Last week, I went to Oslo to pitch a game for British student game competition Dare To Be Digital. If you’ve never heard of Dare before, the premise is that teams pitch a concept for a game and compete for the chance to get money and counselling to turn their concept into a game in 10 weeks over the summer. The competition accepts a single team from Scandinavia, as well as certain other regions.
Eight teams applied to the Scandinavian part of the competition, five of us were invited to pitch our concept to three industry judges (one from IO Interactive in Denmark, one from Swedish DICE, and one from Norwegian Funcom) in Oslo. We didn’t win, but we did have a fun 1-day trip to Oslo (at our own expense, but still). We also got to hang out with a bunch of other game students, three teams from Norway and one from Sweden.
I invite you to check out this post over on Morten’s blog (which has also been added to my sidebar), as it has lots of details about the game we pitched, including the feedback we got from the judges and our in-engine presentation and prototype, which runs in your browser via the Unity web player.
Due to the volcanic ash cloud from Eyjafjallajökull, we decided not to take our chances with the air-plane we’d originally ordered tickets for. Instead, we bought tickets for the Oslo boat, which is a cruise ship that sails between Copenhagen and Oslo every night. We may not have won the pitch, but nobody can say we don’t travel in style. Photos of the trip follow, click for full size versions with captions.
Oslofjord looks pretty awesome, Oslo looks pretty generic city-ish but the trip sounds like fun. With your damn champagne baths on cruise ships.
Hey Jonas,
) Did you guys take the cheapest tickets? I did, which meant that I slept below monkey class, there was no signs about deck 2, which is located between the engine room and the car decks. Oslo is not very exciting I think, but when you sail into oslo(the oslo fjord), it’s a amazing view.
Cool photos from Norway, I have traveled with the Oslo boat about 15-20 times when I was little. My mother’s sister moved to Norway some 50 years ago and she have 3 children(my cousins), so I have visited them many times. Last time I went there was in the easter this year, I also took the boat, but that was because of I’m really amazed about boats in that size. It’s like a small city floating(Star Trek like almost
The white building(which is their new opera-house, if I remember right) it’s a really beautiful building, but the strange thing about Oslo is that there seams to be no plan in where the buildings are placed, because next to the opera there’s some industrial buildings.
Yeah Oslo is pretty generic, and it seems to have no real identity of its own. Various parts remind you of all sorts of other North European cities. We got a 4-bed cabin on deck 5, lowest of the proper decks, but at least a proper deck. It didn’t have a window, but it was a pretty decent room. My favourite thing is that there was wireless on board, even if it was really slow.