Megapop

Final common playthrough of Life Below before the holidays. Almost everyone in the office❤️ 2024 was thankfully a positive year for us. Our best year to date, but we have worked really hard to make that happen. It’s rickety times in the world, so we don’t take anything for granted these days. Overall, we are just grateful we can keep being us 🙏 The quest continues in 2025! Then it’s good to play together before the holidays, and talk about our plans for the times to come. Many have supported us this year, including our gamers, our clients, NFI, Bufdir, Creative Europe, Forskningsrådet and many other friends, fellow devs and supporters. Thank you 🙏🙏🙏

Yay! We have launched a big update to 'Rasmus & Gusse på Sykehuset'. As you may notice we have updated the name, too, now including the Badger Gusse! He is the hospital mascot at St. Olavs hospital in Trondheim, meaning the hospital treatment game now comes into play for Middle-Norway! We captured some of the new gamplay in the video. With Gusse, we worked closely with the staff at St. Olav to get out his character, voice and new meanings to the game. Since Rasmus was tied to the treatments, we all wanted a bit more play in it. This is what Gusse brings along! The game now joins a research study on "pre-operation preparation" for kids, mixing it in with the other methods the hospital use to prepare kids for operation. We hope it adds nicely to the mix of prepping kids (and parents). This new use of games is not really studied a lot. Since this is, to our knowledge, the first ever public use of a game towards hospitals, we look forward to seing the results sometime in 2025. In the meantime; the game is free, for kids 3-7, and you find it on the app stores; https://lnkd.in/d_tn-5GQ https://lnkd.in/dcvFggvj The game remains a not-for-profit title for Megapop, and we have invested considerable time, effort and resources to getting to the state it is in. We hope it may help the kids, serve as an inspiration for other games, as well as giving us insights into future use of games into new sectors.

Big news from the Life Below team! We’re thrilled to share that we some time ago received a 500.000 NOK grant from BUFDIR to extensively support accessibility in Life Below, and our future games. From the start of this project, we’ve been committed to making our games inclusive, so as many people as possible can enjoy our creations. With this support, we’re able to push that further. We got expert advice from Twitch streamer and accessibility consultant Elisabeth Sivertsen (Arevya), who lends us her extensive experience. The UK-based charity SPECIALEFFECT.ORG.UK LIMITED have also been supporting our accessibility work, with free advice from their experienced multidisciplinary team. Their feedback after playthroughs has been pure gold, and we’re  excited to keep building on it! We also have several members on the dev team who are really eager on this. This mix of positive forces will hopefully lead to a better game, for every player.  While we’re keeping some of our plans under wraps for now, we’re aiming to make Life Below one of the most inclusive city-builders out there. Our goal is then to create software libraries to embed accessibility as a standard in all our future projects. We have then promised to share our findings back to the Norwegian game development community as a whole, a pledge we intend to hold, and already are looking into. It’s a great milestone in our journey—one we hope will work towards a new accessibility bar for what’s possible in city-builders strategy games. _ _ _ _ Bufdir (The Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs), in case you wondered! SpecialEffect is a UK-based charity dedicated to enhancing the lives of individuals with physical disabilities by making video games accessible to them. Founded in 2007 by Dr. Mick Donegan, the organization employs innovative technology to create customized gaming setups tailored to each person's unique abilities and needs www.specialeffect.org.uk

Some of us are a Konsoll this week, the great Norwegian game developer conference. Senior Designer Thor Palsson had a talk there yesterday for a legion of students about "The Power of Game Jams", and it focused on how to use Game Jams to create a diverse portfolio and land a job in the games industry. We borrowed the images from the organizers, we hope that is ok!

We are a Lillehammer today to hold a talk

The Hitatchi Energy game we made for the energy conferences in Norway and France worked really well! We are now improving and expanding on the game together with Hitachi to use it at the largest Swedish Energy conference. We hope even more people will learn about how Hitachi Energy works, and cool to once again verify that games are effective to engage visitors at conferences. For now only playable at said conferences, so you'll have to take our word for it!

Rob Riches have been out in Norwegian libraries for a while now. When we got this cute message from Gjesdal library, it melted our hearts a little, as we worked really hard to make Rob Riches intuitive for all ages and player types! "As a public library, we get Norwegian games through the purchasing program, and that’s how we got Rob Riches. Kids are often skeptical of new games, and we only have a few seconds to grab their attention. Rob Riches has been the most successful, with short levels and a great learning curve. We’ve used it during school visits, on our game Tuesdays, and we’re excited to showcase it at our upcoming game festival."

Almost everybody in Megapop/ Team Life Below out for lunch today. We’re at the end of a very important sprint to us, shipping out to potentials later today after 18 months of work! Feels like we are making a game which is very new and different, yet at the same time something most every city-builder fan will love. We shall soon find out if others think the same. Julie, Joachim and Simen will hopefully join next time!

We are going to the Konsoll conference in Bergen next month with some of our devs! Megapop Senior Game Designer Thor Palsson will hold a talk at Konsoll's "Student day", seeking to inspire future game-developers-to-be on how to join the games industry! "Thor Palsson is a Nord graduate that currently works as Senior Game Designer for Megapop. With over Six years of experience in the gaming industry. In his career Thor has worn many hats, everything from Co-Founder, Teacher, Programmer to Game Designer. Thor has a strong passion for storytelling and mechanical game design. Beyond his work with Megapop Thor is an avid “Game Jammer” and has published over 20 jam projects. When not working on Games Thor you will often find him playing tabletop rpg’s or reading a good book."

We had an extensive test session at the offices on friday. Some 30 devs and gamers (mostly) played Life Below. Some really good discussions, insights and just very good for us to be at a stage where we can trigger such talks