Let me give you an update, maybe you’ll find it interesting.

There has of course been a lot of work done on the projects we have in production, Umami and the Android port of Skybound. But also in the last couple of weeks there has been a lot of stuff going on in the Norwegian game development community.

Let me try and break it down in what I remember to be the chronological order.

Norwegian Game Conference
This was a “serious games” conference that was arranged for the very first time here at Hamar, the city were we have established our stronghold. The focus was on how the traditional industry could benefit from game technology and game ideas.

The speakers ranged from American Cornell professor John Nesheim to Norwegian law professor and sci-fi author Jon Bing and lots of other interesting people.

Hamar Game Challenge
Hamar Game Challenge is an annual student game development competition for the students at the Hedmark University College. The student teams do a presentation of their game to an audience and a jury.

The jury then selects the game they believe to have best chance of being turned in to a released commercial game.

This year, a team/game called Project Oasis won. Their game sure does look cool and is based upon the idea of rebuilding a city through killing evil stuff.

What they won? They won three months free office space and free support to help create a business plan for their own company. This is exactly the same thing we won two years ago.

We’re looking forward to them joining us as active developers here in Hamar.

Norwegian Game Awards and JoinGame
In a very eventful day, there was a lot of stuff happening at NTNU. First off, JoinGame, the Norwegian network for all things game-ish, arranged a seminar. What I found most interesting there was:

• a talk about rhythm/pacing in entertainment and its importance by Ole Goethe
• sound production in games by Jory Prum
• and a talk from Kellee Santiago from thatgamecompany about flower and their visions for games.

Me and Kris Jet also held a talk at the seminar, our talk was about how to get money from the Norwegian Goverments game development funding program. We were also interviewed about the future of indie games in Norway ( link, but in Norwegian only )

Norwegian Game Awards (NGA), like Hamar Game Challenge, is a student game development competition. NGA is open for all students in Norway and the winners won money.

The main winner was a cool FPS/Adventure game called Kuzka’s Mother which I hope get finished and released.

There were other prices as well, the one for best innovation went to Project Oasis who also won the Hamar Game Challenge.

The price for best concept went to an iPhone game concept described as “Tamagotchi on steroids”.

A game that didn’t win anything, but which I really want to see more of, is a game where you control a captain of a space ship in first person and navigate the universe by giving out commands to people on the bridge.

Kind of like a star trek captain simulator. They also had voice recognition, but they didn’t have “make it so” as the command to put things in motion… So, I only have one message to them, “Make it so”.

You can find lots more stuff about NGA, and even some downloadable games, here , link to NGA.

And as for the future of Norwegian Game Development?

Let us create some games, kick some ass, that a plan?

Make It So!