If you are not that keen on reading or just busy, check out the “comic book” version “Questions and Answers (on Game Innovation)”. It introduces the research questions and conclusions of our articles, each as a one-page comic.

There is also a limited edition of physical copies available at Granum virtual book store. Order your copy of “Questions and Answers (on Game Innovation)” or “Changing Faces of Game Innovation” before they run out! They ship internationally!

It’s been a great project! Big Thank You belongs to the people and the companies who have helped us during this journey! Hopefully we’ll get to elaborate these issues in the future as well, as the project has raised at least as many new questions as it has answered. We also encourage others to pick up from where we left off and continue the work. There is so much to do!

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/

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.

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.

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.

The lecture started with a formal announcement prohibiting all cameras during the show. But when Ian Bowden got started, the atmosphere changed. He started by commenting the Eurovision song contest and both the Norwegian and the Swedish song got their share. He also showed some “mug shots” of himself, demonstrating how the game industry changes you. After the humorous start and some background information about how Rockstar Leeds was born, we got to the main point.

One of the biggest challenges designing the Chinatown Wars was making the game world and the characters convincing. It wasn’t just making things smaller and simpler; you had to make it look so believable that the player could identify with their character. They decided to use cartoon style graphics, not even trying to make it too realistic. They also had to decide what to leave really simple and what to polish more in the city view and how to make the characters and animations look real while still being easy to reproduce. They ended up using sprites with a few parts they could recolor, thus giving them an easy way to reproduce different looking characters to the game world. They also took notice on how to make game characters similar enough both far and up close, so they would be recognized as the same people. In addition, they made the close-ups of characters out of polygons and then added textures, making it easy to create new impressions of the same face while keeping the style. That way, they didn’t have to use exactly the same image of a face twice anywhere in the game. All this was in the purpose of making the game convincing for the player.

And you would say they managed it all pretty well, considering for instance the MobyScore, which is at the moment an astonishing 94.

http://www.gameinnovation.org