Gamers' Challenge, an event I organized with Swedish Game Awards (SGA) on the 4th of October.

As SGA is a game development competition, for students, it is only natural that the participants are independent developers. But as we all know there isn't a really big gamer community for independent games. Most gamers play AAA-titles. So to bring some attention to the games we organized a game tournament, where you play the winning games of SGA 2006. The tournament was cutely named Gamers' Challenge.

The event was a real learning experience. Neither I nor anyone else of the organizers has held a game tournament, but how hard can it be? Actually, it wasn't that hard.

• You'll need a lot of computers - host it at a gaming cafe


• You'll need games to play - use winners/participants from a game dev compo


• You'll need to keep scores - use CompoMaster


• You'll need prizes - use merchandise from sponsors


• You'll want spectator mode, real-time score updating, other stuff in AAA titles - it won't happen

The hard part was the clan 5on5 game. Creating guilds was a more tedious task than the developers had counted with. As usual with problems, they never come alone. So when one guild was finally finished, some of the team members had already gotten bored and gone home or changed teams.

But we pulled it off! You can read about the event on our site.