Manse Games '18

I missed the last lesson so here's my excuse for that.

Manse Games '18 was hosted at Palatsi in center of Tampere. It's the first time it was made and the topic was free-to-play games so I thought it would be awesome experience to participate. And it was.

The event was free and they offered lunch, dinner and drinks. I'm surprised that nobody else (from our school) was interested in coming there.

The day started at 10am and ended at 8pm. There were 6 speakers about different game design, business and f2p topics.

Last 2 hours included 2 different panels. The first one had designers from Finnish game companies discussing their approach on F2P and mobile game designs.

The second panel had the heads of game companies in Tampere talking about the creation of their companies, the games that they have published and their future projects.

Overall, I really did like the event. It was nice to see what the Finnish game industry is up to and get some insight on what the people on the field do. Even if I hate doing "networking" it has to start somewhere I guess.

This event is also being hosted next year and I'm definitely going there.

AI making artists job easier

Yesterday there was a Reddit post about a website that uses AI to automatically color line art pictures.

The results that users posted were stunning. The site allows people to upload an image, press a button and 10 seconds later it is fully colored. It even allows the users to add different lightning sources, modify colors and download all kinds of variations of the process.

And it's open source project.

So, today I took a bit better look at it. After about 1 hour of poking around, I managed to get out quite a few good looking results. The middle one is the only thing I drew.

Careless and Careful mode comparisons

And here's a closer look at my favorite one. I had to give the programs a few hints on where the colors are supposed to be, it mainly had issues with parts of hair and the hand with glass.

Seeing something like this really makes me wonder what the future will bring us. Some artists are worried (for a reason) and call this method "cheating". In my opinion, if you can save hours of work by using AI, it's just being efficient.

What is a stereotypical Finnish game?

Korean games are grindy, Japanese games have over-the-top effects and USA makes AAA games.

But how would you defines a Finnish game?

If I had to use my own words, it's pretty simple: mobile.

Don't get me wrong, Finland does have some successful high quality PC and console games but there are so few of them compared to mobile that they are out of the question. Looking at lists like "Top 10 Finnish video games" or Wikipedia's list of games developed in Finland it's pretty obvious that the amount of games produces is small with the most successful ones being mobile.

It's important to understand that games are a very new media. What that means, is that there aren't that many well established companies and that there is a big reliance on investor money. On top of that, the cost of living is so high that the wages have to reflect that. This has a huge impact on what kind of scale we can pick for the projects.

These things in mind, it doesn't come as surprise that the mobile games were a huge success. They are possible to be developed even with a really small team and the investors feel much safer investing in them.


Speaking of Finnish games, here's the progress on my final task (Day 1). It's still very rough but making progress.

And here's what it looks after a little bit of tuning (Day 2):

Stalking a famous streamers social media usage

CohhCarnage is my choice for famous person. He has a very successful Twitch channel gaining over 20 thousand constant viewers every stream so he's usually in the top 5 most viewed streamers and this is a really big achievement for a variety streamer.

Links to different media channels he uses:

• Twitch
• YouTube
• Twitter

I will be focusing on his Twitter posting.

Looking back at his posts, it seems that he has a very regular posting schedule of when he goes live and what kind of content he is playing that day. One thing that stood out about this was that his posts are hand written and not automatically posted by Twitch. Seems like he also puts quite a bit effort on writing these and adds mentions of game companies that made the games he plays. His writing style is also very positive.

Another common topic for him (especially in early access / beta games) is to discuss the bugs / features the games offer and if the player should bother investing into the game at its current stage. This also ties to the developer communication that he tries to keep active.

I also noticed a few polls and posts that encouraged discussion. These were mostly related to things that people want to see in the future streams. Some gaming related news posts were also included.

Lastly there are for smaller part sponsored messages (he has a deal with GOG to post about discounts) but those are rare. Overall his Twitter look feels very professional instead of being personal. I could only find one personal message that was about his Halloween breakfast so it's quite understandable.

A quick look at his other media:
The YouTube channel is mainly used as a video archive where he uploads his gameplay. This is pretty much unedited stream footage cut into 30 minute episodes so they don't gain that many views. It's nice to have as an archive though.
The Twitch channel includes well highlighted and archived broadcasts. For me it was surprising to see since past broadcasts for the longest time has been a place where almost nobody in Twitch goes. Just putting the extra effort to keep it organized is a big plus.

Blizzcon 2018 announcements!

Today was the first day of Blizzcon (gaming convention hosted by Blizzard in California) that is usually the highlight of the year for us Blizzard fans. These conventions include news about upcoming content for current Blizzard games, announcements for new game releases and massive E-sports finals for WoW, Overwatch and Starcraft 2.

Since I spent a few hours watching the stream before SC2 tournament started, I thought it would be nice to share what happened and my thoughts on the topics.

First of all, DESTINY 2 IS FREE until November 18th! That means if you get Battle.net app you should see it claimable in the gift box. Personally I have really wanted to play the game since it looks a lot like Mass Effect. I'm not a huge fan of shooting games so paying 50€ for Destiny felt a bit too much. That being said, it has been downloading for past 5 hours now (90 gigs take quite a while..)

I'm speechless. The time for WoW classic release was finally announced after years of private servers being hosted and shut down left and right. This game has a special place in my heart and it has done so many things right in MMORPG genre that it's something everyone should experience at least once. There is massive amount of discussion going around how it's all nostalgia but having experienced it now twice myself I can say that if there is one thing to look towards in 2018 summer it's WoW Classic. The game will be playable with WoW subscription so everyone who pays the sub gets access to current WoW and the Classic content.

Another super exciting announcement. Warcraft 3 is a game where I spent waaay too many hours just going through all the custom maps people created and witnessed many very impressive creations. Some of those custom maps actually became their own games on later date (looking at you DotA 2). Recently Blizzard created remastered edition of Starcraft 1 that let players who own either the old game or the remaster play together. If they manage to pull the same with WC3 and let us play all the old custom games, this is like the dream come true. Currently WC3 is a ghost town so it's pretty much impossible to find players to play with so seeing the game gain popularity again would be amazing.

With all the other exciting stuff coming out, we just had to have something that disappointed everyone. Diablo is one of the most successful PC game series that initially got me to gaming 20 or so years ago. Diablo 3 has had a massive content drought lately (no real updates for last 3 years) so everyone was waiting for something new from the franchise. Then Blizzard at the end of this presentation came up with the M bomb: Diablo on mobile. I have never seen that disappointed crowd in this kind of conventions, there was no clapping and people could have been heard booing. The trailers for the game are massively down voted in YouTube and the Diablo community is going crazy on social media. Having no news for the whole franchise and coming up with outsourced mobile game for established PC series is just a disgrace.

There were some other smaller announcements like new heroes in Overwatch and Starcraft 2, Hearthstone expansion and teaser for WoW BfA content but since those aren't really major things I won't cover them here. Overall next year looks really really good to me.