Nordic Game Conference 2025 - Day 3

(Read about my day two at NGC 2025 here.)

Responsible people as we are at this age we did not overdo it last night so we were all fresh and ready for day three.

Building games in 2025: Emerging models

There was another fireside talk, this time about Indiana Jones and the great circle, but I did not stick around. Instead I went to a talk about publishing games in 2025 given by three studio directors.

I noticed that there was absolutely no mentioning of journalists or press in the talk; it seems that classic media for getting your game in the market is no longer a thing. Now it is all social media, community building and influencers. They mentioned "MVC's", minimum viable communities next to an MVP as a necessity to launch a game successfully.

They spoke about a concept of "nimble studios", small studios that through these new channels manage to create and publish large games, they were of course referring to Expedition 33 and the likes.

Even publishers are getting outdated - a statement was that a publisher should have a community of their own, build around the IP they publish. That way they still have something to offer to a developer (besides money).

From AAA to Education – Designing a game engine for learning game development

Now this was an interesting talk! Björn Ottosson (needs to update his LinkedIn picture), teacher at TGA, talked about the inhouse game engine their students need to use during their second year for the game projects they work on.

He also gave some extra insight in how TGA organizes their program, specifically their game projects. Over the entire program there are 7 cross discipline game projects with 10-20 students per project (!), giving them an output of 90+ games each year. That is quite different from what we do at DAE, where there are typically three of those projects with only 6 students per project, giving us a similar output of 100+ games per year.

The 1st year students create two games in Unity but after that all their projects are made with TGE - The Game Engine. In the second year there are 3 game projects, and all of them are made with the same group, so they stay in their group for their entire year! These groups need to build their own game engine and can start from TGE.

TGE itself is written in C++ for Windows and uses DirectX 11 for rendering and Dear ImGui for ui. They acknowledge that DX11 is old and are planning to upgrade to something more modern, but it is unclear at this moment if this will become Vulkan, DX12 or even SDL3.

Interesting is that the game runtime is very barebone, leaving much for the students to still decide on how they want to approach things. 

Also interesting is that every object in a scene is saved to a separate file, instead of having the data in a central scene file. This makes it easier to work with VCS, a good thing for students that are just starting to get the hang of git. 

I stayed after the talk to have a chat with Björn and he showed me a bit of the setup in Visual Studio, students get several classes in the engine that teach them how to implement features of a game and related engine code. Really nice!

CPU + GPU = Heart

I then went to a talk by AMD about optimization strategies for an APU, compared to those for a dedicated GPU. Let's be honest, the talk was a little over my head but my main takeaway was that whatever GPU optimizations exist, they also benefit an APU in the same way. An APU mostly has better memory access patterns since there is no need for copying data from the CPU to the GPU - they simply access the same buffers.

Asset streaming in Valheim

I then went to a talk about asset streaming in Valheim. They used Unity and there you have some options to do asset streaming, like addressables for example. Addressables however have the potential downside of having the same data loaded multiple times, which in the context of Valheim became an issue. 

Because of that they build there own system on top of Asset Bundles, in other words an alternative for Addressables which are also build on top of Asset Bundles. They introduced the concept of "Soft Refs" which will be loaded when necessary, in contrast to Hard Refs with which they referred to how all assets are loaded in Unity by default.

The main difference is that instead of having to define your own addressable groups, these groups are calculated at build time via analysis of the soft refs in the game.

Beyond Vibe coding (AI agent coding)

The speaker of this talk, Simon McCallum, was truly remarkable. It was not so much about actual vibe coding (which I would like to try out at some point) but rather more about AI philosophy.

In 2010 he said we were "DJ-programming" where we combine libraries and frameworks into a working application. Now vibe coding, or agentic programming, is where the programmer has mulitple AI agents working together performing all kinds of tasks to develop a program, going from file creation, scripting and interacting with github, mostly running on Docker containers.

Another way to approach AI is "navigator coding". Instead of asking for solutions to specific problems, ask for multiple options and you make the choice. By steering the AI in this way you remain in the driving seat and your brain is still thinking along with the AI, instead of just simply copying it over.

An interesting insight was this: today's first year students will never be better than AI. AI already knows a lot more about programming than a first year and it is also learning faster than them. Hence a student can never outperform an AI. I argued that this is assuming of course that the AI doesn't make any mistakes along the way, which at this point is not yet the case.

He wrapped up with some tangible tips on how to use copilot.

Nordic Game Awards

No more talks anymore, at 18:00 another happy hour was hosted by Sharkmob after which the Nordic Game Award show happened, which is always a very fun thing to watch. It was even allowed to bring beers into the theatre so the atmosphere was quite nice to say the least :)

Winner was Indiana Jones and the great circle, but I must say there were many impressive games that passed the revue. 

After the award show it was networking time, followed by an after party with marioke (karaoke but the lyrics are about games). Unfortunately there is absolutely no footage of me singing something on stage. 

Games! 

The last day of the conference was not very interesting and mostly targeted at students, most of the booths were gone and there were only some masterclasses and only one stage with some beginner talks. 

What I did not mention though is that there were a lot of games to play at the event and you could vote on them for the Nordic Game Awards. My favorite didn't make the cut however so I do want to give a shout-out to Dicetris, a game that I absolutely loved to play and am looking forward to see released on mobile.

It's already playable on crazy games in a sort of early access. 

Thanks!

If you've read this far then I extend you my sincerest respect and gratitude, let's connect on LinkedIn ;)