PixelForgez
Who we are
and how we teach
PixelForgez started in 2017 with a single question: why do so many people who want to build Android games stop before they ship anything? The answer was almost never talent. It was structure, feedback, and the absence of anyone who had been through the same problems. That gap is what this platform was built to close.
By the numbers
What shapes this platform
- 8 Years of running live Android game development sessions — group and individual — with learners from across Finland and beyond.
- 3 Distinct learning paths: foundational game logic, UI systems, and full game production — each adapted to the learner's pace.
- 14 Average number of sessions before a learner ships their first working prototype to the Google Play Store.
- Honest feedback
- Small cohorts
- Live code review
- Adaptive pacing
The story behind it
Petri Väänänen, one of the founding instructors, spent three years freelancing on Android games before he started teaching. What he noticed was that most learners had already watched hours of tutorials — they could follow steps, but they couldn't yet solve problems they hadn't seen before. Group sessions at PixelForgez are designed around exactly that: encountering real bugs, real design decisions, and real tradeoffs, with an instructor in the room who can explain the reasoning rather than just the solution.
Individual sessions work differently. Learners bring their own project — something they actually want to build — and the instructor works around that project rather than a fixed curriculum. It takes longer to prepare, but the retention is noticeably different when someone is debugging their own idea rather than a generic exercise.
Kotlin / Android
- // collision check
- fun onUpdate() {
- if (player.hits(enemy)) {
- score.add(1)
- enemy.respawn()
- }
- }
Live output
+1
Score event
Group
1-on-1
The instructors
Petri Väänänen
Game Logic / Kotlin
Mira Lindqvist
UI Systems / UX
Tuomas Korhonen
Audio / Physics
Aino Hämäläinen
Production / Publishing