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Anne Ryynänen

How to Exercise without Exercising – 3 Protips!

Do you know what I hate? Exercise. Do you know what I love? Playing Just Dance. Here is a very simple reason why: you get to jump around like an idiot pretending you’re just short of Lady Gaga with your awesome moves. The video that the game compiles immediately after each performance always cleanses me of such illusions. A keen-eyed reader might find themselves thinking: “But dancing is exercise.” Whaaaat?! Mind b-l-o-w-n. With game and play you can at least try to make exercising fun for even a short-spanned soul such as myself. How? I’ll tell you! When? Now!

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Gamescom Advice, No Advice

Sometime ago I, like many people in this industry, found myself in Cologne. For gamescom. We, like many people in this industry, were there to see if our upcoming title would track any interest. We’re happy with the results. So, here I am, finding an angle to write about on what it means for an indie developer. However, the muddling that happens in one’s brain during a week of hectic expo life is something that seems to prevent me from creating a beautiful post mortem. So it’s your choice at this point to decide if you’re going to get anything useful out of what I’m sure are going to be ramblings that may or may not have a point to them.

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To Ludum Dare or not to Ludum Dare

Ludum Dare is a competition, held three times a year, in which game developers all over the world aim to make a game fitting a given theme. The challenge is that you only have two days to finish your game and you get to know the theme of the game right before your 48 hours start. Avid game makers and game changers  as we are, many ludocraftees have participated in the competition over the years (with Teemu Väisänen from our art team winning the whole thing a while back with his game Superdimensional. The latest Ludum Dare was held in April with the theme Shapeshift. Heikki Törmälä from our coding team braved the challenge. He shared his process in what it takes to make a game in 48 hours. There are some tips in there for the would-be Ludum Dare contestant and game developer in general.

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Summertime Clashing – 5 Pro Tips for Winning in Clash Royale

It might seem weird that we would write an entire text about the best methods to win at a game that isn’t even made by us. However, when you make games for a living, it’s important to play games made by other people to gain perspective on your own work. This is also a view our CEO encourages, for example in this article. Sorry it’s in Finnish only. Besides, LudoCraft is big on games that celebrate collaboration, so Supercell’s Clash Royale makes sense in that regard, too. But what have we learned from our fierce adventures with Clash Royale?

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Games and Gaming – Why Is There a Difference?

I had the surprising pleasure to visit London and see the latest up and coming trends in the gaming industry at ICE 2016. Not the game industry – gaming industry. This means betting, slot machines and the like. Now, games and gaming are very close to each other as terms, so I’ll try to keep my wits about the distinction when discussing how the two do relate and could relate. Because the two can be easily considered as cousins and both can benefit from each other in many ways, I chose stories & skills and social gaming as my main points to avoid this post from turning into an essay.

Coming from the game industry it was fun to recognise familiar brands, like Frogger, turned into slot machines and pay notice to how the Walking Dead brand (comic book turned TV series turned games) conquers in all aspects of games and gaming from the amazing Telltale series to the NextGames mobile game and into slot machines with a special Michonne bonus that made me smile. With the gaming industry and the game industry intertwined so closely in regards of brands and the purpose to entertain, it is amazing that the actual game content of the two are not more closely linked. Naturally there are some limitations, like the nature of luck and odds in gaming and the strong element of story and skills in games. Read More »Games and Gaming – Why Is There a Difference?

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