“When faced with a challenge, get smarter”- Ed Catmull. These were the words that the founder of Noor Games started his speech, and this was exactly what we tried to do during GCON Armenia 2023, to get smarter! Let’s dive into the details of the conference!
As we all know pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives, and GGJ was not an exception. After 2 years (2021, 2022) of organizing GGJ online, in 2023 we couldn’t be more excited to finally have it offline! For the Armenian game community, it has already become a tradition and a much-awaited event.
“Global Game Jam Armenia 2019”, organized in January 27, was the 3rd game development hackathon in Armenia. You should know that GGJ is the world’s largest game jam event and Global Game Jam Armenia is the largest game development related event in Armenia. Let’s see the progress from the previous years. The table below is worth a thousand words:
This year Global Game Jam (GGJ) game development hackathon was held for the 10th time in the world and for the second time in Armenia. GGJ is not a competition, it has no winners. Instead, it encourages open cooperation of participants, experimentation and innovation. It was held on January 26-28, as usual, during the last weekend of January. In Armenia it was held at American University of Armenia. The organizers of GGJ Armenia were Noor Games, AUA EPIC and UITE. This year the registrations were about twice more. As organizers, we were thinking how to make the event more exciting and effective this time. And we came up with several new ideas that we applied to the evet: We have invited experienced and well known specialists of Armenian game development industry to participate in the event as mentors. They had to help the jammers in the stage of game idea brainstorming as well as during the implementation of their ideas. Therefore, we had game designers, artists, 3D modelers and programmers as mentors. We have organized several tech talks right before the event started. This was a new element to stimulate knowledge sharing. Another reason for these talks was that we knew that this year we were having very experienced programmers who were participating in the event for the first time…
Victory belongs to the most persevering. -Napoleon Bonaparte Noor Games has participated in Casual Connect in Kyiv, Ukraine this year. Casual Connect is an international conference devoted to game development which was founded in 2006. The event was held on October 24-26 and there were more than 1000 professional attendees, 80 game industry experts and executives from companies such as Apple, Google, Epic, Ubisoft, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Nordeus, Gameloft and so on. Within 3 days, 1200 minutes of educational talks were provided from representatives of industry-leading experts. Topics were covering industry insights, growth, casino, market navigation, technology, monetization, design, marketing, company management, business of games and more. We were so excited to have so many game experts around us. So much experience and knowledge was floating around that one could learn infinitely. Those 3 days were very intense – presentations, workshops, personal meetings, discussions, play-testing, etc. Just around a cup of tea we could learn something that others had understood struggling, trying and failing for several years. I don’t even talk about how powerful the networking aspect was. Nowadays game market is very developed and demanding and, as a result, the competition is very high. We were very interested in how people succeeded in such a tough market. The target was to somehow understand and summarize the key to success…