What is a game jam? It's a challenge to create a video game from scratch in a short amount of time. There are a lot of different ones being run; for Ludum Dare you and your team have 72 hours to make and submit your game. Although that may sound impossible, game jams are popular exactly because they force you to be creative instead of dithering about the details of what you want to make.

Ludum Dare

Ludum Dare has been running for fifteen years now, and this was the 39th edition. Thousands of people across the world participated, all creating games on the same theme—which was not announced until the start of the jam. You can always participate at home, but getting together with other jammers is much more fun. It also lets you meet new people and form new teams. That's very necessary, because making a game requires so many different skills.

In Zürich, the local game developers' group Gamespace organises meetups for Ludum Dare, and this was the second time Liip has hosted them. It's much easier to jam if you have a big space where you're not disturbing anyone by spreading out electronics and making weird sounds.

The Jam

We started on Saturday morning with croissants and orange juice and discussed the theme: Running out of power. A good jam theme should have lots of different possible interpretations, and our group discussed running out of computing or graphics power, the Spoon Theory, losing political power, losing magical powers, or having to constantly charge your mobile phone in the game. In the end we split into two groups. One decided to make a story game about coping with depression, and the other started on a platformer about a magical creature giving up their powers to become more human.

The groups got down to business and began writing code and using graphics tablets to make the artwork. Both games were programmed using the Unity engine, a popular choice because of its broad feature set and visual editor.

For the game Dryad, which I worked on with David Stark, we wanted to come up with all our sound effects from scratch. This meant repurposing whatever office supplies we could find in unexpected ways! The sound of sticky tape being pulled off the roll became the sound of a magical spell. Riffling a block of post-its, we got the sound of a crossbow firing a bolt. The noise of triumph when you reach the end of a level comes from a table football trophy being struck!

The Results

By the end of Sunday night, our games were mostly complete and only needed the finishing touches to be submitted on Monday. Both of them are available to play online: Dryad and 03:00 AM. We'll discuss the creation process at a future Gamespace meetup. In the meantime, the games from the Ludum Dare 38 jam (also held at Liip Zürich) are available here:

• Turtle Rider
• Annulus
• Ghost Story
• Herbarium
• Escape from the Bottle

The current result is a starterkit providing the essential bricks to start in a snap a website project for the federal government running with Drupal 8, based on the version 3 of the official styleguide.

Navigation modules, multilingual environnement per default (German, French, Italian, Rumantch and English), responsive layout following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, we threw the fundamental stones for bootstraping a web platform for the Confederation.

con~foederatio : to build a league, together.

In other words, joining forces, to support a common cause. From the very start of the project we decided to opensource the code, as a participatory initiative.

Learn more about this intent.

Any developer working on a new website for the swiss government can now quickly start developing with this Drupal starterkit, then modify, contribute and improve it collegially. Pulling requests and opening issues on GitHub is the recommended way to help us extend further the project.

What's inside the box

The Bund-Starterkit provides theme and elements based on the official styleguide (version 3.0.0) of the Swiss Federal Administration.

This starterkit also contains a base to quickly implement a website running on Drupal 8 for the Swiss Federal Administration. Currently, it provides the following Drupal and frontend elements:

• Multilingual main navigation blocks
• Multilingual service navigation blocks
• Multilingual footer service navigation blocks
• Logo block
• Language switcher block with German, French, Italian, Rumantsch enabled
• All the assets (CSS, SASS. JS files) provided by the official styleguide
• A ready-to-use SASS workflow

Installation process, an overview

Please check the Readme file to quickly start your project. But let's have a look at the details of the installation process. First of all, Composer (a PHP dependencies manager) is binding together for us the following repositories:

• a Drupal 8 installer
• a theme:  bund_drupal_starterkit_theme
• an installation profile:  bund_drupal_starterkit_profile

• a module for importing menu content:

  bund_drupal_starterkit_dummycontent

After downloading the sources with Composer and setting your vhost and hosts files, you have two options. Continuing with a few drush commands to run the Drupal installation process, or following the installation wizard in the browser. If you choose this last option, don't forget to select the «Bund profile» option when the wizard ask you to choose a profile:

Continue with the last steps of the wizard and that's it. you should be able to see an empty Drupal 8 website, painted with the swiss administration's corporate sauce.

Inserting menus content

With the help of a .CSV file and some drush commands, you can quickly import your menu structure. Once done, create and assign your content the the freshly created menu items through the Drupal administration interface.

Theming

Don't forget to create a personal Drupal sub-theme from the bund_drupal_starterkit_theme, as a Drupal best practice.  Don't edit the existing theme directly or you could loose your changes after a future update.

Frontend

This starterkit use the official styleguide (version 3.0.0) as a submodule. All existing CSS/JS files and assets are imported and available per default, but not necessary integrated as a drupal module at the moment. We highly encourage you to check the official styleguide before adding any new CSS style or JS files to your project. Based on the existing styles, it should be possible to create a lot of Drupal templates without modifying or extending any CSS. And as already said, we invite you to share any Drupal template matching the styleguide you would develop for your project.

Further reading

• Official styleguide
• Official announcement by Jenny Bächtold
• The Drupal starterkit repository
• An article  about the realization of the Style Guide of the Swiss Confederation
• A blogpost by Ludovic Turmel

Conference 2016.04.12
Revamping the Identity of an Iconic Technology Brand: Logitech

Rodrigo Castaňeda, Head of Brand Experience

© Atelier Kaïros photos

Logitech's rebranding was qualified as the most ambitious brand transformation in its 30+ year history' in the summary of the conference. It was intended to reflect the company's commitment to design and its transformation into a stronger, multi-category technology brand.

I was particularly interested in listening to Rodrigo Castaňeda and on which perspective he would adopt to explain Logitech's rebranding. Not only thanks to swissmarketing's appealing summary but especially because I think that there is nothing challenging like crisis communication or management. In those situations we learn the most and get to understand, in retrospect, from the weight of our decisions. The way a company tells its history is revealing of its essence.

2011-2013: Economical context

Founded in 1981 in Apples (Vaud, Switzerland), Logitech is specialized in the fabrication of peripheral devices. In the 80's, it started by producing mouses and keyboards for several enterprises such as HP, Dell or Sony, then expanded its range of products.

In 2010, along with Google and Sony, it planned to propose the Google TV. However in 2011, Logitech stopped its collaboration on the project, mentioning that this partnership was a mistake losing millions of dollars on the way. Certainly an unlucky timing, since it synchronized with an economic downturn: everybody thought PC was slowing down, because everything was going mobile. A few dark years followed, the 2012-2013 fiscal year had especially moribond perspectives. Logitech underwent different actions to fix the situation, the rebranding being one of them.

Of Logitech's history, Castaňeda only evoked the contextual economic situation of 2011-2013, mentioning that Logitech got into a turnaround mode because of it. The question challenging them at that moment was ‘how to maximise profit and grow the company beyond the PC strong hold?'

On the influence of your company's structure Castaňeda explained how Logitech operates in hundred countries, yet behaves as a small company, a nice place to work at, with little hierarchy, and everybody being very open. For example, nobody has an office, including the CEO, which makes everybody very accessible. You can just go, talk and ask, which made the teams very committed into the rebranding project.

« A lot of things were happening, and we had a lot ambition but how far do we pay tribute to it? how far do we diverge? » asked Castaňeda mentioning the need to honor and recognize Logitech's legacy and its approximately 30 years of existence, as it was being rebranded.

Logitech has a long story behind, it sold its one billionth mouse in 2008, however it needed to reinvent itself. Upon arrival, CEO Bracken Darrell did not only plan to refresh the product portfolio, drifting from peripherals to speakers, mobile and tablet accessories, but also create a design company. The existing excellency of the engineering would meet with design efforts. To undertake this task, Alastair Curtis, the head of design chief at Nokia, was hired.

State your ambitions

How do you bring customers from trusting to loving your products?

With a well planned brand strategy. Indeed, the purpose as a brand is at the intersection of the focus of the company (who we are, what we do) and its ambitions (where do we go?).

In Logitech's case, the wish was to go beyond functional performance; it should not only be about products and peripherals. The product should be carried beyond its physical assets. They wanted to design products that transcend their functional value and are loved by people. It is then about experiences.

To the three existing functional brand values – performance, ease of use, quality – three emotional values were added – engaging, empowering, inspiring – bringing Logitech new perspectives.

“We design (our focus as a company) experiences (beyond products) so you (beyond consumer) create, achieve and enjoy more.” stated the team.

SwissICT is the primary representative of the ICT Branch in Switzerland. They are based in Zürich and the largest professional association of the ICT industry, with 800 companies, 2'200 single members and 16 groups of experts (including User Experience).

As one of the objective of this non-profit organisation is the promotion of professional knowledge, the UX Expert Group organises various events throughout Switzerland (there are regular meet-ups in Bern, Zürich, Fribourg and now Lausanne). Four specialists of the UX Expert Group, Dorit Horst (Associate at Uservalue), Eva Siegenthaler (Manager UX@SBB-Team, SBB), Andreas Weder (Head of UX at Magnolia International Ldt.) and Philipp Murkowsky (Head of User Experience at Puzzle ITC GmbH) organized the event in Lausanne, with the support of the Liip Team.

Discussion and promotion of knowledge on UX & Agile

The aim of the ICT-UX events is to share valuable insights and best practices between specialists, to discuss each other's challenges and questions and to generate new inspiration. Indeed, the format of the evening was deeply participative! It consisted of 3 discussion groups with one to two mediators. The format is very flexible as we might walk from one group to another. It included more discussion and less talks. It started with a short introduction on UX practice and Agile method.

Dorit, Eva, Philipp and Andreas introduced us to the statements, which would be the ground of the evening's discussion:

• UX precedes agile
• UX is leading by one sprint
• You need to test with real users in every sprint

Once in groups, we wrote our thoughts on sticky notes and explained them to the group. We clustered them afterwards, according to their similarity in themes. Once clustered, we could identify priorities, a number one topic obviously had many notes.

Food for thoughts – short insights in the conversations

UX precedes agile As Philipp stated it ‘You have to prototype everything in advance!'

© ICT UX Expert Group

Philipp fostered the discussion: “We need to know where we are heading. Sometimes the client does not know where he is heading. How then do we integrate the development? Is the project feasible within the budget? Etc. Developers have a good perception of what the outcome will be and what the technical risks will be. They can spot things better, which means that they will be prone to solutions.”

UX is leading by one sprint «UX has to be one sprint ahead of development.»

© ICT UX Expert Group

The whole group agreed that having a vision gives us motivation to pursue the work. We judged that one week ahead is not enough, two weeks is ideal, because you have an iteration while the client is looking at the work and gives us feedbacks.

However, by big projects, and when you don't know what will be the big milestone, it is close to impossible to have UX first. One of the participant, recalling his experience, enhanced how important collaboration is between the UX and dev teams. In his example, the whole team decided to have a coffee together in the morning, enabling discussions. Such a simple thing actually really worked and facilitated the project.

You need to test with real users in every sprint

© ICT UX Expert Group

Testing with real users will deliver you facts instead of opinions. It will therefore allow you to base your decisions on real data. You should start testing with real users in early stages and continue doing so as the user requirements evolve. Regular user testings will also anchor a user-centered culture in the agile team.

Dorit provided us with insightful advice on how to run user tests. She recommended us to watch people's behavior instead of asking questions: “You can have as many opinions as people. But with behaviors, it is different, because you see what actually happens, you see where people fail, where they hesitate, slow down, etc. .” Thus, it provides you real data.

Next steps and further discussion At Liip, we all had a lot of fun participating at this event and we are excited about the next ICT UX meet-up. 

In every group, the discussion sooner or later fostered around the theme of the collaboration within the teams. The need to talk, between developers, UXers and PO was an evidence.

To continue discussing the subject, we recommend a talk (in French) by Jérémie Fontana, Art Director at Wax Interactive, on the collaboration between designers and developers. Jérémie will present us a case study on the functionalities of Adobe and the CreativeCloud services. Designers, developers and project managers, discover how you can optimise your workflow and save time! Darja Gartner, one of our UX specialist will be there, in case you have any question, don't hesitate to go to her!

Designers et développeurs, comment réussir votre collaboration?

13.04.2016, 18:30

Alpha Palmier, Lausanne

See our album of the evening here.

Don't miss any of our events and follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

More on User Experience @Liip here.

As Swisslinux.org member, I again had the opportunity to take part to the Rencontres Hivernales du Libre (roughly translated as ‘Winter Libre meetup'), up in the jura, in St-Cergue. This week-end-long meetup, organized for the second time this year, aims at gathering all libre-related actors. This article, originally written in french, tells you the story of what happened there, who attended and did what.

Les Rencontres Hivernales du Libre, deuxième édition

Dans le cadre de l'association Swisslinux.org dont je suis membre, j'ai à nouveau eu le plaisir de participer aux Rencontres Hivernales du Libre, du 8 au 10 janvier passés. Ces rencontres, organisées pour la deuxième fois en 2016, ont pour but de rassembler les acteurs romands du Libre, dans sa définition la plus large.

30 geeks à St-Cergue

Dès la première édition, l'idée a été de profiter d'une période et d'un cadre moins usuel, en allant chercher la neige là où elle est. Viser une expérience de “conférence” plus large; entre informatique et loisirs extérieurs. Lors de l'édition 2015, le beau temps avait permis à plusieurs participants de profiter de chacun de ces deux aspects, entre ski et surf.

Le lieu choisi cette année a de nouveau été le Centre du Vallon, à St-Cergue, pour son bon compromis entre proximité aux transports publics, enneigement et coûts.

Malheureusement, les conditions météorologiques de l'édition 2016 ont été moins profitables, avec un faible manteau neigeux, arrosé de pluie durant tout le week-end. Bonne surprise cependant, avec l'incinération des sapins de Noël de la commune, organisée devant le local par les pompiers, qui a amené une grande bouffée de chaleur à ce week-end maussade.

Il s'y est passé quoi ?

Répondant à l'appel de Swisslinux.org, plusieurs associations et organismes étaient présents, favorisant ainsi les échanges inter-disciplinaires et les discussions animées. Petit tour de présentations.

Les bricoleurs du Post Tenebras Lab(le hackerspace genevois) ont profité d'une salle d'atelier pour travailler sur un système de paiement sans fil entièrement libre (matériel et logicel). ATICOM, association orientée vers l'enseignement et la pédagogie, a présenté ses activités lors d'une conférence. Doxel.org a présenté ses dernières avancées en photo-grammétrie avec des senseurs optiques non-calibrés: impressionnante combinaison de technologies pour la reconstitution de scènes tri-dimensionnelles à l'aide de photos prises par des téléphones portables. L' IAPC a amené et mis en place tout le matériel nécessaire pour l'implantation d'une station radio-amateur: entre l'antenne d'un mètre cinquante et les équipements électroniques, l'ensemble en a impressioné plus d'un. Axel & Frank, venus de loin, ont présenté leur projet collaboratif de livre sur les techniques d'empaquetage pour  Debian (en allemand). La présentation a abordé les défis éditoriaux (trouver, puis convaincre un éditeur de la viabilité et de l'intérêt d'un livre libre) et les défis techniques (collaboration à deux personnes géographiquement distantes sur un même ouvrage, ouverture de la rédaction aux contributeurs externes, assurer la construction et la distribution du livre dans différents formats, etc.).

Défis et Organisation

20 personnes étaient déjà présentes vendredi soir, pour un souper en commun “ à la bonne franquette“. Le lendemain soir, 8 caquelons de fondue ont été servis aux 35 participants. Ensuite, si d'aucuns restaient sur leurs laptops, d'autres ont laissé leurs claviers de côté pour des discussions ou des jeux de société. Autant dire que la soirée ne s'est pas terminée tôt!

L'organisation d'une telle conférence, bien que modeste en nombre de participants, est tout de même une suite de défis à relever. Au niveau des repas, la décision a été prise de prendre une équipe professionnelle pour la cuisine: ce fut une bénédiction culinaire! Si mettre en place et maintenir une infrastructure sans fil pour 30 participants n'est pas si compliqué en théorie, en pratique, ce n'est pas le WiFi qui a failli, mais l' uplink Swisscom. La conférence s'est donc terminée en accédant à l'Internet par la 4G.

Swisslinux.org remercie les différents parrains qui ont permis la tenue de cet événement: le GULL et  ATICOM pour les soutiens financiers et Liip pour avoir assuré la logistique et le financement du café pour tout le monde.

À l'année prochaine, pour une nouvelle édition, qu'on espère enneigée!

Just open this link as Network Link in Google Earth and you can enjoy geotagged Swiss blogs in 3D :)

See it in action.

It basically shows all Swiss blogs, which are geotagged (how to do that is explained on alain's blog) and the icon fades out, the older the latest post is. It is automatically updated every hour by endoxon via our georss feed from the planet.

The feed also looks for geotagged posts (and not only the main blog coordinates) and displays the icon there, but that only happens for your latest post. I try to improve that feature in the near future.

See also my older post about how blogug does the geolocation recognition.

BTW: I know, that slug.ch has something like this since ages, but “we” have high resolution for the whole of Switzerland :)

Posts per day:

Active weblogs:

Certainly too early to make a final statement and anyway, noone claims that blogug knows all Swiss blogs :)