Boden is today the northernmost location for the gaming industry in Sweden. The Boden Game Camp ecosystem creates new opportunities for people to get involved in the gaming industry, with all that it entails in terms of game and web development, and at the same time create a life for themselves in northern Sweden.
Students from Sweden and all over the world come to Norrbotten for an education with good prospects for a career in a digital industry of the future. We have 200 students on our premises, divided between one folk high school, five vocational training courses and one upper secondary school.
– We are very happy that Futuregames will keep Sweden’s only game tester training, it will be a core for building a QA hub here in Boden, says Emil Sandberg, Business Developer at Boden Business Park/Boden Game Camp.
At Boden Business Park there is some accommodation, companies offering internships and some students have also found jobs at some of the established game studios after completing their education. One studio, Northify, which was founded in the summer of 2021 and works on testing and quality assurance (QA) of games in particular, welcomes the extension of the training.
– The continuation of the QA training at Boden Game Camp shows that Yrkeshögskolan has a great understanding of the industry needs and a confidence in what we are building. The goal of Northify is to be the leading QA company in the gaming industry in the Nordic countries and to succeed, QA training is extremely important! Now we can continue to work forward and offer even more students internships and job opportunities in the coming years, which is great fun and exactly what we strive to do,” says Mattias Bergqvist, CEO of Northify and business developer at Boden Business Park/Boden Game Camp.
– It’s a terribly fun course, not quite what I expected because it’s more fun than I thought. It is very varied, we have cases where companies reach out to us for help with playtesting. Then what we do depends on the course, if it’s honest game testing then it’s basically bug reporting. Right now we’re doing regression testing and it’s more feedback on bugs so this is a bit different than what we’re used to, now we’re getting into the details of how a game should be in terms of movements for example and confirming those features. So it’s very detailed and it’s reported in a different way. So we have many different ways and different angles for how we approach quality assurance.
We have also worked with usability testing to broaden our scope, which included something called User Research. You might not test it yourself, but we invite other testers and then we do a scientific report where we examine the game. With User Research, we hit another market and there we basically write a scientific report where we test games and then confirm various theses. Theses are then what we think might be difficult before a game and then we investigate and confirm if it is correct based on what the test subjects showed or appreciated, says Gustav Lundh, Student at QA Futuregames in Boden.
Boden Gamecamp is an integral part of Boden Business Park, a collaboration with Sunderby Folk High School and Changemaker Educations.
