On tuesday this week we had an Unity evening at Futuregames. It is safe to say that we had no problem filling our roughly 130 seats as the event turned out to be very popular! The crowd was a very good mix of people from more than 20 different gaming companies as well as some students, who got the opportunity to showcase some of their own games as well.

We began the evening with a presentation by Unity representatives Nick Jovic and Alex McCredie, who told us a bit about additional Unity Services. After that, Andy Touch from Unity gave us an in-depth presentation of the new 2D toolset.

FutureGames teacher Joachim Holmer went on next and gave us a presentation of his highly popular and quite recently released Shaderforge plugin.

Last, but not least, indie studio That Brain told us about the development of their Unity developed title: 20 000 Leagues Above the Clouds.

This was our second Unity evening so far and seeing how successfull it was, it will certainly not be our last. A big thank you to everyone who attended!

FutureGames has had a couple of more guests over recently! Almir Listo is a producer at award winning, Starbreeze-owned studio Overkill Software. He visited us to talk to our students about what the industry expectations on them will be once they finish their education.

We also had a visit from former head of productions for Imagination Studios, Filip Carvell. Filip spoke to our students about his career and his experiences from running a company. Imagination Studios was an Uppsala based studio working specifically with motion capturing and high quality anmiation for studios such as Starbreeze and Dice.

Thank you, Almir and Filip, for sharing your valuable insights with us and our students!

We are very pleased to introduce you all to yet another new member to our board of education: Dan Thronström, senior producer at Avalanche Studios. Let’s ask him a couple of questions shall we?

Hello there, Dan! Tell us a little bit about yourself?
My name is Dan Thronström, but most people in the industry knows me as Dante. I have a bachelors degree in Media with game design as a major from the University of Skövde. I have been working in the game industry for 8 years, mostly as a Senior Producer with teams ranging from teams of 10 to 120 people. I love to work with people passionate about games and of course games are a big part of my life.

What are your thoughts about FutureGames?
I think that it is one of the best practial oriented education institutions in Sweden and at Avalanche Studios we are very happy to have a great relationship with Future Games. We have had great response from the students on our guest lectures and mentorship program and we have had excellent LIA interns at the studio.

What do educations like ours mean for the video game industry (the Swedish one in particular)?
I think that the more practially oriented education programs are a great addition to the academic educations. Students gets a lot of time with game projects hands-on, which is the best way to gain knowledge and experience. Also the LIA internship is an excellent way for students to get a head start in their game dev career and for us it is a great way to tutor and show students how it is done in “the real world”.

Welcome to Futuregames, Dante. We’re excited to have you with us!

We are happy that so many have registered for the Unity evening! We are, however, sad to say that we can’t accept any more registrations at this point as we fear that we might run out of space.

Thank you all for your interest! Keep following us on our site and our facebook page for updates regarding other events like this.

Recently, a bunch of FutureGames students got the opportunity to visit Fatshark and do some focus testing for an upcoming title. Doing a play test for a game while it is still in development is both an interesting learning experience and great fun. The title is unannounced, so what game it is remains our little secret for now.

Thank you for having us, Fatshark! We look forward to visiting again.