So Me and Jo both returned from NGC in Malmö yesterday. I'll admit, it was a pretty interesting trip. Like always, I'll give you the rundown of the events that took place, didn't take place, should have taken place and probably will take place at some point. There's salmon involved.

Hit the jump for more and a ton of pictures.

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Unlike usual, we were actually covered for this trip, so we had the chance to stay a bit longer than anticipated. Of course, with other people organising your trips comes great responsibillity! Well, no. There's confusion though, which meant setting up the trip to work for both me and Jo took a bit of effort, but it worked out.

We took the plane down to Copenhagen, Danmark and continued by train over to Sweden. The two cities are right next to eachother, so it was just a 20 minute trainride or so. We checked into our hotel and went out in search of food. We soon discovered that Sweden closes at night and reluctantly, we tried a burger place. Yeah... not doing that again.

It was a nice town though. Filled with flowers and... houses and flowers.

Did I mention the flowers? Don't quote me on this one, but I suspect there might be some kind of... spring thing going on here. Not sure though. More as things develop.

But theories about plants and planetary cycles would have to wait. We had buisness to attend to. Namely NGC! What we had been invited for was to show off our game and also to hold a talk with some fellow indies. The plan was to talk about someone else's game, which was an interesting concept. Of course, in my head I thought it would be an open discussion, but it suddenly dawned on me (the day before the talk no less), that we might be doing a solo presentation. Turned out I was right...

So there was a ton of scrambling to get some talking points ready. I honestly thought we would be the least prepared of the whole bunch, but we had to do this thing, so why not present what we've got, right?

The conference itself wasn't gigantic, but it was interesting to see the nordic countries come together and make something like this. The expo hall was located in the open space between two buildings with the lectures held inside. The indie Game night dawned on us pretty quickly, so we printed out our talking points and just went with it.

Surprisingly, our presentation was very well recieved, to the point where we got congratulated. I guess standard art critiques are still very much appretiated. Then again, maybe the pizza we all scoffed in the back room before we went out had something magical in it. Who knows.

Throughout the night we had a ton of people come up to us, discussing buisness, doing interviews or just being curious about our oddly shaped faces. The latter less than the rest. The party held on until the early morning, but we headed out in search of food again, unsuccessful. Jo resorted to more cheap hamburgers throughout the trip, while I waited for breakfast. Turned out the hotel breakfast was equally horrible so we quickly learned to rummage for supplies during the day.

During the conference we had our game demoing, though we didn't have the manpower to keep watch on it constantly. Thankfully, the game didn't seem to crash, so we had less to worry about. Of course, we still wanted to check up on it every once in a while.

People seemed to be enjoying themselves though, so we decided to check out what the resto of the conference had to offer.

A school specialising in game design was demoing their stuff right next to us, and we quickly fell in love with their custom arcade cabinets. We would regularly drop by to play a four-player isometric racing game, controlled by spinning a trackball in the desired direction as fast as possible. Simple, but very entertaining. (We were also given coffee in glasses rather than cups. Go figure...)

Another favorite was a game created around the idea of spinning a large disc, rotating the world to help a family of aimless wanderers along, the goal being to help them... well.. not die. We heard rumors of an iPhone adaptation comming of this thing, but I suppose a lot of the novelty for me was the giant custom wheel they had created. Makes me want to build one of my own. Guess we'll see about that one though.

Co-Op platforming was also present. The game was Colourless and played on the mechanic of a couple getting stronger the closer they are.

The strange thing about NGC was that, because it didn't have all the giant gaming coorperations flogging the place with their latest releases, most of what was on display were independent games and student projects, which gave room to some very interesting ideas. Regardless if they were commertially viable or not, seing all this creativity gave it a very different light than a larger conference would have done.

Lilomilo for example is a game I'm pretty sure would have been drowned out at places like GDC and E3, but here, it was one of the star attractions. It was a Co-Op puzzle game where the goal is to get to the other player, walking around the sides of the 3D world to do so.

Instead of playing just a single round, me and jo ended up playing three stages, which nearly made us miss a lecture, so there's definitely merit here. Speaking of lectures. We attended a few of them. They seemed to have a love for showing random internet videos though. Even the start of the indie talk had the N64 viral unpacking video and the Mega64 clip from GDC last year.

In a talk about Games vs Movies and their relationships, they played off an entire Screw Attack episode. Strange. Regardless, the talks themselves were interesting.

The talk we attended on the Nordic Game Jam was especially inspiring. I can honestly say that we were seriously psyced about creating some new prototypes after attending this thing.

Then... it was time for the Nordic Game Awards. I didn't even know there was going to be such a thing, so when we read about it, it came as kind of a shock. Regardless, we had to try and catch it, so we headed over to the ceremony.

It was a strange place, with free food and drinks, and horrible carbonated water. We were perplexed.

There was also salmon with crackers. Jo was not impressed.

The awards was soley nordic based and a lot of the awards actually went to our fellow indies. After the ceremony, we decided to catch up said indies. I had met a lot of them during my visits to GDC, but we never really talked, so it was a welcome addition.

We decided the best course of action would be to order some food that wasn't salmon with crackers or midnight horror burgers. There was happy involved. Well, aside from that brief few seconds when I strained my neck, but I'll look passed it.

Jo went home a day before I did, leaving me to stay up all night so I could catch the train at six in the morning. I'm still not on the right schedule, but hey, it was worth it.

Now, it's back to work!