In our efforts to give you the best view of the world's mobile gaming hotspots, we've decided to dedicate a regular slot to the comings and goings in the ever vibrant Nordic region.

(To those of you who skipped geography, that's essentially Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland.)

In the months ahead, expect to see the biggest developments from the Nordic region details across these pages – news that, with studios across the region enjoying international success, will no doubt define the mobile industry as we move forward.

News just like this, in fact...

Multiplayer mode

While the eyes of the gaming world were firmly focused on Google during its annual I/O conference, news of the giant's new game service platform was viewed with skepticism by one Stockholm studio.

Jihua Liu and Johan Lövdahl, co-founders of multiplayer solution UxVibe, believe that Google new social gaming platform is saddled by its rigid nature, which - among other features - also lacks a key component: real-time multiplayer.

"Services such as Apple's Game Center and, recently, Google's Game Services provide game developers with APIs to build social real-time or turn-based multiplayer games," said Lövdahl.

"Both of these services are tightly coupled to iOS versus Android and require users to login with their Apple ID and Google+ account.

"Our real time and turn based APIs today work on all Android variants and will in the near future have support for iOS. In short, we offer easy discovery and integration of cross platform real-time multiplayer capabilities without the privacy concerns currently plaguing Google Play."



Lövdahl's comments are undoubtedly coloured by a certain amount of self interest, of course. More details on UxVibe – and it's new multiplayer framework uWe – can be found on the firm's website.

Ahead of the game

Another day, and another studio sprouts up in Finland's blossoming games industry.

Say hello to Headnought, a five person studio from Lappeenranta with an intriguing beginning and big ambitions.

"The story of the game and Headnought all started when a few of us took part in the Finnish Game Jam 2012 and created the first prototype in just 48 hours," CEO Pauli Jutila told us.

"The approach was more on crude humor and we managed to draw quite some laughs from the other jam participants and industry representatives. For a while after the event some of us kept working with the project but eventually other stuff came along for everyone and quietly the effort just faded.

"A few months later, at a demonstration event for a whole another project we did for a university game-making course, a friend of mine insisted that I show our previous prototype too.

"It was then when the CEO of Nitro Games - Jussi Tähtinen - remarked that our game about a pink helicopter with a smiling face might have commercial appeal. Maybe he was just being nice about it at the moment, who knows!"

The studio's first game, WoodChopper, is currently in development for mobile platforms and Jutila hopes the game may be the spring board the studio needs to spur it on to bigger projects.



"We're aiming for a late summer or early fall release date," added Jutila.

"This is largely dependent on if WoodChopper manages to attract the attention of a publisher. Regarding the platforms, because we're using the Unity3D engine we can be quite flexible.

"We have developed the game primarily with mobile devices in mind, but AppCampus might limit our initial release for the Windows Phone market."

More details on the studio's setup can be found via its website.