I have just returned from a pleasant trip to Future Entertainment Week 2006. This is a summer camp for young talents from primarly Denmark but also Norway and Sweden. Out of several hundred applications, 50 were selected for the game development part and 50 for nano technology.
I was on the team developing a game called Dropship as 2d artist. My 2d skills are not the best, but we lacked 2d artists and I was the best for the spot.
Television spotabout the the camp and our game at TV2.
Here is a picture of my crew:
http://thefuture.dk/futureweek/dropshipteam.jpg
All the games where judged by a group consisting of the 100 attendees and a group of judges. Among the judges were Thomas Howalt(Producer at IO Interactive), Lars Kroll(CEO of Runestone Game Development), Ole Rasmussen(Vice Director of IBM Denmark) and Kristian G. Olesen(Leader of Computer Science at Aalborg University).
Our team managed to get the most votes from both the attendees and the judges. So we won everything, which was quite a cool experience. Among the rewards were an Ipod, an usb-key, a belt, a jacket and some other random stuff.
We had to develop a game totally from scratch in 4 days, so sleep was not among the things we got a lot of. Unhealthy amounts of Coca-cola, X-ray and pizza kept us going though.
If you are danish you can read a lot more about the event in the diary from the Game Development Camp and the Nano Camp. More pictures can also be found in those diaries.