Ever since the release of Bastion of 2011, players and game developers alike have paid close attention to Supergiant’s projects, thanks to the studio’s unique sense of style and ability to execute on its game concepts.

During The Game Awards in December, Supergiant announced and immediately launched Hades — a new Early Access roguelike title first available on the new Epic Game Store.

Right after launch, Hades creative director Greg Kasavin talked to us about the business and design decisions behind Hades over on the GDC Twitch channel.

Below are a few key highlights from the conversation that may help you evaluate both the state of the Epic Game store, and whether making an Early Access game is right for you.

Edited for length and clarity.

We’ve been really really happy with how [Early Access] has been going so far. Thankfully, even given the Early Access nature of the game, the initial technical challenges were pretty minimal, so everybody was, for the most part, able to get into the game and start playing.

The response we’ve been getting, we’re really really happy with. I will never ever take for granted having a group of our players actually like the stuff that we work on. I will never take that for granted. So every time we launch a game and our players say “hey this is cool, thank you for making this,” I wipe the sweat off my brow and I breathe a sigh of relief. That response has been really encouraging.

As for why Early Access, we conceived of that aspect of this game as part of the whole package right from the start. It was a high priority when thinking about what to make next after our last game, Pyre, came out last year. We were really interested in a game that we could like develop out in the open once it reached a certain point, and make it the best game it could be by gathering feedback along the way by building it in partnership with the community.

For us, it opened up so many possibilities, not just from a game design perspective, but also even from a narrative perspective. From my standpoint as the writer on our games, being able to work on a game whose story could unfold a little bit more serially instead having to put the entire thing in, beginning middle and end, right in that initial launch, [that was a new experience].

So we think of the Early Access launch almost as a sort of pilot episode of a series or something like that, where it’s a lot of setup, you meet a lot of the characters, and you figure out what the conflict is all about. But the resolution of the story is not all in the game yet and we’ll roll out new characters and more events in the story over the course of the Early Access period, along with just improving every other aspect of the game with any luck.

Yeah so a lot of it does tie back to the Early Access nature of the game, and that being like really key to the whole design from our perspective. So that meant that if we were going to develop this game out in the open for a while, and we expect Early Access to last for more than a year on this game from our initial launch, we need to be able to move on it really quickly.

So we knew for sure that we weren’t going to launch Early Access on a whole bunch of different platforms at the same time. That would basically make it close to impossible for us to update the game in a timely fashion. Our team size is fewer than 20 people. Maybe there are some teams out there who are really effective at patching games on many different platforms all the same time, but that is not a skillset that we possess as a small team.

We felt that it was vital to be able to focus on a single version of the game until we get the game to a really good state and then during that process we can start to look at other platforms toward an eventual multiplatform launch. So that’s very much our plan.

So as we were working on Hades we got in touch with the folks at Epic and started to learn about what they were working on with their store, and we became really excited for it. It just seemed like a really good fit given the experiment we were making and the experiment they were making.

One of the factors with Hades is that we want this game to be highly enjoyable to watch as well as to play. It’s a game designed around immediacy and replayability among other factors, and you get in there and hopefully start having fun with it, have a unique experience each time, and have the action be very readable if a friend is next to you or if you’re streaming it or something like that.

Part of Epic’s focus with the store is to help enable streamers and YouTube content creators to essentially get a piece of the action. You’ve seen the Fortnite support-a-creator program, where creators basically just get compensated for their work. I think streamers and YouTube content creators have had such a significant and overall beneficial influence on games over the years that it’s really only fair that they should be able to benefit more from the incredibly hard work that they do. So on a personal level, that spoke to me, I think it spoke to other folks I work with, just as part of the priority that Epic was interested in.

But anyway, that’s all stuff they can probably speak to better than I can, but those are just some of the reasons why it made sense for us to go conduct our Early Access experiment off to the side, because folks on other platforms who are familiar with our games are used to our games being 100 percent complete. We’ve said in the past that we really value the completeness of our games, so folks on other platforms one day will get the kind of experience that they are used to from us, and on the same timeline as we’ve delivered our games in the past.

Transistor and Pyre both took us about 3 years to make, we expect that Hades will be done on roughly that same timeline. So we figured if that’s the experience you’re accustomed to and the experience you want to have, nothing has changed. You’ll get to play our completed game hopefully wherever as many places we can support and make sense of once we’re out of Early Access. But for now it made sense to us to run Early Access on the Epic Games store.

I’m one of the people who helps formulate the ideas that we then pursue. And one of the things I look for as the highest priority is what is the overlap of preoccupations on the team. What do the most people here want to make the most passionately, and that’s the game we should make. So we started having, very soon after Pyre launched, like within a month, we started having many, many hours of conversations.

And some themes started to emerge from that. One of the ideas I already spoke to was wanting to develop a concept that we could continue to build on after it was out there, a game idea that was extensible, and not just a one-and-done game similar to our last three games. So that was a high priority for us. And we were very intrigued by a design around replayability, kind of a, for lack of a better term, like a more modern design sensibility than maybe some of our previous games that have a more linear campaign structure. You finish them, hopefully they’ll stick with you forever on an emotional level, but they’re not necessarily games designed to be replayed many many times. We’re really drawn to making a game that felt very immediate, that you could pick up and play in short stretches or play as for long as you wanted and still have a compelling experience around that.

And then we started thinking about what theme would align well with that. We thought about whether we want to revisit one of the worlds we’ve created in the past, because we love those worlds. While we’ve never returned to one of our past games, it’s not something we’re morally opposed to or anything like that. We just don’t want to do it unless the time and circumstances are right.

Given our other priorities, it felt like, once again, let’s make something new, let’s make something that really, really fits this set of design goals. We looked to Greek mythology in this case as a source. In one sense, it’s a well-worn theme for video games, but in another sense, something that we felt was both a perfect fit for what we were doing. In some ways it’s really unexplored.

As the person doing the writing, I was very drawn to a particular angle on Greek mythology. What I feel is often lost in the shuffle is that the gods are a big dysfunctional family that we can see ourselves in. I think part of the reason these characters have survived for thousands of years is because they relate so strongly to so many people and they relate not because they are gods but because they are human. So we wanted to explore some of that. It felt rich with potential for us, so yeah we started making it.

So that’s a long answer, but yeah, we wanted to make a roguelike dungeon crawler where you defy the god of death. It felt exciting to us to figure out what that game was going to look like. We love playing roguelikes. We’ve been really inspired by some of the Early Access successes over the years. These games like Darkest Dungeon, Slay the Spire, and Dead Cells. Games that started off really strong, like from the moment you dropped your $20 on them, you knew that was money super well spent and then they only got better and better from there.

So we’re like, “oh man what if we could pull off something like that!” We felt that if we planned for it to be Early Access maybe that improves our chances of handling that kind of process properly.

I just wanna make games that feel fresh also, I really value games that feel like they have a kind of reason for being, that don’t just feel like they’re you know kind of the same as other games that are out there. But I think that what we’ve made has plenty of our dirty signature all over it and has our particular marks on it to make it feel distinct.

Hopefully she’s not watching this, but I think Jen Zee’s one of the greatest artists working in the industry and it’s a huge honor to be working with her. She reinvents her style on every single game we’ve worked on. She’s of course just one member of our team, though she does create the overall sense of style and the look and does all our wonderful character designs and everything. The work of Darren Korb our audio director who does all our music and contributes key voices to this game and all the sound effects, he is a man of many talents and of course his work has really helped our games always stand out over the years, and I think this game is no exception.

It’s always exciting to see what my colleagues will do on each new game, and I think for us that’s been part of the fun of kind of choosing a different theme and setting every single time.

Depth in games I think works on many vectors. We aspire to have gameplay depth, and we aspire to have narrative depth, and hopefully the two together create an overall very rich experience. But I think you’re referring more to gameplay depth so let me speak to that. We really, really value in each of our designs for our past games, the sense that you can discover different successful playstyles as you go.

So we really favor designs that let you experiment, that give you the latitude to experiment and encourage you try different things and experiment with different tools within the context of the gameplay. And then just when you find what feels like a perfect combination — a very effective set of skills and tools and abilities and so on — maybe you get nudged into a new set of tools and abilities that is even better or maybe just different in an intriguing way.

If you look to each of our previous games they’ve all done some version of that, but in the case of Hades I think it really synthesizes a lot of our best ideas from our previous games. In Bastion, there was this goal around immediacy, it was a game with very little preamble. You just pick it up and start playing and we wanted you to get right in there with Hades and just immediately figure the gameplay out.

It’s about making the most of a situation that you can’t entirely control in some cases. So we find that that kind of structure can make for gameplay that continues to be surprising and interesting over time, and defining enough overlapping systems that can interact with each other to where suddenly richness emerges from the play experience. And in our own playtesting, we find that we’re not having the same experience over and over, and we’re compelled to start new runs. That’s all stuff that we really look for.

Our process has changed a lot in anticipation of this. A really key aspect of this whole game for us has been that we’ve just planned it more in general. And part of it is anticipating an Early Access launch.

I hope this doesn’t sound too obnoxious as an analogy, but it almost felt like training for a marathon or something like that. We’ve basically moved internally to a monthly milestone cadence, so every month we have a milestone where we have certain goals, and the month is divided up into certain phases. At the beginning of a milestone is when we can make more major changes to the code and so on, and then we lock the code down and we can still make data changes, and fine tune things.

From my standpoint I can still be adding new narrative events or changing the voice over and stuff like that because that’s all part of a data-driven system and its not like fundamentally altering the code by me adding or subtracting events.

And then toward the end of the milestone, we’re then testing, bug fixing, polishing, making final changes to get everything ready. At the end of that, we playtest and kind of do it over. We’ve been working this way for a number of months now, knowing that basically once this game is out there we just keep doing that and those major updates become major updates that we’re committing ourselves to. If you quit out to the main menu you’ll see right there on the main menu it says when our next major update is coming. That basically is in line with our internal milestones.

So that really has been the biggest shift in our internal development. Whereas with a three-year project, our milestones at this point in the process would be much longer — probably spanning two-and-a-half or three months, and be somewhat more nebulous in nature I would say. I think in a word it’s a more disciplined approach that we’re taking, but we’ve always valued planning and production discipline at Supergiant. I think its been key to our success.

You’ve heard it from many developers, I’m sure, that finishing a project is really hard. It’s really hard to decide that it’s time to wrap it up and make those really tough choices about finishing your game. We’ve learned a lot about that over nearly 10 years that we’ve been working together as a team, and so this project puts that forward. Of course, it’s a little scary to commit to major updates on a regular basis, but we’ve been practicing at it and we think we can do, obviously.

<!– –>

<!–

Calendar

View All     Submit Event

---

–>

If you enjoy reading this site, you might also want to check out these UBM Tech sites:

---

---

  

---

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

---

Today Nvidia launched its GeForce Now cloud gaming service on iOS in beta. Due to App Store’s restrictions on cloud gaming services, it will be delivered as a web app though the Safari browser. GeForce Now is a ‘PC in the cloud’ service, which allows users who already own games on Steam or Epic Games Store to play them on less capable devices. This is different to ‘cloud gaming content’ services such as PlayStation Now and Google Stadia, which offers a library of games which users access as part of the subscription, or can purchase.

GeForce Now can be accessed for free (limited to one-hour sessions) or for $5 a month, which offers priority access to servers, extended session length and RTX On feature for compatible games. It is available in 71 countries around the world, supported by its own data centres or by telco partners. Windows PCs, macOS, Android, Chromebooks and Shield TV devices are currently supported, with plans to bring the service via Chrome browser in 2021. GeForce Now boasts more than 5 million members, with over 15 million hours being streamed every month. Its users can access 75 free-to-play games and over 750 games via Steam, Epic Games Store and soon GoG.

Fortnite is coming back to iOS… soon

An intriguing aspect of this Nvidia’s announcement is that Fortnite fans will be able to access the game via GeForce Now via Safari, but its date of availability hasn’t yet been revealed. Nvidia has attributed this delay to the work it is doing on creating a touch-friendly version of Fortnite. This, of course, comes at a contentious time when Apple and Epic Games are locked in a bitter lawsuit, which followed the banning of Fortnite from the App Store. GeForce Now will serve as an official workaround for iOS users, but I believe that a reaction from Apple is imminent, which could possibly lead to blocking or diminishing the quality of the service on Safari.

GeForce Now will bring high-end gaming to more people, but cloud PC services will remain niche over the next five years

There is a growing interest in flagship PC game titles, but a large proportion of the engaged games community does not have access to powerful hardware to run those games locally. PC in the cloud can democratize premium PC gaming: instead of a large upfront hardware investment, these services can be positioned as a way to spread out the cost of PC gaming, cut down on the system maintenance time and offer instant games/software updates.

Revenue generated from Cloud PC subscriptions (includes some rentals revenue) will grow from $125 million in 2020 to $899 million in 2025 at a CAGR of 48%.

However, several big factors will limit the appeal and uptake of cloud PC services such as GeForce Now beyond PC gaming enthusiasts. There is a higher barrier to entry than cloud gaming content services such as Xbox Game Pass Ultimate; the requirement to purchase games separately on other platform such as Steam and Epic Games stores will put off more casual users. The availability of free-to-play games mitigates this somewhat, but the requirement to connect to other games services leads to a disjointed user experience. Furthermore, popular free-to-play titles such as Among Us and Genshin Impact are increasingly cross-platform, meaning gamers can already use their smartphones to play with friends who are using PC or console.

Some major game publishers remain apprehensive about the cloud PC platform, particularly as they have growing platform ambitions of their own. This was evidenced by 2K, Activision Blizzard, and Bethesda pulling games from Nvidia GeForce Now service in 2020. Given the power-intensive nature of running powerful PCs in the cloud, there are questions around scalability and it is not yet clear if it’s possible to profitably deliver current services to millions of concurrent users. Despite these challenges, Omdia believes the cloud gaming category is set to play a key role in the future of video games.

---

Related Jobs

---

<!–

Extra Div –>

Nintendo has announced that it is adding AR features to its long-standing AC mobile game, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. These two new modes – called AR Camera and AR Cabin – let players spend some quality time with their favourite villagers. The first, AR Camera, lets you set up a space for your pal, adding furniture to the scene, and taking a snapshot. AR Cabin, on the other hand, is a little more comprehensive, and lets you enter the same space as the characters.

You can turn this AR Cabin into a cosy hideaway, and overlay the door anywhere in the real world, allowing you to enter whenever you want. Once in your cabin, you can invite up to eight of your favourite villagers to hang out in the space. In celebration of this new mode, Nintendo are also giving away a free month of the Furniture and Fashion plan, which is a great way to get some new clothes and home decorations.

For those unfamiliar, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp first launched three years ago, and is Nintendo’s free-to-start mobile game. In Pocket Camp you build a campsite and invite friends to come stay. You can also visit different locations, catch bugs, fish, and pick fruit. It isn’t as comprehensive as New Horizons, but it’s still a fun on-the-go experience for any AC fan.

If you want to know more about the AR features, check out the release trailer below:

AR Cabin and AR Camera launched on November 19, and are available in-game now.

If you want to play Pocket Camp for yourself, you can find it on Google Play and the App Store. For more relaxing recommendations, why not see our list of the best mobile idle games?

You may encounter a special ValueError when working with Python’s math module.

ValueError: math domain error

Python raises this error when you try to do something that is not mathematically possible or mathematically defined.

To understand this error, have a look at the definition of the domain:

“The domain of a function is the complete set of possible values of the independent variable. Roughly speaking, the domain is the set of all possible (input) x-values which result in a valid (output) y-value.” (source)

The domain of a function is the set of all possible input values. If Python throws the ValueError: math domain error, you’ve passed an undefined input into the math function. Fix the error by passing a valid input for which the function is able to calculate a numerical output.

Here are a few examples:

Python Math Domain Error Sqrt

The math domain error appears if you pass a negative argument into the math.sqrt() function. It’s mathematically impossible to calculate the square root of a negative number without using complex numbers. Python doesn’t get that and throws a ValueError: math domain error.

Here’s a minimal example:

from math import sqrt

print(sqrt(-1)) '''

Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Users\xcent\Desktop\Finxter\Blog\code.py", line 2, in <module> print(sqrt(-1))

ValueError: math domain error '''

You can fix the math domain error by using the cmath package that allows the creation of complex numbers:

from cmath import sqrt

print(sqrt(-1))

# 1j

Python Math Domain Error Log

The math domain error for the math.log() function appears if you pass a zero value into it—the logarithm is not defined for value 0.

Here’s the code on an input value outside the domain of the logarithm function:

from math import log

print(log(0))

The output is the math domain error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Users\xcent\Desktop\Finxter\Blog\code.py", line 3, in <module> print(log(0))

ValueError: math domain error

You can fix this error by passing a valid input value into the math.log() function:

from math import log

print(log(0.000001))

# -13.815510557964274

This error can sometimes appear if you pass a very small number into it—Python’s float type cannot express all numbers. To pass a value “close to 0”, use the Decimal module with higher precision, or pass a very small input argument such as:

math.log(sys.float_info.min)

Python Math Domain Error Acos

The math domain error for the math.acos() function appears if you pass a value into it for which it is not defined—arccos is only defined for values between -1 and 1.

Here’s the wrong code:

import math

print(math.acos(2))

The output is the math domain error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Users\xcent\Desktop\Finxter\Blog\code.py", line 3, in <module> print(math.acos(2))

ValueError: math domain error

You can fix this error by passing a valid input value between [-1,1] into the math.acos() function:

import math

print(math.acos(0.5))

# 1.0471975511965979

Python Math Domain Error Asin

The math domain error for the math.asin() function appears if you pass a value into it for which it is not defined—arcsin is only defined for values between -1 and 1.

Here’s the erroneous code:

import math

print(math.asin(2))

The output is the math domain error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Users\xcent\Desktop\Finxter\Blog\code.py", line 3, in <module> print(math.asin(2))

ValueError: math domain error

You can fix this error by passing a valid input value between [-1,1] into the math.asin() function:

import math

print(math.asin(0.5))

# 0.5235987755982989

Python Math Domain Error Pow

The math domain error for the math.pow(a,b) function to calculate a**b appears if you pass a negative base value into it and try to calculate a negative power of it. The reason it is not defined is that any negative number to the power of 0.5 would be the square number—and thus, a complex number. But complex numbers are not defined by default in Python!

import math

print(math.pow(-2, 0.5))

The output is the math domain error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Users\xcent\Desktop\Finxter\Blog\code.py", line 3, in <module> print(math.pow(-2, 0.5))

ValueError: math domain error

If you need a complex number, a^b must be rewritten into e^{b ln a}. For example:

import cmath

print(cmath.exp(0.5 * cmath.log(-2)))

# (8.659560562354932e-17+1.414213562373095j)

You see, it’s a complex number!

NumPy Math Domain Error — np.log(x)

import numpy as np

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # Plotting y = log(x)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

ax.set(xlim=(-5, 20), ylim=(-4, 4), title='log(x)', ylabel='y', xlabel='x')

x = np.linspace(-10, 20, num=1000)

y = np.log(x) plt.plot(x, y)

This is the graph of log(x). Don’t worry if you don’t understand the code, what’s more important is the following point. You can see that log(x) tends to negative infinity as x tends to 0. Thus, it is mathematically meaningless to calculate the log of a negative number. If you try to do so, Python raises a math domain error.

>>> math.log(-10)

Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>

ValueError: math domain error

Where to Go From Here?

Enough theory, let’s get some practice!

To become successful in coding, you need to get out there and solve real problems for real people. That’s how you can become a six-figure earner easily. And that’s how you polish the skills you really need in practice. After all, what’s the use of learning theory that nobody ever needs?

Practice projects is how you sharpen your saw in coding!

Do you want to become a code master by focusing on practical code projects that actually earn you money and solve problems for people?

Then become a Python freelance developer! It’s the best way of approaching the task of improving your Python skills—even if you are a complete beginner.

Join my free webinar “How to Build Your High-Income Skill Python” and watch how I grew my coding business online and how you can, too—from the comfort of your own home.

Join the free webinar now!

The post Python Math Domain Error (How to Fix This Stupid Bug) first appeared on Finxter.

If you’ve so much as glanced at our home page over the past couple of days, you’ll no doubt be aware that today sees the launch of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity on Nintendo Switch.

The game mixes the characters, locations and story of Zelda: Breath of the Wild with the strategic, hack ‘n slash action of the Warriors franchise. It’s set 100 years before the events of Breath of the Wild, meaning fans can finally see just how all the events discussed in Link’s most recent adventure truly went down.

With Breath of the Wild being the absolute behemoth that it is, you’d naturally assume that a prequel would sell like hotcakes. However, not everyone is a fan of the Warriors gameplay style, so we’re left with a curious release that might divide the Zelda fanbase at launch.

So, we hand it over to you. Make sure to have your say in our poll below so that we can find out once and for all just how popular the game is with the Nintendo Life community. Feel free to expand upon your answer in the comments below!

For an audio recording of the blog, listen below.

Three years ago, Microsoft President Brad Smith joined North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum in downtown Fargo to launch a new project called Microsoft TechSpark. This civic initiative was formed to foster economic impact and job creation through deep partnerships and collaboration. Corporate engagements with communities are nothing new, but the pivot here was to dive deep in just six specific regions, and focus on rural and remote communities, a change from often traditional outreach in larger, more urban metropolitans.

If we could find communities that embraced collaboration and would help test new resources and technologies, we knew we would learn a great deal. To gain a greater understanding of these differing ecosystems, we selected six regions with varying backgrounds, sizes, and demographics. We chose Cheyenne, Wyoming, Southern Virginia and central Washington State as they housed Microsoft data centers, while Fargo was a natural fit with an already large Microsoft employee campus. We wanted to engage a few regions, too, where we had little to no Microsoft presence. Given their strong engagement in our computer science education efforts, we also launched TechSpark in northeast Wisconsin, and then moved south to El Paso, Texas, before quickly adding in bordering Juarez, Mexico, to explore bi-national projects.

One essential ingredient in this plan was to find and hire TechSpark managers who lived in and knew the community. Some might have thought it would have been easier to send a team from company headquarters or rotated in visiting experts, but that’s not what we were going for. We’ve found that a member of the community who has resided in, worked alongside these neighbors, and previously led some of the region’s organizations, accelerates the work instantly with established credibility, presence, trust, network and awareness. This 24/7 approach to community engagement ensures constant communication, and many TechSpark ideas and approaches began with a conversation in the grocery store line or local coffee shop.

The team was charged with driving community and economic development through partnership, and delivery of Microsoft resources, keying in on a few pillars, including:

• Collaboration with local nonprofits, and empowering these community organizations to do more through tech enablement and digital transformation
• Driving opportunities in these regions for reskilling, or skilling that leads directly to employability in the community
• Connecting these local regions to high-speed internet and working with Microsoft’s Airband Initiative toward the goal of bringing broadband access to 3 million Americans living in unserved rural areas of the United States
• Empowering local partners to help build a more signature regional project, larger in scale and scope, and created for sustainability and longer-term impact

These signature projects have underscored our mission of growing each region’s plan organically and collaboratively. Several local leaders have shared the phrase, “Meet the community where they are.” Three years in, we’re proud to see these signature projects in planning and/or execution in all six of our TechSpark regions:

• Green Bay, Wisconsin celebrated the one-year anniversary of TitletownTech this summer. This partnership between Microsoft and the Green Bay Packers, has created an exciting venture lab and studio, across the street from iconic Lambeau Stadium, and is now shepherding more than 20 new startups into formation, with many beginning operations in Northeast Wisconsin.
• In North Dakota, a partnership with the innovative organization Emerging Prairie, has started the Grand Farm. This farm of the future will bring together students, teachers and industry to explore precision agriculture on a 60-acre experimental farm and test bed, alongside a digital academy and plug and play agriculture accelerator.
• Near our Boydton, Virginia, data center, and together with the MidAtlantic Broadband Corporation, the new Southern Virginia Innovation HUB will open its doors early next year (2021). The first new in the region for decades will house area nonprofits working to drive skilling, tech training and community partnerships.
• This fall, companies from both Mexico and the U.S. are coming together weekly, for our third cohort in the El Paso-Juarez Bridge Accelerator. This unique bi-national project has tapped the network of the Juarez Technology HUB and local partners to unite manufacturers, startups and other regional companies, sharing resources, best practices and training over a 12-week program. Already, the Bridge Accelerator’s first two cohorts have produced nearly $4 million in new sales, over $500,000 in new VC investment, and 110 new jobs.
• Cheyenne, Wyoming, is bringing together the great work of gener8tor to drive new business and startups in the state, and then leverage those new opportunities with the innovative curriculum of the Array School of Coding and the unique apprenticeship training of the Techtonic software and tech team.
• And in central Washington state, skilling through remote training has become a key mission of rural resilience, in partnership with area leaders like the Greater Wenatchee Tech Alliance, the Columbia Basin Foundation and Washington State University.

The daily connection and communication with these communities has informed our processes, priorities and programs. To summarize a few learnings and key takeaways across all regions:

• Partners before projects: The partner is key to any engagement. And finding the right partner first, and then building the plan and project second, is instrumental to every regional engagement. One can’t quickly recreate the relationships, know-how, infrastructure, network and knowledge that an established local partner brings. These organizations are already doing great work, and in some cases, are simply in need of additional resourcing, connections and a bright north star to dream bigger and accelerate their mission. Collectively, TechSpark has now partnered with 314 nonprofits across these regions, supporting more than 303,000 individuals.
• Back to school: We have found a strong common denominator in every rural or remote region with the local university, community or technical college. These higher education institutions often serve as the barometer for future employment and local workforce trends. Strong collaboration with these schools has produced new curriculum, planning and training opportunities like mentoring, apprenticeship and distance learning. From larger schools like the University of Texas at El Paso, North Dakota State University, the University of Wyoming and the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay to great local community colleges like Washington’s Big Bend, Southside Virginia and Wyoming’s Laramie, we’re finding engaged faculties and innovative administrations willing to collaborate to educate the next workforce. Together, these TechSpark partnerships have impacted 52,000 college students. Additionally, the team has worked to help bring the TEALS computer science teaching program into 135 high schools in the TechSpark regions, training over 150 high school teachers and 7,500 students.
• Connect: Access to high-speed internet is the electricity of this era, and in communities without strong internet, the struggle for business, education and health-care connections is exacerbated. Understanding the challenge with real numbers to identify demand, and incentivizing providers to move in, is a constant quest. From students doing homework in cars near new Wi-Fi hotspots, to agricultural projects growing through FarmBeats and data collection, the connection remains a foundational priority for economic and community growth. The work of Microsoft’s Airband team is helping to drive these projects across the globe, and finding partnership in states from Wyoming to Wisconsin, Texas to North Dakota.
• No cookie cutter: The varying backgrounds of these diverse regions has demanded regional approaches and individual attention. As we began to work to land AI for Good grants in each community, we quickly learned that a small nonprofit organization with a staff of one or two may not have the bandwidth to quickly absorb and implement an AI project. A flexible toolkit, with resources to help enable technology, is essential and must be inventoried uniquely by each region. With the necessary support, TechSpark has delivered 14 AI for Good grants across these regions. As well, the continuing work with local partners, has delivered skills training and a path to employability, for over 54,000 individuals in these TechSpark communities.
• Multiply: As the TechSpark program moves into year four, the ability to sustain these efforts and inspire replication becomes paramount. Our ability to multiply seed funding has become a metric across all these regions with a minimum goal of 3X. If we can help serve as a catalyst for other local and national partners, to help support a regional nonprofit, we’re a step closer to long-term sustainment. This work has already secured an additional $25m in funding from other partners (local and national) in addition to our TechSpark support, a 4X multiplier. Additionally, this effort underscores our hope for TechSpark-like projects to spring up in other communities across the globe. Providing a toolbox of best practices and lessons learned will spur other regions to scale through partnership.
• More alike than different: As much as we focus on differences between rural and urban, we are often struck by the greater array of similarities we all share. Regardless of the region’s population, we’ve witnessed the same hope shared by many; to provide for and educate their family, leave behind a stronger community, and give their children a better future. Likewise, we are hearing from many young people and new graduates, who express an eagerness to return to their roots, find a home near extended family, and continue the community building of their parents. Many may leave for school or adventure, but that instinctual path back to the hometown is strong, if only they can find the workplace opportunity.

The pandemic has caused many to push a reset button, as we have heard daily from local nonprofits and small businesses, struggling for survival. We’ve been able to support over 100,000 individuals in these regions through Covid-19 relief projects and, now more than ever, the work is critical to expand these local recovery and rebuilding efforts.

After three years, it is clear to us that no one organization, public or private, corporate or nonprofit, can transform these challenges alone. It is also clear that the desire to build up these ecosystems, digitally enable local businesses, provide skills for 21st-century jobs and redistribute opportunity is at the forefront for community leaders at all levels. This mission transcends political stripes across the spectrum.

The reception from these communities continues to be both welcoming and beyond appreciative. We look forward to this ongoing learning, community engagement and economic development as the spark started three years ago in Fargo continues to light.

Mike Egan is the Senior Director of TechSpark for Microsoft. Mike began his career picking raspberries in the fields of his hometown Puyallup, Washington, and working at the State Fair.

Tags: Airband initiative, Bridge Accelerator, El Paso, Microsoft TechSpark