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Meet the Indie Prize Serbia Entries from Eastern Europe

September 18, 2018 — by Catherine Quinton

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The entries for Casual Connect‘s Indie Prize coming from Eastern Europe will challenge players in many different ways. A game may explore fighting with weapons that include ladles, chimney brushes and hair dryers, while another requires players to cooperate in teams to reach their objective. A more serious game explores the stages of grief as a different game explores a network of universes and another leads players to rely on their sense of hearing to explore. Players will need to use quick reflexes, logical thinking, puzzle solving skills and more in these games.

Game Title: Cube
Developer: ColdCoffee
Platform: Android
Country: Turkey

In this game, you are trying to reach the key with Cube while avoiding the tricks and overcoming the traps. To do so, you must keep your head, remain calm and don’t rush. But eventually this won’t be enough; the path ahead will only be revealed when Cube rotates on its axis.

Europe 2018Video Coverage

Reko Ukko: Balancing Art and Business in Games | Casual Connect Video

September 18, 2018 — by Catherine Quinton

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As long as there's creativity involved, I'm happy. - Reko UkkoClick To Tweet

In a highly competitive industry, Best Fiends has managed to grow its mobile entertainment franchise into a $100 million brand. In a talk at Casual Connect Europe entitled How to Leverage Game Design to Sustain Brand Awareness, Reko Ukko, VP of Game Design at Seriously, shared his insights on how to successfully grow an audience and increase engagement through storytelling, new feature updates and holiday themed events.

EventsNews

Casual Connect Europe 2018 Indie Prize Finalists from Eastern Europe

May 18, 2018 — by Catherine Quinton

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Indie Prize London at Casual Connect Europe 2018 has attracted an outstanding variety of games from Eastern Europe. Role playing is featured in many games, and is perhaps taken to new heights in a game where the player literally chooses a role to play on stage. Many also combine role playing with different types of adventure, such as surviving on a sinking island or digging through caves or being lost in a desert. There are games that challenge the brain with puzzles, multiplayer games, beautiful learning games for children, and even games that take players into accurate representations of history. There is something in this group of games that will attract everyone.

Game Title: Theatre VR
Developer: Misterine
Platform: VR desktop/console
Country: Czech Republic

Theatre VR is the perfect game for aspiring actors and anyone who would like to experience what it would be like to be on stage. It allows you to choose a play and a role, then act that character. You say the lines while making gestures and moving around the stage. But you are not alone on stage; there are other characters driven by the computer. You can also create your own productions and share them with others and enjoy the play with your friends.

Europe 2017Video Coverage

Petri Ikonen on Designing Games, Creativity and Putting Players First | Casual Connect Video

September 15, 2017 — by Catherine Quinton

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Petri Ikonen, Creative Director at tracktwenty, joined EA in 2012 when they opened their mobile game studio in Helsinki, Finland. With responsibilities that include supervising the studio’s design team as well as doing many hands-on design tasks, he is vitally involved in developing tracktwenty’s creative culture and processes. At Casual Connect Europe 2017 in Berlin, Petri discussed the challenges of creating SimCity BuildIt.

Asia 2017Video Coverage

Vesa Jutila: Be Ready for Cloud Gaming for Mobile | Casual Connect Video

June 1, 2017 — by Catherine Quinton

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2017 is the year cloud gaming arrived for mobile! Now it’s possible to stream and play mobile games directly over the cloud. What will this mean for your business? Vesa Jutila, Co-Founder and Vice President of Content and Commercial Partnerships at Hatch Entertainment can help you answer that question.

Vesa Jutila speaking at Casual Connect Asia 2017, photo by Lera Polska Photography

Hatch Entertainment is a new social gaming service and is set to change the way we play games. Vesa and the team have built an inspiring, high-quality game collection for Hatch. Previously Vesa held a variety of executive positions at Rovio.

At Casual Connect Asia, Vesa explored the opportunities coming through cloud gaming for developers of full-featured premium games with no in-app purchases. He described, “We made it very simple and easy for ordinary people to try out new games, have fun with great games and really share this fun with their friends.” With cloud gaming we may soon be seeing mass market penetration for premium mobile games. PC and console-first developers could have a new way to reach the massive mobile game audience. Watch this video of Vesa’s session at Casual Connect and learn what you need to know to be ready for cloud gaming on mobile.

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To read more about Vesa Jutila including a lecture from Casual Connect Europe 2017, see this exclusive article.

Europe 2017Video Coverage

Hatch: Netflix Meets Facebook for Premium Mobile Games

March 14, 2017 — by David Radd

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Hatch could be the most revolutionary mobile platform to release in 2017. While that might sound like marketing hype, the set up for Hatch is as ambitious as it is intriguing. First and foremost, it lets users stream any mobile game to their phone or tablet with low latency. The low latency streaming allows for easy and quick access to all games. This means no downloads, no waiting. On top of this, players can easily share gameplay videos of what they’ve been playing to their friends.

At Casual Connect Europe 2017, Juhani Honkala, Founder & CEO, Hatch Entertainment and Vesa Jutila, Co-Founder and VP Content & Commercial Partnerships at Hatch Entertainment were interviewed by Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer, GamesBeat at VentureBeat. During this session, Vesa reflected, “From the very get-go, Hatch is built around the social elements of gameplay. We really wanted to bring people together over the games that they love and let them play games in very new ways that you haven’t been able to do in mobile before.”

ContributionsDevelopmentEventsIndieNews

Nordic Countries & Northern Europe at Indie Prize Berlin 2017

January 14, 2017 — by Yuliya Moshkaryova

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Three games from Finland and from Sweden, one game from Denmark, from Ireland and from Estonia, two games from Lithuania and eight games from United Kingdom will be showcased at the international Indie Prize showcase during Casual Connect Europe 2017. Among these games there are two games that were nominated by Game Nation Nomination Partners: Sweden Game Conference from Sweden and by GameOn from Lithuania.

BusinessExclusive InterviewsIndustryNewsNews BusinessServices

Juhani Honkala: Hatch-ing New Mobile Gaming Experience

December 27, 2016 — by Orchid

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Netflix for movies, Spotify for music, but nothing like that for games… so Rovio, who many just know as creators of Angry Birds, have corrected it by coming up with Hatch: a free-to-play mobile game streaming service that will first come to the Android platform. Instead of downloading a game on your phone, you stream it through an app, whose backend cloud infrastructure makes it possible to play without lag. What is more, you can hand the controls to a friend, therefore turning a single-player game into a multiplayer experience. Hatch founder and CEO Juhani Honkala told Gamesauce more about Hatch-ing the new project.


EventsNews

Nordic Countries are Coming to Indie Prize Tel Aviv

October 11, 2016 — by Yuliya Moshkaryova

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The international Indie Prize showcase for independent developers will take place on Nov 1-3, 2016 in Tel Aviv. Sixty games from 21countries were provided with Indie Prize scholar27ship by Casual Connect and will be showcased at Habima Square during three days from 9 AM to 5 PM.

This year at the international Indie Prize showcase Nordic countries will be represented with one game from Finland and two games from Sweden at the 2nd annual Casual Connect Tel Aviv.

Game DevelopmentPostmortem

Iron Tides: From Board To Digital

September 8, 2016 — by Industry Contributions

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Crash Wave Games, founded in August 2015, is an unusual pairing of two game developers from Finland and South Africa. As two developers of entertainment, the Vancouver-based indie studio has travelled all across the city and its borders for opportunities to showcase their first turn-based tactics game Iron Tides for the PC/Mac. The duo emerged from the hustle-and-bustle world where they met and made a pact to pursue the lifestyle of their dreams.


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