(Part 1) Swedish Game Awards Conference 2014 Report
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Last weekend, Swedish Game Awards Conference 2014 took place in Södertörns Högskola, Stockholm. Me and a couple of other students from Campus Gotland was attending the conference. In the next coming posts, I will give my impressions on the Conference. I will talk about the talks that was given in the upcoming posts, because there is a lot that can be said about those. The reason to why there aren’t many images in these posts is because my phone decided to live it’s own life, causing me to lose most of the pictures that I took. And just because I tried and fix it before Day 2, it still didn’t want to work on Day 2. Technology… Student ShowcasesOne thing that SGAC did this year was to let students at universities in Sweden showcase games, prototypes or demos that they had been working on. I didn’t get a chance to play all of the games here, but if those that I managed to play, there were some really good gems. One of the games was the platform game Grief, that I’ve talked about previously. I still think the games looks great, although I yet again did not manage to play it.
Another games that I saw potential in was a 3rd person action game called Root Force. It was a game where you are playing as a tree stump, and you try to bump out the other teams tree stumps from the map. You can also pick up power-ups, which can make that a lot easier. The game could need more polish, but it still shows potential in the concept.
There was also a 2D puzzle-game that I don’t remember the name of, but the idea is that you are playing as a robot that gives instructions to other “dummy robots”, and the goal of the game is to rescue a certain amounts of robots. The aesthetics of this game looked really nice, and I really liked the puzzles of this game, although some improvements on the technical side of things could be necessary.
Partner ShowcasesStudents was not the only ones who was showing stuff during the conference. Other companies was present at the conference as well. This is my impressions of the companies that I managed to get a chance to talk to/visit.
Arrowhead Studios (makers of Magicka) was showing up their new game Helldivers for the PS4. Although the game was fun to play of what I manged to play, I just don’t like the PS4 controller. I can’t even play 5 minutes without starting to feel weird pains in my hands.
Code Club is the developer of the sandbox game Wurm online. Although they did not show the game, they still talked about it and it looks like they are at least trying to make something new with the sandbox genre that has exploded in the recent years (with games like Minecraft, Terraria and Atarbound).
Fondia is a company that helps persons and companies with legal matters. In addition to having a booth on site, they also had a talk about legal matters in games. More about that in an upcoming posts
King was one of the sponsors of the conference, and they also had a booth at the conference. In addition to showing of their games, they had several employees present at the conference (at least 4 of them), and they were all really nice to talk to.
Although Rovio was present at the expo as well, I think I managed to get the worse timings to meet up with any person from Rovio, as their talks was going on at the same time as other talks that interested me more was going on at the same time, and I didn’t managed to find any developer at their booth when I was there.
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