Game design workshop with Gareth Noyce and Lassi Kurkijärvi

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As one of my courses here in Tampere, I’m taking online course Game design. Name already tells you all about this course. It’s a course about games, and how to design them in concept stage. We learned about basic structure of game design. What we need to have good concept before we go to development stage. After few tasks on the basic stuff, we split in groups, and started to work on our designs. Each group, hat at first, 25 different game ideas. I know’ your thinking, what 25 ideas, why? Well, we are all full of ideas, and sometimes is hard to know which are and which are not good. Also sometimes we get too attached to some ideas, and don’t realize that they are not so good. To get easier trough selection process we gave comments on ideas from other groups, and other groups commented on our ideas. At the end of this stage we had few ideas, that got best comments and we could decide on our best idea and develop it in detail. So, for last two months we worked in group, to get all parts needed for great design. And this week, on 30. 11 and 1. 12, we had workshop to present our design. 

Gareth Noyce and Lassi Kurkijärvi (photo by Heidi Mäenpää)

To evaluate and comment we had two guests who know a lot more about game design that we, because they bout work actively in game industry. Gareth Noyce who is Development Director at Ruffian Games  and Lassi Kurkijärvi who is manager of Mobile Development at Sanoma Digital. So two really capable guys gave comments on our designs.

 

 

 

My team, The SuperSmash Foreigners was on second day of the workshop as first presentation. We were prepared and confident that our concept is the best, awesome and brilliant (it was actually in presentation):P.  And everything seems to be true. We did presentation in best possible way. Explained all aspects of the game and show also some sketches. When we finished, we got best possible feedback. Gareth and Lassi were really satisfied with concept of the game. Gave as some advice how to go on, and encourage us to develop the game.

SuperSmash Foreigners at work (photo by Heidi Mäenpää)

We are really proud with what we achieved. (more on game and team in next post)

After workshop, we also had party, where we had fun. Played some guitar hero and DJ hero, drink few beer and talk. It was nice to talk to Gareth and Lassi, about what they did already in there carriers. But the best part was when I realized that they are two most awesome guys. We told us the most funny stories from past. At some point in the evening we compared photos from young years (that was actually my fault, because nobody believed me that I had black hair) (and also Heidi was sure that I’m 25, end then I had to show her, what a big difference my hair do). It was amazing :D The best, most random night in my life.

 

See you around!