Indie video games saved my 2016

Writer Kate Gray spent the year exploring indie game events around Europe; what she learned about creativity and community has left a lasting impression

Over the summer, I spent a month at Stugan, a Swedish "game development acceleration camp". That may sound like a faintly sinister concept, but it was in fact stupidly idyllic. The eight-week event, organised by alumni from game publishers Rovio and King, took place in adorable red wooden cabins perched on a hill overlooking a lake - apparently called "Bjursen", although we just called it The Lake, because we couldn't pronounce anything correctly. While not working on our game development projects, we watched meteor showers from a nearby mountaintop, swam beneath the Northern Lights, and sat around a campfire getting sloshed on schnapps.

The Stugan attendees were from all over the world, but we'd ended up in this tiny corner of Scandinavia, brought together by the one thing we shared: the desire to create and play video games. I turned up three weeks late, and already an outsider as the only journalist, but within a few days I felt like I'd been welcomed as one of the team. There with me were people like Ivan Notaros, an incredibly talented Serbian developer who was ostensibly making a game called House of Flowers based on his experience and knowledge of the war in Yugoslavia in the 90s, but spent much of his time making tiny games, procedurally generated art, and incredible low-res photogrammetry of us as a group. There were Michael and Laura, a married team who were making a game despite being animators rather than programmers, using their artistic style to inform what their project, Thin Air, would become.