And the winner is...

The jury 's task was to find the game that best lived up to the criteria for the competition. The jury's members was picked to give a good spread from industry and academia; from the industry it was Alessandro Canossa from IO Interactive and Stephanie Munck from Deadline Games, from academia Troels Linde from the University of Gotland in Sweden and as wildcard we had Erik Robertson, Director of The Nordic Game Program, which supports the game industry in Scandinavia and is responsible for the annual Nordic Game Conference in Malmö near Copenhagen.

The jury didn't take long to decide. They chose Love Child as the winner of the Jury's Award. Love Child is a 2D cooperative multiplayer-game and a comment on genetic screening of fetuses. The players play the parents of a baby. Good and bad genes rain down, and the parents have to toss the baby between them to catch the good genes and have to shoot the bad genes. The game was made by a group of four people for the Gamemaker platform.

The rules for the Participant's Award were rather straightforward: vote on the game that you like to best. Luckily the voting wasn't tied. Segregation came out as a clear winner, with Dark Room XX as second and Mass Salvation as third.

Segregation is a 2D top-down action-puzzle. Each player has his home in either end of the level, and must draw a path for his followers to his home, so they can follow it home. If followers get entangled where the two players' paths crossed, or were left alone for too long, they'd become aggressive and attack the other player's followers. The purpose of the game is to segregate the followers before violence breaks out (developer diary and game available here).

NGJ'08 officially ended after the award-ceremony, but the student bar at ITU -- Scrollbar -- opened and participants went for a beer, to mingle and exchange development stories from two days in the trenches.

A good time was had by all, and it's our general perception that the vast majority of the participants plan to return next year for Nordic Game Jam '09. One U.S. student from the ITU told us that he was considering going from the States to the Denmark next year primarily to participate in the Game Jam.

In conclusion

We had a blast making Nordic Game Jam '08, and we can promise -- without a doubt -- that there will be a NGJ'09. However, NGJ doubled its size this year, which put a lot of strain on the organization. And there is no reason to assume that event is going to be smaller next year.

We are currently looking into various types of funding to make sure that NGJ'09 is going to be just as good as this year -- with a tight focus on innovation in games, experimental games, and a bit of academia. The ambition is to make NGJ the event to be at in Northern Europe if you want to test your skills and creativity and make the most experimental game in 49 hours straight. We hope to see you next year!