You are currently browsing katialha's articles.
During last autumn, GaIn has been busy on running two sets of workshops with our industry partners.
First round was a blue-sky ideation workshop with 2 to 3 ideation methods per workshop. The methods included GameSpace methods such as VNA, GameSeekers, GameBoard and some other methods such as ThinkCube.
The other round included restriction-based ideation, where the companies could propose a restriction for their session. We developed new prototypes that try to facilitate more focused ideation sessions. The results have not yet been overly promising as this “idea game” design challenge is more demanding. The restrictions used in workshops varied from platform, theme and social aspects to old concepts.
In both rounds the ideas were documented, and the best ones were introduced and talked about. We also gathered the experiences by conducting a group interview about previous experiences, thoughts about the workshop, methods and ideas as well as what restrictions means in general level to the developers.
GameSpace project methods are available here: http://gamelab.uta.fi/gamespacetool/
GaIn is proud to inform that the registration to FGJ is now open and can be found here.
Make sure to register early! The registration will be open until Monday, January 25th, 16:00. However, the participant number is limited and in case it is exceeded, the registering order is one criterion to select the participants. In addition, participants registering before 15th January get a free Finnish Game Jam t-shirt!
More information of the FGJ on www.finnishgamejam.fi and on the global event it is part of, Global Game Jam, from www.globalgamejam.org.
Finnish Game Jam (FGJ) is part of the Global Game Jam 2010. Finland is taking part in the Global Game Jam for the first time this year with three locations: Helsinki, Tampere and Kajaani. Tampere location is organized by GaIn with the help of Demola and Score.
A Game Jam brings together both game development students and professionals to innovate new games in a single weekend. Global Game Jam is a worldwide event, in which several jams are organized all over the world at the same time. The event lasts 48 hours, starting on January 29 at 17:00 local time in each time zone.
The first GGJ was held in 2009 with over 1600 participants in 23 countries, producing 370 games. More information about the GGJ and examples of previous game jams and games can be found on the GGJ website, Finnish Game Jam details are found at new domain www.finnishgamejam.fi.
During the Game Jam, GaIn will be conducting research on the development process, ideation and time-constrained creativity. We are interested how this approach could be developed into a method that can be tied into game companies innovation processes.
It is one thing to make a game for a big screen. It is completely another case re-creating the same game world using a small handheld device.
Ian Bowden from Rockstar Leeds talked at the Nordic Game conference about what kind of challenges they encountered while developing the Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on Nintendo DS. Chinatown Wars is the first GTA game for DS, and it is based in the world of GTA IV. You would think there is not much innovation in developing the twelfth sequel for a well-known game series. Surely, they had an established concept; they even had an already created city environment. However, as we heard at the Nordic Game, it takes much creativity and a bunch of innovative decisions to take a big-scale game and to convert it to a small screen and other limits of a handheld device.
Game Innovation Database is a project, which objective is no more or less than to “classify and record every innovation in the history of computer and video games, while displaying their relationship to one another”. Currently the database includes 235 innovations.
