Hurray, more exhibitions xD
This time at the LUGA in Lucerne. I have to say I never EVER saw an exhibition space as cute as this one before!
Oh look, it’s Niche in a boat!
Also note: Running on a tablets fot the first time ever.
This girl played for 3 hours straight. Until her mom came and dragged here away 
After my pitch at Quo Vadis I headed over to A MAZE., happy to have the business part of the journey behind me.
The festival welcomed me with colorful lights and lots of happy game people. Every few steps I met another familiar face. It was great to see all my friends again!
The next day (Thursday) I attended the Indie Arena Meetup. I really enjoy this kind of community, were every member can openly say their opinion and suggest things to improve. We need more Swiss people in this community!
On Friday I got up “early” to attend the talks taking place at “Neue Heimat”.
In the evening the ZHdK people showed what they had been working on the past two days: Multiplayer Games that could be played with a bar scanner. It was quite a show xD
The same evening I watched a “Interactive theater performance” by the group Extraleben. It was really great, I can only recommend it 
On Saturday I wanted to play ALL the games. Unfortunately, half of them were gone already 
Oh look, it’s David Stark showning his game Airships
After playing comes resting! ZHdK peps chilling together.
We had the idea to maybe rent one of the festival sheds together next year. A nice space for Swiss Games!
Also: Some people started game jamming together
After saying goodbye to all the awesome people at A MAZE. I walked trough Berlin for a bit.
On Sunday morning the ZHdK people met up to journey back to Zurich together, by BUS! I was afraid to get sick (14h trip ahoi!), but it was quite alright. We even stopped in Munich and drank a hell load of beer in a beer garden xD
A MAZE. and Quo Vadis were both great! I will be back next year
A regular day at your local Capsule Games office
Robin & Gian visited the University Basel in the morning to talk about a cooperation. More infos about that next Tuesday
I spent the day signing up for festivals, managing our playtester group, answering mails, preparing for the Fantasy Basel exhibition and so on.
Also: The ZHdK Incubator wants to run a pitching session together with Swisscom. I’ve been running around looking for interesting projects all week. Stay tunned!
This happens when René is in charge of teaching us: We sit somewhere in the middle of the school building where lots of people walk by and watch a Let’s play of R-Type. I could read it in the passing peoples eyes: “What are those strange game design students up to now?”. It was great xD
Well we didn’t just watch a video, we had to analyse enemy waves, emotional arcs and movement strategies.
In the evening Isa and me met up with our ETH team to produce a screenshot for the upcoming exhibition flyer. I like the result 
Today the 2. semester Bachelor students showed of their board games! I even skipped the weekly ETH course to attend this fun playround. It seems that each year the quality of the produced materials (board, tokes, …) goes up.
Spending the whole afternoon in the classroom, I tried almost all the games
These two are my favorites:
A turnbased 2 player strategy game, where you try to destroy your opponents space ships/base.
And a weird narration game were each players tries to reach his/her specific ending.
Great job everyone, the overall quality of the games was superb
In the evening Beat and me fixed a Source Tree issue we had with Niche.
Last week I attended the Quo Vadis in Berlin.
We missed the opening ceremony unfortunately, since we arrived on Tuesday evening. After making my way through the city and getting lost a bit I finally arrived at the “Kino International” where the conference took place.
While listening to lots of talks, I worked on my pitch for the “Best of Quo Vadis” show in the evening.
We got nominated with Niche.
There were also various cool indie exhibitions spread all over the festival.
And so it started. There were over 300 people in that room!
I know one thing: Niche was never shown on such a HUGE screen before
The highlight of the day: We won 2. place! I never would have thought that.
Puuh, I’m quite a bit late with this one.
But I really don’t want to keep this awesome weekend to myself
On Thursday evening (9.4) my plane took to London. From there is was a 2h train ride to Cambridge.
Tom Kail, a good friend of mine and Playful Oasis member kindly hosted me for the whole stay. Thank you so much!
So, in the next morning Tom and me headed over to the Norwich Gaming Festival.
The festival took place at “the Forum”, that huge thing over there!
After a bit of tinkering, the Niche booth was all setup.
The festival started to fill up with more and more people.
A lot of families with small children attended the festival, so I spent most of the weekend explaining genetics to kids. Some of them played the game for over an hour!
And this mom played the game with her daughter for 3 hours in total! (They went to have lunch inbetween).
We even setup a little highscore display. The top record was 76 days, achieved by a 9 year old boy
There were lots of other cool games at the festival. On Sunday I took the time to play them ALL.
And this is my favorite! A 1-4 players collaborative kitchen simulator, called Overcooked.
In the evening, we hung out with fellow developers. We had a great time playing and inventing strange games.
Was great meeting you all! I’ll never forget the strange letter we wrote together xD
In the blink of an eye, the weekend was over and I had to say goodbye to my new friends.
Goodbye everyone, we’ll meet again for sure!
Being back in London, I had to wait for my plane.
I took a little walk around and visited the Harry Potter store at platform 9 3/4, Kings Cross.
Aaaand I’m back home again
Back at school after an amazing Games Week Berlin.
Oh well, today was quite fun actually. After a rather dull lesson in the morning (during which I got to answer some urgent mails) we did the “Marshmallow Challenge” in the afternoon. We won because we had a great Industral Designer (hurray for Sabine!) in our team. Look at this mighty mighty spaghetti tower!
Fun fact: Kindergartners are usually very good at this challenge while Businessmen tend to build breaking structures.
After school we attended the “Kein Kino” event at the ZHdK. Katrin Moll introduced the interactive audio game she worked on for Deutschlandradio Kultur.
I was especially impressed by a microphone device concept called “Kunstkopfmikrofon“.
Ahhhh, doing homework on the balcony during a nice spring day is just THE BEST. Even the most boring texts can’t spoil that. Nah, the text was actually quite alright. Not the kind of thing I choose to read voluntarily, but ok
It was about the comparision of different innovation methodes.
In the afternoon we analyzed the text together.
After finishing up some SGDA and Capsule game tasks I can noooow….
pack for the International Games Week in Berlin :D!
After finishing some organizational stuff in the morning I headed over to the ZHdK for a gameZ association meeting. We talked about the future of our festival (the gameZfestival), possible partnerships and scheduling.
No time for lunch today since we had visitors. Niche and other ZHdK games will be exhibited at the LUGA next week. After an intro presentation by our director Ulrich Götz, each of the students exhibiting a game introduced their projects briefly.
