I’ve been so tired and busy since I came back from Stockholm so I haven’t had the energy or time to recap my latest weekend shenanigans, but I’ll type until I eventually fall asleep here at my keyboard. [Great compromise, no?]

So I left for Stockholm on Friday evening, in the day I actually had a quick lunch [Caesar salad seen below]] with FRIDA who is a busy busy bee studying in Warwick the majority of the time. Since she was spending a long weekend at home she asked if I had time for a quick meetup. If ever! I was so happy to see her again, I haven’t seen her since December, for her birthday dinner…. And it’s been even longer since I got to spend alone-time with her, so it was two hours well spent catching up and giggling at nothing in particular. I’ve missed her.

After that I spent an hour and a half at the gym, had dinner at my grandparents’ and ran home to pack in my last things before Sofia and Simon arrived with the bus from Lund. We got them at the bus stop and were off to the airport outside of Malmo. 

Our flight took off at 8:10 and we arrived on schedule at 9:30 PM or so, received by Sofia’s mother and within a few minutes we were at their place. I forgot to take pictures of their pretty house and the dogs and cats they had…. On the other hand, the pets [especially the dogs] were extremely hyper, so I probably wouldn’t have gotten any good pictures of them. 

In conclusion of Friday night and arriving, it was super-duper cold in Stockholm, and they had a lot more snow than we have in the South. Thinking about the snow up there makes me shudder. 

We got about 3 hours of sleep [as I mentioned when I was blogging from the conference] as we spent the whole night watching YouTube videos and being hyper… Looking back, that wasn’t a very wise choice, but we had fun at least..? 

The next morning we were up and about by 6:45 AM, at 7:15 we left Sofia’s house for the train, the next train, followed by the bus to KTH [“Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan” Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology]. 
We found the other group from our school, they had taken the train and hadn’t arrived until 11:30 PM, and they stayed with another guy from Stockholm [also in Computer Science] . It took ages before they finally let us in to the stupid building, and my toes were hurting from the cold. Stupid cold.

The place was much smaller than I thought it would be… In fact, all of the Swedish Game Awards was much much smaller than I thought it would be… I guess I had too high expectations. 

They had eight lectures running parallel with each other, so you had to choose between them, each an hour long. The first lecture I was at was held by an employee from king.com, a gaming site. He talked about gaming and the effects of the future use of HTML5. It was really interesting and cool to listen to, so I’m really happy we chose that lecture. [I have no clue what the other lecture we could’ve gone to was, so I’ll just leave this here.]…

The second lecture we picked was about “Making it our breaking it in the App Store”… The topic sounded super-interesting and was held by some clueless person from Stardoll.com… Now I don’t know if it was the lack of sleep, the restlessness or just coming from a better lecture, but this lecture was complete and utter torture. 

For an hour I had to listen to a grown Swedish man stumble and fumble in English, a language he had apparent trouble with, and in the end- the lecture was incredibly uninformative. It downright sucked, and we couldn’t wait until it was over. PLUS, it was delayed…. so by the time we ran to the next lecture hall for our lecture held by Unity, the lecture hall was full, we didn’t get to sit and ended up standing/half-leaning on a wall for an hour or longer….

We were given three meals a day at the conference, and the food wasn’t too bad- we got to choose from Italian, Chinese and pasta salad. 

Our last lecture on Saturday was during lunch, and we chose to listen to ARM’s presentation on “The Future of Gaming Platforms.”- which was a bunch of statistics on sales of different devices and estimated sales figures on different devices. It was a really interesting lecture as well, so all in all- most of the lecturers were great.

After lunch, we didn’t have much to do. The conference had a bunch of events in form of workshops and talking to the companies there but since we [Mainly Sofia and I]:
1)  We’re still first-year students. We don’t know much, we have nothing to contribute with….We had no questions
2) We had no computers with us, so the workshops would’ve been for naught
3) ……We got bored?

And so a few of us decided to head into town!

We went to a vintage clothes store called Beyond Retro….They had…interesting things.

And here we have Sergels Torg!
 

And more to the left of the picture is the large mall, ‘Gallerian’….We were extremely thirsty and had some ice cream instad. [Chocolate and cheesecake flavoured]

In the evening we went back to the conference for dinner and the ‘pub night’ they were hosting as well.

It turns out we aren’t nerdy at all.

This was a whole new level of nerdy.

After dinner, they had a huge screen set up for contestants to battle in Starcraft II while one of the top 8 commentators in the world was there commenting on strategies and gameplay……And the other nerds assembled to drink beer, cider or wine, or all- while watching the ….intense games… 

I’ve never played Starcraft, let alone Starcraft II, so I was pretty much bored out of my mind. But so were most of the people with us from Lund, so at least we had each other’s company….In the dark while a bunch of nerds were screaming and ooing and aaing at the bright screen… 

We were definitely not mentally prepared for that.

So by 8 PM, Sofia and I said goodbye to the others and Simon, and took the trains back to her house. We had our own girl’s evening and it was such a nice time to just relax and take it easy.

We snoozed in the morning and missed the first lectures, we only really wanted to go for DICE’s lecture on “Showing off your game” making video trailers for your games. The topic itself great I guess, but the guy presenting it was great. He made it a whole load of laughs and fun, which really showed what a difference it makes to be a good public speaker. [I still cringe when I think about that stupid Stardoll-lecture…]

And after that, was a lunch lecture on “Survival course for the Game Industry” that has more or less deterred me from ever wanting to be a game developer in the foreseeable future. It more or less showed how tough it is in the gaming industry, once you make it you make it big, but if you don’t, you don’t stand a chance… More or less. 

The average game developer works with game development for very few reasons. The biggest one is their passion for games. They have incredibly bad working hours and horrible pay. Some hardly get paid at all.

Mission complete mr Lecturer, I’ll stick to my engineering program and hopefully I’ll be able to rely on my Master’s in Computer Science to landing me a job.

And that was more or less the end of the conference.

They let us roam around for a bit more to talk to the companies sponsoring the conference, and they still had some minor events going on, but all in all- we had gotten the most out of what we wanted to be there for in the first place, so it was definitely time to go back and get packed.

Goodbye KTH and Stockholm! Please be warmer the next time I visit!