THIS WEEK (15/2018) IN THE FINNISH GAME INDUSTRY

Play Finland’s Weekly Newsletter
In this report we will combine the week 15/2018 from the Finnish Game Industry.
News are gathered from the Play Finland group posts during the week. That is why we recommend you to post by yourself (however not flood) your Finnish Game Industry related news to the group. It also guarantees that your news will be visible in the weekly newsletter /news compilation. Play Finland is at the moment one of the main channels for sharing information inside the industry.

 
Events:

• 16th April Eduhack pre-event: team roles / Turku
• 19th-21st April Reboot Develop 2018 / Dubrovnik, Crotia
  • If you are interested in joining Reboot Develop this year, please do not hesitate to contact Neogames/EGDF, as the seminar organised have been kind enough to provide -10% discount code for you (-20% for the next 24 hours!) and to host the EGDF General Assembly.
• April 24th Finnish Game Awards Helsinki. 
  • Registration is now open! There is a limited number of tickets available for purchase at https://fga2018.eventbrite.com/
• April 24-25th The University of Tampere Game Research Lab Spring Seminar, Making Games.
• April 25th Visual Storytelling – Helping Artists With Words – Q & A / Helsinki
• May 5th Game Över 11- pelitapahtuma Lahden pääkirjastolla
• May 8th Games First / Helsinki
  • The pitching you’ll hear at GF is not about user acquisition pipeline optimization and ad revenue monetization – it’s about games. To be precise: Game Demos. This year, it’s going to be even cooler as we’ve got something special from our dear friends at Trojan Horse was a Unicorn. Come present to your fellow developers what you’re working on and apply for a Game Demo ticket now!
• 16-17 May Bit1 Metropolia game event / Helsinki
• May 23-25 Nordic Game Conference / Malmö, Sweden
• May 25-27th SmirnovSchool / Theme Park May Workshop / Kouvola
  • Eugene Je (Evgeniya Zherebtsova), instructor, who is going to run one of the workshops in May, have some new art on her ArtStation, go check it out.

See also The Game Industry Events calendar: http://www.neogames.fi/en/events/eventcalendar
Open jobs:

• JAMK is looking for a teacher.
• 700+ game companies in the Nordics to get an overview of game development jobs available right now. Currently 440 job openings in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway – browse through them at http://gameform.eu/
• More jobs at gamesjobs.fi

Releases;

• Land Crashers iOS version is now available

Other News;

• INDUSTRY DEFINES EDUCATION, Part 1: Game Education needs to match your needs. What are your needs?
  Take part in our first open workshop 24.4 13-16 (free lunch 12-13) in Helsinki and help us define what exactly programmers, artists, designers and others should learn! Sign up here.
  This work is part of Chips for Game Skills which is an ESF funded project with Metropolia, Oamk, Tamk, Amiedu, Laurea and Haaga-Helia supported with majority of game education in Finland.
• What is visual design, art process and environmental storytelling? Our new Downward Spiral: Horus Station developer diary has the answer.
• Sign up for Bit1.fi! Student team, you have till Friday! 
• 3rd Eye Studios is represented in Reboot Develop 2018 by our CTO and Unity expert Veli Pekka Kokkonen, who will have talk on ‘How to scale up your productions with tools instead of more team members
• Project: Longtail‘s video.
• Planet Colonization – Alien Lifeforms. 
• XR Challenge is looking for developers in virtual, augmented and mixed reality. Top 3 Finnish industrial companies Fastems, Glaston and Valmet are looking for value-adding XR solutions and new concepts to their challenges. Apply latest May 15th 2018 through our web page.Chance to win 40 000 €
• Platonic Partnership Ltd announced our next game, King of Peasants
• Jukka Vahlo‘s PhD thesis on the video game gameplay experience has just been published. The dissertation is theory-heavy, but here are the key empirical and methodological results which game companies may find interesting:

1. A novel gameplay preference model and a player typology (pp. 60->92), which can be used e.g., in predicting players’ game choice and in targeted marketing. Representative survey data from Finland and Denmark.
2.  A survey data analysis on how and to what extent players of the identified seven player types (or player personas) prefer to feel excitement, happiness, fear, sadness and other emotions during gameplay (pp. 181-189).
3.  An exploratory factor analysis on what kind of elements players prefer in video games. The analysis revealed that there are at least three latent dimensions in how players valuate games (pp. 211-220).
4. . Another exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis on motivations to play video games. I argue for five motivations: competence, relatedness, autonomy, immersion and fun, and that both immersion and fun are actually enabled by experiencing combinations of competence, relatedness and autonomy in gameplay (pp. 264-293).The press release by University of Turku. 

• Teemu Hemminki is doing some 2d platformer/adventure prototyping with miniatures and terrain I have.
• 9.4.2018 15-17 EEST on the Games Now! lecture series:  about the disabilities in gaming.

This is the weekly summary of news from the Finnish game  industry. If you want to have your news on the list, post them on the Play Finland Facebook group. The summary will be posted every Friday afternoon. Check out previous week’s list.