The Team Apprien will be at the Develop: Brighton 2019 UK event at 9th to 10th of June. Thanks for the kind invitation and our friends with IGDA, Unity and Jagex we are able to participate the 9th The Develop conference. We are at the indie Expo and our very own “man in the yellow hoodie” VP of Biz Dev Mr. Arto Käyhkö will be around the off site events too – come to say hi and talk about the latest of IAP monetisation!

The Develop:Brighton conference is where the European developer community comes together to learn from each other and share experiences, be inspired by world renowned experts and gurus, get up-to-date with the latest development tools and techniques, make new contacts and catch up with old ones.

With a programme that is shaped by some of the industry’s key figures, the conference touches all levels of the development community from the largest studios to the smallest indies; from development directors to programmers. It is also leading UK game industry event and has record breaking amount of developers participating this year too. Last year was more than 3500 developers present. The Develop: Brighton consists of industry talks, workshops and indie expo and Pitch&Match area. All neatly in one place in Brighton only 40 miles away from London.

Apprien Dynamic Pricing Team has arrived to Malmö, Sweden to attend Nordic Game 2019 -conference.

Apprien Dynamic Pricing Team attended China Dev Days in Helsinki.

Apprien was honoured to participate the FGA 2019 gala at the Restaurant Bank in Helsinki last week.  The successful game industry of Finland celebrated and rewarded their best in the Finnish Game Awards organised 25.4  in Helsinki. The evening was full of great friends, cool companies and awards. I guess couple of the gem moments were the double victory by Supercell and the celebration of Bugbear’s comeback in a new prize category. The evening was splendid combination of music, entertainment, good food and drinks – these all are thanks for the gala sponsors and partners. It is also cool to see once a year the ever so laid back gaming community peeps putting on their best and glamours outfits for a one night 😉

A total of eight awards were presented in the gala. The Finnish Game of the Year 2018, Best Mobile Game, and Best Computer and Console Game were chosen by the members of the Finnish Game Developers’ Association. The Applied Game Award 2018 was selected by the Serious Gaming Cluster Finland Association. The Best Creative Achievement of the Year 2018 and the Comeback of the Year 2018 were chosen by the board of the Finnish Game Developers’ Association. Also Power Player of the Year Award was presented and IGDA Finland presented their recognition to Christopher Hamilton with the Volunteer of the Year award for his work for the community in 2018. Here is the list of the awards and winners:

Applied Game Award 2018: Lights On! / Turku Game Lab & Humak

The Best Creative Achievement of the Year 2018: The Thief of Thieves / Rival Games

Comeback of the Year 2018: Wreckfest / Bugbear

Power Player of the Year: Petri Hyökyranta / Rovio

Big Screen Game of the Year 2018: Tesla v. Lovecraft / 10tons

Mobile Game 2018 (Small Screen Game of the Year 2018): Brawl Stars / Supercell

Main Prize: The 2018 Finnish Game of the Year 2018: Brawl Stars / Supercell

More info and pictures of the gala can be found from www.neogames.fi

Team Apprien`s own dynamic duo Arto and Jesse will be presenting our dynamic IAP pricing solution for the fellow Nordics at the The Nordic Game conference that is held annually in Malmö, Sweden.

The 2019 edition of Nordic Game will take place on 22-24 May at Slagthuset, near Malmö city center and only minutes away from Copenhagen Airport. The event has proven to be THE place to meet Nordic developers and academia around the gaming industry.

As the leading games conference in Europe, we have a lot to offer, including a program filled with the best speakers from the global industry and our own Nordic heroes, access to international exhibitors and 2000+ professionals, world-class hospitality and a host of networking events, such as MeetToMatch • Expo • Discovery Day • Nordic Game Awards • the new Dinner Experience • and renowned Nordic Party.

We are exited and looking forward to meeting up with all old and new friends in Malmö again 🙂

Reboot Develop Blue 2019 took place in 11th to 13th of April 2019 in the legendary historical seaside city of Dubrovnik, also known as “real world King’s Landing” from HBO TV series Game of Thrones. The timing was also perfect since the 8th and last season of the series was in premier just at the following weekend 🙂  The conference was again at the luxurious conference resort – Sheraton Dubrovnik Riviera. The facilities are top notch and all key notes and meetings will take place at the lobby and confrere area of the hotel.

In 2019 the sixth edition the conference was revealing name and logo rebranding (with Blue edition in the same year being set in Dubrovnik, CROATIA during spring while Red will take place in Banff, Canada during fall) being set to grow again and go again level higher then previous iteration, reconfirming it’s position as the most unique, premier and high-end games industry and game developers event in Europe and one of the biggest worldwide. This year in Dubrovnik was present more than 800 participants from 120 different companies. Also record participants amount from Finnish game development industry, nearly 60 people! The main interest was around FINGERSOFT STAGE, where they presented the new logo of the company and also many good speeches that highlighted the Fingersoft game publishing arm Round Zero and their unique data driven approach to see and improve the performance of f2p mobile games. Also another Finnish company Matchmade – influencer network company hosted very interested talks about how and what kind of influencers developers should look for and use to reach their audience.

Apprien says big thanks to Damir Đuroviç and the whole organising team for a superb event!

The Team Apprien was happy to join the speakers of  The GameDev Days 2019 Conference in Tallinn. GDD is an excellent networking opportunity for all developers and everybody working in gaming industry.. Traditionally, it will bring together the world’s leading game development companies to share their knowledge and ambitions in a very cool industrial surroundings in Kulturikatel. The event is hosted by Creative Mobile, one of the leading developers in Estonia.

Apprien was represented by our VP Arto Käyhkö, CTO Kristian Lauttamus, Senior Developer Noora Planting and BizDev Manager Matti Levo. All liked the relaxed atmosphere and good meetings with top game developers and industry experts. One specific thing about GDD as a boutique trade show is that that everything is close by – no long queuing, endless corridors of meeting rooms and show floors sized of football stadiums. No, everything is in your fingertips and people are easy to find. Also Estonians are super friendly and hospitality is overwhelming. This year we noticed that the Reboot conference was exactly at the same time which probably limited the Finnish companies attendance into the event. Also notable was the amount of PC/ Console developers and the rise of the online casino games.

We want to express our gratitude and big thanks to Vladimir and Marianna from Creative Mobile and also for the whole event organisation. Surely if you work in the game development industry in the Nordics, this is a must event! Whether you’re running a business, seeking wisdom, or want to be in the spotlight, GameDev Days is the place where Nordic and Baltic gaming business meet each other in relaxed atmosphere !

The Team Apprien represented by Mr. Arto Käyhkö will be at the Quo Vadis 2019 Gaming Conference in Berlin participating the indie advisory group. Thanks to the invitation to Booster Space Berlin and  Games:net Berlin-Brandenburg. “It is always interesting to meet and talk with the dynamic indie developers and hear whats cooking and coming up from their creative pots and pans next. I feel that the energy and commitment from the indie studios is inspiration for us all”, says Mr. Käyhkö, partner and Vice President of Apprien ltd.

QUO VADIS is the core B2B event during two days of Games Week Berlin.
In 2019, it will be a new and holistic experience: central, convenient and perfectly integrated into this one week full of gaming events connecting business, technology and culture. The reason for that: with the new host Booster Space, the organizers of gamesweekberlin themselves are responsible the QUO VADIS for the first time. It consists of keynotes, talks, roundtables and workshops focusing on individually tailored tracks for business developers, game developers, community developers and other industries interested in digital games.
Berlin is  one of Europe’s hot spots for gaming professionals. In Quo Vadis you can meet with decision makers, creative minds and leaders of the gaming industry and lay the foundation for your success.

We believe in test automation, quality and sustainability of code. All of our systems are failsafe for the end users aka gamers. Here’s some of our methods on how we enforce (in a nice way) our tech standards.

Test Automation

Only thing that ensures our product’s quality is testing. We run our tests before every git commit ... and our CI runs tests on every merge request. We are really proud to be able to assure our customers that when they use Apprien, every single test has been run on Apprien’s every service and every test has passed 100%.

We currently have over 12500 tests written, with even more assertions.

Unit testing vs. Integration testing

My vision about Unit tests is that Unit tests should be completely non-dependant of anything other than the thing you’re testing. So if you’re testing controller’s action, you should mock every single thing it handles, including the database. This makes it so, if someone makes a change in the database migrations, the code itself calculating only numbers for example. Will behave as it should.

Continuous Integration (CI)

There are multiple events that trigger our CI’s pipeline for each project. We do most of our DevOps on the CI side also, to minimize user error. One of these CI pipeline triggering events is that for example our current Lead Developer Jussi creates a merge request, our CI checks tests and QA. If it goes through, it can be merged after the code review.

Git workflow

We have our own Gitlab set up, which we use for version controlling internal systems. Our public code will (atleast for now) be available on Github. Our git workflow goes so that we use a branch naming convention familiar from JIRA, PROJECT-TASK-description. Definition of done includes that tests need to be done for the feature wanting to get merged and more. After someone creates a new merge request, our CI checks tests and QA. Then the merge request gets reviewed and if it goes through. It goes to our Staging environment, and from there we release to production.

Pair Programming

While it might cost us more to do pair programming, it helps our coders reach the same skill level faster and more efficiently. This makes sure that our team is always up to date with the big tech stack that we have. Usually we switch pairs around on every daily stand up. If there’s only tasks that everyone can do well, then I try to pair up people by having two coders that know more about different techs. For example Jussi knows a lot about our Game Api backend and Jenna knows a lot about our Apprien dashboard. Pairing them up makes them the perfect combo to complete tasks efficiently.

Apprien Dynamic Pricing had a very good time at GDC 2019 Nordic Party! Thank you IGDA,  Neogames and all organizers for a great event!