ErikSvedang.com

So, what are you doing?!

Right now I’m preparing Blueberry Garden for the Independent Games Festival. It’s going fine.

The initial release for Blueberry Garden was planned for “summer 2008″ so why can’t I play the game already?

A couple of reasons:

1. The game isn’t polished enough
2. I haven’t decided how to distribute the game

I’m sorry for keeping you waiting but I think it’s for the better…

When will you release the game then?

1. When it is polished enough
2. When I have decided how to distribute it

What should I do with my life?

Devote it to mastering the fabulous World of Goo, obviously!

Erik

The Swedish game magazine Super Play wrote about the little indie developer party I arranged this summer:

I really appreciate that they put the name of the games on the front page too, that’s awesome!

(Blueberry Garden concept art from the summer of 2007)

Today is my birthday and since I haven’t written very much here lately I thought I would give a little news roundup of the last couple of months:

• I have graduated from the University of Skövde with a degree in Computer Game Design
• Three weeks ago I started working at the University of Skövde as a teacher of Computer Game Design
• Since I work only half-time at the university I have had a lot of time to work on several small games to try out different ideas. Most of it has turned out to be junk but that’s part of the fun — trying crazy stuff and watch it fail…

Finally I want to thank everybody who is waiting for Blueberry Garden and say they like the look of the game, it’s really exciting! Unfortunately I don’t have any public news about it… I’ll leave that to your imagination a little bit longer.

Yours truly,

Erik

Top: Erik Svedäng, Emil Berner, mr anonymous, Petri Purho, Jens Bergensten, Andreas Jörgensen & Jonatan Söderström (Cactus). Bottom: Gøksel (Decipher), Nicklas Nygren (Nifflas), Joel Nyström, Kian Bashiri & Mårten Brüggemann (laying down). Missing: Erik Sjöstrand.

This weekend I arranged a meet-up for Nordic indie game developers. It was really fun hanging out and we created a lot of weird and cool games (and some music).

We had one big game making competition that lasted from 14.00 at Sunday to 18.00 at Monday. The results were truly good and entertaining. My personal favorite was Nifflas’ Avoid the Evil Space Eel that can be downloaded here. I will add more info about the other games later when they are posted on the internet.

On Monday evening Petri Purho held one of the best and most inspiring lectures on game design I have ever heard. The rest of the night felt a bit surreal and I realized that all these talented people actually were in the same room.

Then everybody went home, I miss them already…

I was interviewed for this month’s issue of the Swedish video game magazine Super Play.

Yesterday I got back from the Nordic Game conference. It was two interesting and fun days even though most of the speeches and “debates” really wasn’t that inspiring. Here’s my top three of good things during the visit:

1. Meeting awesome game developers like Petri Purho, Martin “Grapefrukt” Jonasson and Oxeye Game Studio
2. Fumito Ueda showing his concept movies from Ico and Shadow of the Colossus
3. The keynote about making “Rock Band”, the speakers actually tried to share their thinking behind the design

I hope they will arrange the event next year but make it a little less about business and a little more about creativity…

Take care,
Erik

Now Blueberry & Flipside are both handed in to the Swedish Game Awards competition. It’s been a hectic weekend with a lot of work and only a small taste of the lovely weather. Hopefully the following time will be more relaxed…

A big thanks to everyone who has play tested Blueberry Garden, it’s been great!

This is my new attempt of creating a personal website. It will contain special pages about some of my projects and a blog with the latest news. I hope you will enjoy it!

Sincerely yours,
Erik