simogo

Nordic Indie Sensation Award -“Among the Sleep”, developed by Krillbite

 And Lastly! Here is the crown jewel of the conference. My absolute favourite ”Killing the Games Industry” by Ste Curran. He reminded us what's it all about.

Definitely worth the whole 52:46 minutes!