Workshop Chocolate Tower Llama day??

After a quick trip to the printer’s shop (you’ll see the result a bit later) I joined Gian and Robin at the Capsule Games office. It was a very entertaining morning with lots of joking and fun. Gian took care of the background music, mixing dupstep with funny goat sounds and Beethoven. My time was mostly spent building up the playtester group for Tower Offense.

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In the afternoon, we (the game design master & 4. semester bachelor students) had a workshop together with the SRF. In a short session we had to develop a concept for a planned format. The first round was completely open in terms of projects size and cost. In the second round, we had to take financial restrictions into account.

Heading back to Capsule Games, I picked up the finished materials from the printer’s shop on the way. And here you see the result: Chocolate paper for the SGDA. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and hope it will be a helpful goodie at the GDC.
Before heading home, Robin gave me a quick program structure crash course to help me with my refactoring problems. Thanks Robin ^^

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My life is crazy…
I was peacefully reworking the Niche code, applying the structures Robin taugth me earlier. Suddenly Patrick, the guy from Indiegames.ch told me about a “llama Jam” which seemed to be happening on Twitter. The whole ruckus was started by two Llamas that went loose in Arizona. We agreed that we should host the Jam on Playful Oasis. Let’s see how many people will participate :)
Do YOU like Game Jams and Llamas?

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Pro Helvetia Business Workshop

Today, the Niche and Tower Offense Team (and all the other Call for projects finalists) gathered in Bern to attend the Pro Helvetia Business Workshop.
The day started of nerdy, as we played Tower Offense in the train.

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After a small breakfast we split up into different groups, all attending the following lectures by turns:

Accounting & Finance (Dr. Alexander Fust)
Business Model (Jasmin Mastnak & Marco Busse)
How to generate users (Erinrose Sullivan)
Market Analysis (André Bernhardt)
Pitch Training (Jan Fülscher)

I want to thank our teachers for their interesting insights and inputs!
Really enjoyed listening to the different perspectives on business models and strategies.
Especially interesting for me was the business André Bernhardt is running.
He would be a great fit to mentor my master thesis. *Getting in contact*

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And THIS is were we had our Apéro.
Super fancy location and even fancier food.
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Thanks a lot Pro Helvetia and Tech Bridge (hope I’m not forgetting anyone!) for today :)

Sunny Sunny Kobold Friday

Haaa, today was such a nice, sunny day. I spend most of it working on our balcony. And later headed out with my laptop, typing eagerly on a park bench.
Friday is now the official Kobold Games day. Every Friday I’m helping the team (which are very very lovely people btw) to prepare for their first self-published release. They already released a big game, called Journey of a Roach. Daedalic published the game and took care of the marketing/PR. Now they want to try it themselves :)
It will be very interesting for me to see if we can reactivate the community altough the new game will have a new genre.

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Also: During my lunch break an article about the “Call for projects: Swiss Games” finalists was posted on 20 Minuten Online. I’m very happy to announce that both Niche and Tower Offense made it into the finale! On Monday Andi, Robin and me will join the business training for the finalists :D

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Capsule Games and SGDA

On Thursdays and Fridays all the master students have time to work on their master projects. Which means no school lessons, work where you want.
I spent most of the day at the Capsule Games office. Tower Offense (Capsule Games current project) is one of the games I’m supporting during the course of my master. My dear classmate Andi is the lead artist of the team.
The programmers are working hard to get the online multiplayer working. I’m currently trying to build up a small community around the game.
We are looking for playtesters and player feedback right now. If you’d be interested in trying the game, send us a mail.

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Robin also introduced me to an awesome tool called Parse. I will definitly try it out for Niche. It can be used to track and store user data in a quick and easy way. And it even has an SDK for unity.

 

In the evening I went over to Bitforge for a meeting with the SGDA.
From today on, I will spend at least 4h a week to support this great initiative!
If you are a game developer from Switzerland, I highly recommend joining us.

 

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