In 2009 we organized the “Summer Game Dev” week at Dutch Game Garden. But what has become of the participants in 2012?
Facts (details below)
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- Award Nominees
- Game Startups
- Freelancers
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- Successfully released games
- Experimental games / prototypes
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A couple of weeks ago Dutch Game Garden reintroduced Summer Game Dev, a summer school week where teams of game dev students make games from scratch.
Back in 2009 when still working at Dutch Game Garden, I organized the first DGG Summer Game Dev together with JP van Seventer. The summer can be kind of slow and there were no game dev summer courses in The Netherlands. Game jams were also a lot more rare back then.
We wanted students from different educational institutes to get to know each other, each others skills and for them to collaborate. We had started with a social network platform called Developers Club in 2008 and felt a summer course would be a perfect opportunity to get people to meet in physical space.
Summer Game Dev 2009
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[pictureframe image=”http://www.zo-ii.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/SGD09_NG.jpg” link=”lightbox” align=”left” title=”National Geographic” width=145 height=125]
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The assignment for the first edition of Summer Game Dev in 2009, was to pick a topic from some old issues of National Geographic magazine and think of a game concept. They had one week to design, playtest, iterate and make an actual game. In the same time they also went on a couple of excursions (W! Games & Nixxes) and listened to a few talks by Dutch game industry luminaries. The final games were presented to the group and playable for visitors. We even got the participants a (n improvised) certificate:
Three games were made by 3 teams of 17 participants in total (with at least one girl in every team):
- Turtle Bytes
- Kamal | Group A (parallax game)
- Moskito | Team GRASP (based on Swarm Theory)
The students came from different backgrounds and educational institutes such as HvA, HKU (GDD and DVTG), UU, Grafisch Lyceum Amsterdam. It was a great and intense week, students gained a lot of experience and knowledge about the game industry and development.
Below you can see a video of the Summer Game Dev 09 week (edited by Sjors Houkes)
Anno August 2012
Watching the video above, I realized that many of the participants have graduated and are now working for different companies or even started their own businesses. Below I gathered some info and links:
Some facts:
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Started their own company
- Adriaan de Jongh: Game Oven Studios
- Adriaan Jansen: Abbey Games
- Eric Diepeveen: Stolen Couch Games
- Thomas Noppers: Grundysoft
Freelance
- Marlies Barends: Works of Heart / Abbey Games (NL)
- Suzanne Helmigh: Helmigh | Sophisticated Games (UK)
Portfolio sites
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Released Games
- Adriaan de Jongh: Fingle
- Eric Diepeveen: Ichi, Kids vs Goblins
Experimental Games
- Marries van de Hoef: Seven Dimensions, A Sense of Music
Other Notable Games / Projects
- Daniel Harmsen: SneakSneak
- Guido Soetens: Bygar (MS Surface)
- Adriaan de Jongh, Sherida Halatoe: The Jelly Reef (MS Surface)
- Adriaan de Jongh: Vogels!, What the FAQL!
- Aïda de Ridder: Forest
- Niels Hansum, Eric Diepeveen: Chime Multiplayer
- Eric Diepeveen: The Green Light Bundle
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Award Nominations / Recognition
- Adriaan de Jongh: IGF 2012 Finalist (Fingle), FoG Diamond Trophy (Vogels!), Dutch Game Awards 2010 (Vogels!)
- Adriaan Jansen: LD 23 (TinyTanic), Creative Game Challenge Student Edition 2012 (TinyTanic)
- Guido Soetens: Dutch Game Awards 2011 (Bygar)
- Ferry Keesom: Global Game Jam NL Winner 2010 (Resonance)
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Talks, Articles and other
- Adriaan de Jongh: Gamasutra (interview), This Happened Utrecht (talk)
- Adriaan Jansen: Gamasutra (featured blogs)
- Eric Diepeveen: Indievelopment 2012 (talk)
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A lot can happen in three years, these 2009 participants showed us a wide variety of what is possible within the industry, even for such a small one as the Dutch game industry. Worldwide recognition, talks, successfully released games and new game companies are just a few of the examples. We’re really proud to be able to support this in every small way we can.
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More info Summer Game Dev 2009
- Photo collection: DGG Flickr
- Moskito: Adriaan de Jongh posts: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4 & 5, Day 6, Day 7 & 8
- Kamal: Eric Diepeveen: portfolio page, video
- Turtle Bytes: Blog.
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What will be in store for the Summer Game Dev participants from 2012? We can only wait.
But here are some of their stories so far:
- SGD12 Day reports by teams / participants (in Dutch)
- Summer Game Dev 2012 Storify report by Dutch Game Garden (in Dutch)
- Photos SGD 2012
- Tweakers.net video report
Cool to find this online 🙂
Nice to see what everybody has been up to the past few years.
I got some released games on the market as well and have been in several articles.
Sophisticated game is one of my clients, not my main client per say.
I worked on current Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings games, they are both set to release in October.
I got a lot of good memories from this event 🙂 I’m glad I was there.