On a cold and rainy February 25, 2010, around thirty hooded and shawled people gathered on the foothill of Bern's Gurten at the spacious headquarter of Nothing, in what was built as a printing plant in the 30ies.

Robbert van Rooden alias Zap from Nothing opened the meeting and continued with a presentation on the relation of Flash Games and Casual Games: casual gaming is in full swing, can be fit into varying contexts and Flash brings that on. With examples Robbert pointed out the specific aspects on Casual Flash Game Design and Development.

After that, game designer Michael Burgdorfer made an in-depth presentation on pros and cons of different 3D Engines like Papervision3D, Alternativa and other underlining that all the presented engines have specific strengths and weaknesses that range from bad to great documentation, community activity and performance.

After everyone cozying up with a round of organic hot dogs René Bauer of ZHdK gave insights into how the Bachelor course in game design is built up, and commented on the outlook of the talent emerging there. By comparing Flash and Unity3d René made clear that Flash is missing game development specific needs like a world editor but underlining the importance of Flash for the students to jump into the industry in Switzerland (Advergames).

Michel Wacker from Liip then approached the role of gameplay for learning in general before setting it into the context of specific educational goals of the K-12 games. Michel shared his experience on the game Postfinance Eventmanager, iconomix and his game-in-development "Bubblemath". After his speech a discussion about the different aspects of serious games emerged and the role of them in general and in Switzerland.

The evening was rounded off by Reto Senn of Bitforge addressing the upsides and downsides of porting their successful Orbital from the iPhone to Flash, followed by a short comparison of playing it on the iPhone and in the browser. This mini-post-mortem served as  teaser for the upcoming meeting Post Mortem.

This made for an interesting bunch of topics and also gave an overview of the interesting facets the small, but full-of-ideas game industry has already been busy with for a while. It was great to welcome not only producers but also friends of the industry from Pro Helvetia as well as the ETH. Lively talk before and between the presentations showed how good such meetings are just for everyone to chat and exchange experiences of this and that game production aspect in Switzerland. It's great to see how the scene here combines being at the pulse of game development and knowing the Swiss market's limitations and potentials.

After an animated and long night, everyone made a quick run for one of the last trains dashing under the pouring rain.