Stone´s War

Process of making the movie Stone´s War. Development, including writing, financing and casting. Production, including shooting the film, production difficulties and solutions.

Post production, including editing with Michael J. Duthie at Paramount Pictures. Current process of making the CGI in Lithuania and music score by Joel Goldsmith.

Iron Sky - Nazis! On the Moon!

In 1945 the Nazis went to the Moon. In 2018 they are coming back. The creators of Iron Sky show up to give an update on where the most awesome Finnish film production is at it's current state, how the collaborative community has helped so far, and what's next with this juggernaut of a film!

Iron Sky - Workflow of the production

The core CGI team of Iron Sky introduce themselves and talk about how they are planning to manage the workflow of this massive production.

Improving the end user experience: Playtesting mobile games

As the mobile games industry is maturing robust methods and processes are needed for ensuring a good player experience. Earlier, the mobile games have often been small projects that have aimed to produce so called "snack games" that can entertain a player when they have nothing else to do. Currently, it is not uncommon to see mobile game projects that implement games with budgets ranging up from one million euros. These games aim not only to fill the empty moments in the players' lives, but also to lure them to play mobile games when they could have other activities to do. To achieve this, a polished and engaging player experience is needed. This presentation will give practical examples of what kind of playtesting is done at Nokia. We will show case a viral mobile game that is also tested in Assembly this year. Many of the learnings can also be applied for non-mobile games as well.

Making of Crayon Physics Deluxe or How I Got Lucky and Won the IGF

What it takes to create an innovative game all by yourself? What's the secret recipe for winning at the Independent Games Festival? What's the cheapest place to eat in Helsinki and why should you care? And why isn't the game out yet? All these questions and more will be answered in the MAKING OF CRAYON PHYSICS DELUXE OR HOW I GOT LUCKY AND WON THE IGF...

Gaming: How AMD is changing how Gamers "Game"

The gaming scene is changing, come see how AMD is enabling gamers to blur the lines between what is real and what is rendered.

Playing with Robots both real and virtual

Do you still vacuum your house? Wouldn't you rather spend your time doing fun stuff? Robots can already vacuum your home and have similar costs to normal vacuum cleaners. There are lots more things robots can do for us - remember not all robots have wheels!

This session will introduce Microsoft's robotics technology which is delivered using XNA gaming technology and Internet web service technologies. With some key additional technologies writing robot applications is a lot easier than it sounds.

Using the Visual Simulation Environment you will learn how to build your own simulated world in which to test your robotic ideas with a variety of robots, maybe linking the simulation directly to real world web services and mash-ups. Explore just how to make that robot vacuum the floor and get you a beer from the fridge :-)

The demoscene explained, and more!

Always been a bit curious about this demoscene thing but never knew what to do about it? Maybe wondering what drives the artists behind some of the creative works you've witnessed at the Assembly bigscreen year after year - or how they did it? Here's your chance to ask everything you ever wanted to know about the demoscene - and get the answers. A panel of four demosceners (and one moderator) will discuss the demoscene, how they got into it, their works, answer your questions, and much much more. And, if you're afraid to ask in public, how about asking your question already now? Just send it to this address: demoscene.explained@gmail.com , and we will take it into account. Be sure to show up to get the answer!

Alternative Party presents: Avant-Garde Video Art meets Demoscene and Steampunk

The presentation highlights the exciting relations between demoscene and Finnish contemporary avant-garde video art. Artist and researcher Kari Yli-Annala presents works by two structuralists of Finnish video art, Pekka Sassi and Juha van Ingen. Visual artist and demoscene-activist Pilvari Pirtola screens and talks about his works. In addition, Mr. Setok and Mr. Ravel will present this year's Alternative Party's electro-futuristic steampunk dimensions including Charles Babbage and the Victorian age. Welcome to the dawn of computing! Welcome to the Demoscene area!

Demo Programming for Beginners

Despite having a reputation of being hard, writing demos is in reality not difficult at all. There are some pitfalls though, and building a complete demo from scratch can be a daunting task for a first-timer. This seminar concentrates on the basics of building a working demo framework that can be used as a base for any kind of demo project, with emphasis on simplicity, extensibility and easiness for the programmer to rapidly develop entire demos. Topics covered, among others are: Resource loading and handling, effects and timeline management, demo synchronization with music and effect parameter tweaking.

Programming on Cell tutorial, top to bottom

This tutorial will give an introduction to programming the Cell Broadband Engine and explain different programming techniques, starting with general purpose multi-user capable applications on Linux and ending with writing a new operating system. While most of the information should be hardware independent, there will be a focus on IBM QS2x blade servers and Sony PlayStation 3(R) systems.

It is assumed that the participants have basic knowledge about programming scalar and vector code in C and assembler, so that the tutorial can concentrate on interactions of the program with the operating system, hypervisor and hardware.

Harnessing the power of XGSE

As the democompo of Assembly Summer 2007 showed, XNA Game Studio Express is more then capable for making spectacular demos - but how? What are the caveats? What's the shift in paradigm? And what is XNA anyway? And does it really make you miss your flight? Find all the answers at the talk.

Housemarque's cross platform engine design

Making a reusable crossplatform game engine has lots of challenges. This presentation outlines some of the design choises Housemarque took in their engine architecture and some of the problems/solutions they faced. The engine has been used in PC, XBox 360, PS3 and PSP titles and it has also been used in many prototype demos for various mobile platforms (Symbian and J2ME). The talk will cover broadly the subject matter and focus a bit on game asset processing. Game asset processing is, in Housemarques opinion, the hardest thing to get truly right when aiming for cross platform design. Various problems include support for streaming from variable mediums (disc, HDD), endianess issues, texture conversion to most optimal format, generating display lists offline and so on.

Meaning of Life – Game AI demystified

The presentation tries to break some of the misconceptions and fallacies related to game AI which makes approaching the field more difficult than it actually is. Building a game AI is fundamentally multi disciplinary effort. The presentation introduces a mental model dubbed "Meaning of Life" which can be used to expose the essential structure of the game AI. Once the structure is understood it will lead the design and implementation of the game–helping out to solve the right problem.

Fighting Organized Online Crime

Mikko Hyppönen is renowned for his great presentations on computer security. In this timely presentation he talks about the current activities of the criminal underground and how it is being fought.

Indie start-up for dummies: unavoidable mistakes, self-induced
misery and a surprising amount of luck

Secret Exit began its game development activities in early 2007 with the aspirations to become an income-funded independent game studio. The seminar covers the first 18 months of the company, from bold plans to unfortunate setbacks to a mountain of paperwork up till today: five guys, a bit of funding and a registered console developer status.

Sell your Friends vs. WOW epic mounts: the game industry at change

The game industry is changing rapidly. Wii Fit, Facebook games like Sell your Friends, free to play casual MMOs like Maple Story, funware applications and virtual worlds like Habbo are radically expanding the definition of what is a game and creating opportunities for game developers to make life more fun for everybody. This session provides an overview of the change drivers and makes wild guesses about the future in which everything we do, every product we use, every service we consume is powered by game-like interaction. Oh yeah, and I give away some hints about what Everyplay is building (did I already say that we are recruiting talented folks to build the coolest stuff ever? =)).

Dynamic Mesh Deformation for Car Games

Real time computer simulation of dynamic collision and deformation has increased its popularity as a research subject. The techniques for deformation has been under research for quite some time, but the required mathematics have been computationally reasonable only for off-line solutions. Some examples of which can be seen in movie industry and other off-line animation. In highly interactive applications, the restrictions are very strict when considering the computation time, but on the other hand, more relaxed with the accuracy. This notion has been used in many approaches reaching for simulation at interactive frame rates. In this presentation, different approaches are briefly compared in the purpose of finding a solution for dynamically deforming cars in car racing games in real time. Also one possible solution is presented with results.

Visibility optimization for games

Modern graphics hardware can process polygons extremely fast. Despite this it's easy to choke a GPU when it's used ineffectively. The demand for high quality content is growing and game developers need to push the limits of graphics hardware to make their games look ever more impressive. Visibility optimization is one of the most effective way to improve performance in computer games. The presentation will discuss methods for doing visibility optimization on modern graphics hardware. The technologies presented are used in numerous cutting edge titles such as Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, Lord of the Rings Online(tm) and Guild Wars 2.

XNA for Aspiring Game Developers

Never had a "serious" take on making a game but would like to? Impressed by this year's game development entries and would like to join in, but don't know where to start? In this presentation you will find out how XNA is the right answer for many aspiring game developers and how the game development club Score is training new students with it. The goal is to give you a few tips on making your first game prototype reality before the party is over!