Amazing Alex: The journey from a two-man indie game to a worldwide success

Rovio is an entertainment media company, and the creator of the globally successful Angry Birds franchise. Following the newest addition to it's games portofolio, Rovio’s own Executive Producer, Kalle Kaivola, shares with us the process behind finding, building and launching Amazing Alex. This case study example will show us the mechanics of identifying indie IP’s with potential and transforming them into worldwide hits.

The audience will also have the opportunity to interact with Kalle during a short Q&A section at the end of his presentation, so if you've always wanted to learn more about developing IP’s from a producer’s point of view this is your chance!

Advanced Visual Effects with DirectX 11

This session describes some of the techniques developed by the demogroup Fairlight to render avanced realtime visual effects for demos and games using the new features of DirectX 11 GPUs. The talk will demonstrate dynamic procedural scenes, detailed fluid dynamics simulation and rendering, and real-time raytraced illumination, serving as an introduction to the new possibilities enabled by DirectX11 for graphics and visual effects programmers - and describing the core new algorithmic concepts needed to achieve them.

Why build an entirely new engine for indie game Reset

In this day and age of good and capable allaround third party engines that indie developers can get access to it's pure insanity to build your own - or is it?

Real-Time Graphics Everywhere (and fast) with Uno

Outracks has developed a new programming language, Uno, and Realtime Studio, a companion tool suite -- both designed to bring wow-factor, productivity and unparalleled portability to mainstream app development on both mobile, native and the web. Uno unites graphics code and logic code into a single high-level language. Uno allows the full programmable power of the GPU in any handheld device, PC/Mac, console or Smart-TV can be turned into full frame rate eye-candy without requiring years of graphics programming expertise and avoids platform specific developer pitfalls. 

This session is suited for both novices and hard-core programmers alike and users of existing languages, tool suites and SDKs are more than welcome. 

Outracks Technologies is a Norwegian real-time graphics software house founded by highly experienced graphics programmers, many originating from the legendary 'demoscene'-collective.

Making demos for advertising and creative industries

Minivegas is an animation studio that adapted gaming technology to create new immersive experiences. These custom build projects live somewhere between a game, installation and animation project. In this seminar we explain how we use game engines and C++ frameworks with traditional CG animation and how we see the future developments in the area, especially with growing capabilities of webGL. We'll use several projects as a showcase to explain our experiences.

Four success in a row on iOS can't be a coincidence - Secrets of Mountain Sheep

To be defined.

Cross platform mobile game development with Proton SDK

Mobile games is currently a very hot topic in the game industry. The market for mobile games has skyrocketed during the past few years. This combined with the relative easiness to release a game to the mobile marketplaces has fostered a boom of mobile game developers. Currently iOS and Android occupy a lion's share of the mobile device market. Half a dozen other platforms follow behind. If a game developer wants to reach the biggest audience possible they need to support multiple mobile platforms with their products. Every mobile platform is different in what programming languages they support, what their APIs look like and what kind of devices there are available. In order for game developers to survive in this forest of platforms many cross platform game development systems have been developed. Where a couple of years ago close to none existed in this space now there are tens of solutions available for a developer to choose from. One of these solutions is the open source Proton SDK. Proton is a young player in the field and can still be considered a little rough around the edges. But there are already numerous released games that have been made with Proton so it's a proven platform. In this talk the audience is given an insight to cross platform mobile game development in general as well as a short introduction to Proton SDK. The core design principles of Proton are presented and reasons given why one should (or shouldn't) choose Proton over some other SDK.

Mobile development in Unity : What you need to know

The ability to develop one game and play it on a website and a mobile device without having to build separate games is a major part of why people love using Unity. However, there are considerations and issues that come from developing on mobile platforms. Lower hardware requirements, less memory, multiple resolutions and different input devices all need consideration. During this talk, Russ Morris will talk about how to best develop for mobile platforms. From initial development considerations to memory management and optimisation, this talk will aim to offer useful information for mobile developers of all experience levels.

No, HTML5 does not mean Rich Web. HTML5 is an Application Platform for the Ubiquitous Computing Era

There’s a lot of buzz around the so called ‘HTML5’. But it’s all just hype. It doesn’t even work in practice. Right? What does it even actually mean? A Video tag to provide YouTube without Flash?

An inspirational and mildly provocative talk starting from the misconceptions around HTML5, cutting deep in the tech to clarify thedefinition and finally painting the big picture: HTML5’s role as the dominant application platform in the arguably dawning ubiquitous computing era. Suitable for all genders. Especially recommended for people who hate HTML5.

Adobe Gaming Solutions

9 out of top 10 games on Facebook are in Flash. Understand why companies like Rovio or Zynga and others choose Flash for their social games. Get inspired by visionary demos of the next generation GPU powered Flash games using Stage3D rendering and see where the web gaming is heading. Learn how to target iOS and Android with your Flash apps using Adobe AIR. See the upcoming CPU/GPU/Memory profiling tool for Flash codenamed Monocle in action.

Good tool / Bad master: Tech and game design

What games are and are not good at? How does tech contribute to that equation? Practical examples of ways to get around the limitations of state-of-the-art input, graphics and AI.

Occlusion culling for the next generation

This talk looks into how occlusion culling is done in the next generation of video games according to the experts in the field - Umbra Software. We take a look at Umbra 3 that is based on the idea of transforming a 3D world from its detailed artist created polygon representation into a simplified one. The transformation focuses on capturing the essential occlusion properties while ignoring information on details having no or little relevance in the occlusion culling process. This approach resembles the manually constructed portals-and-cells graph. However, the occlusion model used by Umbra 3 is an automatically generated portals-and-cells graph. Umbra is developing its technology together with industry powerhouses such as Bungie, Guerrilla, Kojima Productions and Square Enix.

Bitcoin: The Future of Money

Bitcoin is an open source digital currency that has been making waves ever since it was created in 2009. In just 3 years Bitcoin has managed to become a controversial force of change. It removes the need for middlemen such as banks and has proven itself to be a real candidate for a universal currency. How does it work? Is Bitcoin safe? Why is it such a big deal anyway? This presentation will answer all of these questions and more.*

Digital painting characters for games and entertainment

Photoshop techniques and theory for quickly concepting appealing and personal characters. Visual communication and establishing mood, tone and setting through characterization, form, material and colour. Includes live demonstration from rough sketch to quickly rendered painting and hands-on methods for quickly delivering ideas.

Unicorn7.org - The next step for game jam games

Within one year, 130 games have been created at game jams in Denmark alone. Games initiated at Nordic Game Jam have made it to the IGF Awards, Game Developers Choice Awards and Nordic Game Awards. This truly proves the talent and creativity among the game jammers and the value of fast prototyping at game jams. However, most of the games are forgotten after the game jam because they never make it to market. Since we are both very active in the game jamming community in the Nordics, we have decided to give our long lasting dream a shot and create a publishing platform for jammers, students and small indie teams. Unicorn7 is a kickstarter and a distribution channel that promotes these games and helps the developers take them one step further.

Powerful ideas -how (and why) to empower younger generations to become digital creators

Could I inspire other people into learning computer science and programming? This presentation discusses the paradigm change in programming education for younger generations. We showcase innovative use of visual programming tools as a part of education, where we have successfully implemented playful classes in e.g. math, language, and visual arts education. We use Scratch and Lego Mindstorm platforms as examples in the presentation. Both of them are easy to start with, and provide lots of learning possibilities.

Playful prototyping, the stories of failing for fun

Thinking with hands, continuous failing and random epic failing might be the best design method you will ever need. This presentation showcases several experimental interfaces & play concepts from the archives of Tuomo Tammenpää, Daniel Blackburn, Mindworks Oy and Yatta Oy which include some moments of pride, several lessons learned, numerous facepalms and one electronic log. The experiments shown are mostly about integrating electronics, computer logic & sensors to everyday objects and as such can provide inspiration for participants involved in experimental & tangible game & play interaction, but the underlying learning-by-doing method could serve as worthy alternative for any creative process.

Tangible Metrics through Data Visualization

Over the past few years, data visualizations have been getting a lot of attention on the web. In gaming industry, however, visualizations have not yet been used to their full potential. Interactive visualizations and gaming data could be used more creatively to generate more interest in games. In his presentation, Tapio will offer novel ways to deploy infographics in gaming.

So you want to build an arcade cabinet?

Loads have tried, many have attempted but very few actually succeed. Why is building your own arcade cabinet - with a dedicated game or an emulation pc - so difficult ? It is not, but you need to know some basic functionalities on connectors and cables before you start. This seminar gives you an overview of the different options in monitors, cabling, controllers and interface standards.

Make real products in your browser with Tinkercad and 3D printing

Shortly about Tinkercad, what we are now and what we will be in the near future. Telling about 3d-printing and its possibilities: how it can fulfill peoples dreams. Also showing live how people can easily design real products in their browser.

Getting started - hosted by Startup Sauna

If you ever thought about moving on to found a startup, already got started at it, or are about to do so, this is the right session for you. Startup Sauna is the leading seed accelerator program in Northern Europe, or as you'd say it in plain English, the best place to get help on building a great company in its very beginning. In this session, you'll get an in-depth look into the tools that are available to moving on with your startup, hear a few war stories from experienced serial entrepreneurs from along the way, and get the possibility for one-on-one coaching afterwards to get a few road-marks to continue forward with.

Ideation – making you brain work in new ways

In this presentation we will look trough some exercises that help us communicate creatively. You will get to work in pairs with some  improvisation methods. Idea creation is all about getting your brain  work in new ways. With loosing control one learns to control? Come and find out.

Panel: game jamming and social programming

To be announced

Robosota

Robosodan nykyinen tila. Kuinka roboja rakennetaan ja kuinka harrastukseen pääsee mukaan. (Finnish only session on robot wars)