Microsoft in unique student initiative in Sweden

Gamereactor stopped by Skövde, a town located around one hour (by train) from Sweden's second largest city Gothenburg.

Skövde is a smallish Swedish town, with a population of about 35,000 inhabitants (50,000 in greater Skövde) that house a game developer education at its university since 12 years. Through close ties with businesses through incubators and such, Skövde has grown to become Sweden's fourth largest game development city outclassing much larger cities in terms of the number of game developers employed. Studios like Coffee Stain Studios (Sanctum and Goat Simulator), Stunlock Studios (Bloodline Champions, Dead Island: Epidemic), Ludosity (Ittle Dew, Magicka: Wizards of the Square Tablet), Coilworks (Cloudbuilt) sit within walking distance of eachother and the school. Paradox Interactive have also established a studio in Skövde.

(Check out that lovely Peruvian cap!)

In an initiative meant to further help fuse business and education, and help the students achieve the goal of starting their own companies after graduating or while still in school the organisation that ties university, municipality and businesses together - Sweden Game Arena - teamed up with Microsoft to create Game Camp Sweden.

It's a two-pronged attack that's both part of the education as 8 teams of second year students partake in an initiative to create prototypes of games on Windows 8, Windows Phone and/or Xbox One. Each of the teams have a mentor, a veteran developer from many of Sweden's most famous studios, including Daniel Kaplan from Mojang (a former student at the university), Martin Walfisz founder of Massive Entertainment and Planeto, Klaus Lyngeled from Zoink Games (Stick it to the Man!), Jens Nilsson founder of Frictional Games (Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Soma) and many others.

"The mentors who have chosen to involved themselves in Microsoft Game Camp Sweden come from successful Swedish game studios such as Mojang, Paradox Interactive, Coffee Stain Studios, Zoink Games, Planeto and Frictional Games", says Sebastian Badylak, producer at Sweden Game Arena.

"With many successful game companies Sweden is a leading country in games development. We are very excited and want to contribute to the further growth and expansion of the industry. We're convinved that Microsoft Game Camp Sweden is an excellent platform to exchange knowledge between business and education," said Peter Zetterberg, who is responsible for this initiative at Microsoft.

For this purpose Microsoft have fitted a floor with equipment, Gamelabs if you will complete with Xbox One devkits and all students and developers who visited a session yesterday with ID@Xbox's Tom Miller were given licenses as Xbox developers. But it's not only those participating in the 6 month student project who will benefit, but the Gamelabs is open to all students involved in the game programme as well as other nearby studios. We talked to Guru Games' Daniel Ström who is working on a project called Magnetica, and they would use the access to port over their project to Xbox One and hopefully (fingers crossed) have the game out in September by the time Sweden's Xbox One launch rolls around.

On stage for the kick-off was the Swedish Games Industry's Per Strömbäck who was joined by Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons' game director Josef Fares on stage were he talked about passion and the need to believe in your project and the will to see it through at all costs. He explained how most publishers wanted to come in and convince him to make it a co-op where players controlled just one of the brothers. "It would be like one person controlling the torso, and the other controlling the legs," he proclaimed on stage.

The 8 student projects included many novel ideas, some on the more serious side with heavy emphasis on narrative, while others had a more playful approach. The plan is for the projects to be shown in playable form in June and for the initiative to end in October. It's not really a competition, instead co-operation is encourage, but there is a scholarship available (worth around £9,000) and ultimately the possibility of publishing a fully realised game on one of Microsoft's platforms is there. No promises, of course.

Some of the concepts that stood out was Lunch Lady Simulator (title says it all, doesn't it?), Räv (Swedish for fox, an atmospheric adventure about time travelling and shadow foxes), and Hoverboard (a mix of Mirror's Edge and Wipeout if you will).