DEVELOPERS. Winning the Swedish Game Awards could be a way to break in to the industry and for young games developers to find employment. When all entries have been submitted on Friday, all that remains is for the jury to go wild with the 100 or so games that are competing.
Student programming experts interested in TV games are competing with their home-made efforts in the Swedish Game Awards (SGA), which will be decided, for the fourth consecutive year, at the end of the month.

“The competition is a chance for participants to also come into contact with the games industry. I know of several former entrants that work for games companies today,” says Etrit Sejdijaj, SGA public relations officer.

This is Joakim Bergman’s ambition. Bergman, and his 12 course mates, developed the game ”Four – Battle at Wind Peak” during a TV games course at the University of Skövde.
“If we win then we hope to attract the attention of employers, ideally Microsoft,” says Joakim Bergman, project leader of Four.

He describes Four as a cooperation action game with a middle ages theme. The four characters use swords, knives and bows and arrows to fight against mutant bird-people and evil wizards, and is played by four people simultaneously.

“We want to jump on the party games trend where everyone can join in, but one can interchange between the characters when playing alone.”

To designate a winner the jury gets together over a weekend and plays its way through the 100 or so competing games that have been submitted during the spring. According to Etrit Sejdijaj it is not programming knowledge that is the decisive factor.

“We go more on game feel than on how the games are made.”

Despite the fact that Joakim Bergman’s team has only had ten weeks to develop their game he thinks that they have a good chance.

“To compete in the SGA has been an incentive for the project team, furthermore we would not pass if the game was not completed before the end of the course.”