Survey…
August 21st, 2010Well. We’re still recovering from last week’s Freeplay, but we’ve been watching all of the positive things’ve been saying – and we’re incredibly pleased to have had such an impact. It was a massive event for us, but seeing people respond so strongly to it puts all of that work into perspective.
During the weekend, we handed out feedback forms for sessions and the whole event to capture people’s immediate reactions, but it’d be really helpful to get your impressions in a bit more detail (and with a little bit more distance 
)
To that end, we’ve created an online survey, and we’d really appreciate it if you could take 10 minutes to let us know what you thought of Freeplay 2010 – and what we can do for Freeplay 2011.
Thanks.
We’re also trying to piece together our thoughts from the event. We’ll post when we have something coherent to say
The Freeplay Awards – Winners
August 16th, 2010Everything is packed away. The directors are in their beds. The library has been returned to its books. And somewhere, hopefully, some people are thinking about the game idea they’ve had for a while – and how to make it a reality.
We want to write a proper wrap-up post (once we’ve recovered), but as something to tide everyone over, we’re very pleased to announce the winners for the first ever Freeplay Indie Games Awards.
Best Australian Game
Brawsome – Jolly Rover
Best International Game
Yellow Jam (Brazil) – Last Hope
Best Design in a Game
Sword Lady & The Viking – Up Down Ready
Best On-Paper Design
Timothy Ryan – iCrazy Man
Best Art in a Game
Farbs – Captain Forever (series)
Best Concept Art
Fiasco Studios – Exodus
Best Technical Innovation
Finn Morgan – Colourbind
Best Game Writing
PVI Collective – Transumer
Best Audio
The Voxel Agents – Train Conductor
Experimedia is still free!
August 13th, 2010Even though 2010 is sold out, Experimedia is still open to the public and is FREE!
Open from 10:00 to 18:00, you can get your hands on 12 locally developed indie games, experience digital art, and listen to some talks on games, culture, and development.
Games
Shadow Field – Shadow Field Team
Shadow Field is a preternatural tactical strategy game for the iPhone. You control four members of a scientific research team as they defend an isolated village from an unimaginable horror…
Jolly Rover – Brawsome
An original 2D point and click adventure game from Brawsome! Players follow the short and stubby tail of canine protagonist Gaius James Rover across three wild and untamed tropical islands, as he attempts to fulfil his dream of starting a circus, hampered only by pirates, villains, voodoo, love and considerable lack of loot.
MineQuest – Play-Bit Entertainment
An original Facebook game made for those sick of farming crops and building towns. Take control arcade style as you dig deep into the earth in search of gems, gold and other treasures! Visit a variety of challenging levels and compete with your friends to bring back the most riches!
The New Prison – Blue Garden
Strange people are welding leaves to trees under the cover of night. Figure out why in this Mystery/Comedy themed adventure for the PC.
Tiberian Sun Rising – CnC Source
A reimagining of the original Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun made in 1999. Tiberian Sun Rising a total conversion modification for C&C3: Tiberium Wars. The old favourites return in this Real Time Strategy game, new features: new units, asymmetrical factions, dynamic environments, Tiberium mutation and much more!
Colourbind – Finn Morgan
Colourbind is a 2D platformer/puzzle/physics game in which the player must guide their vehicle to the end of each level. The complicating factor is that things don’t just fall down – objects are pulled by gravity in different directions, depending on their colour.
Hazard: The Journey Of Life
The Journey Of Life is a philosophical labyrinth of paradoxical space. It’s vibrant, colourful, surreal and mind bending, and it’s going leave you asking questions.
A Noir Tale – The Table Flippers
A Noir Tale is a detective thriller with a comic-book aesthetic, set in an alternate version of the 1930s. Players investigate a series of murders, investigating crime scenes and suspects. The gameplay mechanics are akin to the Myst series, with players using reasoned analysis and deductional logic to garner evidence.
Virus Blaster – MAR
Virus Buster is a side scrolling platform game for children, like Super Mario Bros where you’ll be playing as Tim’s white blood cell. Tim is a 10 year old boy in a conquest to defeat the viruses inside him, by throwing them antibody.
Exigo – Grimoire Studios
A 3rd Sci-fi co-operative survival multi-player game whereby players defend an outpost perimeter against waves of enemies.
Noontide – Team Noontide
Noontide is a hack and slash platformer. In a dystopian future, society has been thrown in to civil war. Minority groups, such as the Clone Miners, seek a voice within this unstable landscape. As a result, conflicts are eventuating across the city.
Art
Ignis, Fatuus, Tacnode – Champagne Valentine
An abstract 3D accordion playing ambient oscillating sound designed in collaboration with Aaron Meyers.
Infinity Pals – Kate Geck
Two interactive soft sculpture creatures that will read your energy to divulge your fortune. The creatures are made of fur, wadding, felt and polar fleece and are designed to be touched. Their psychic capacities are mediated through Flash applications that respond to input from customised, soft game controllers.
Resist, She said. – Sister0
A real-life account of a eviction mêlée. By paying careful attention to logos, costume, colours, flags, hierarchy and tools, the character references video-game culture (‘Pac Man’, ‘counterstrike’, ‘Capture the Flag’) in the dramatic use of levels & ready made objects such as; crowbar, dead red roses, drill and the flag.
Vinyl Arcade (Video Documentation) – Lucas Abela
The vinyl rally is a large-scale interactive installation combining sound art, sculpture, video art, new media and competitive sports into every kid and kidult’s dream-hybrid; a kinetic, immersive, participatory play-set. The vinyl rally combines vinyl fetishism, video arcade mystique and the machismo of motor sports into a video game played within a real world setting! Imagine a racing track constructed from a mass of disused vinyl records, where remote control cars with styli attached to their chassis are raced by members of the crowd.
Mellifera – Andrew Burrell & Trish Adams
Mellifera is virtual environment linked to a complimentary series of real-time exhibitions in gallery and museum spaces. This version of mellifera runs on OpenSim and is accompanied by a real- time abstracted environment that forms itself from data it collects from the within the original mellifera world. The artists’ poetic and scientific interactions with honey bees has inspired the development of this work.
BabelSwarm – Adam Nash, Christopher Dodds & Justin Clemens
Babelswarm is a real-time 3-D and audio art project built in the virtual world of Second Life. It was the winner of the Australia Council’s first Second Life arts residency, and was launched simultaneously in-world and at the Lismore Regional Gallery in New South Wales, Australia.
Talks
See the progam here for session times
Saturday
Everything Old is New Again – Culture
Neil Rennison, David Surman, Nancy Mauro-Flude, others t.b.c. Chair: Andrew Goulding
From 8-bit graphics to chip-music, from digital choose your own adventure books to iPad scrabble, new technology has come so far that the technical restrictions of yesteryear are now stylistic choices. From art to gameplay, this session looks at how everything old is new again.
What Does it Take to Develop a Game? – Design / Education
From the initial design, then continuing through performing the game development, and culminating with the process of selling the game, our hands-on workshop will quickly teach you what developing games is all about.
Getting Started – Design / Art / Code
It’s never been easier to get started in game development. Free tools, tutorials, technologies, opportunities, and avenues for your work to be seen by a broad audience, exist all across the internet. This session looks at some of these tools, where to find them, and how to go about getting the best from them.
Sunday
Sleep is Death – Design
Jason Rohrer’s Sleep is Death is a unique experience. Straddling the space between game and interactive art, it lets two players collaborate on a story in engaging and unpredictable ways. This session looks at the possibilities of this unique piece of software.
Play is Everywhere – Design / Culture
Anna Dunne, Morgan Jaffit, David Glen, Thomas Killen, Helen Nicholson, Vincent Trundle. Chair: Javier Candeira
As much as people on both sides of the fence might deny it, games have slipped into the wider culture. From iPhones to Facebook, from movies to novels, and from classrooms to cities, games and play are inescapable. This session looks at the changing face of gaming and the mainstream.
Ask a Game Developer – Design / Culture / Code / Art / Biz
Jason Bakker, Conor O Kane, Trent Kusters, Sam Mayo, Alistair Doulin. Chair: Claus Höfele
Have a burning question about how games get made? This is your chance to have it answered by our experienced panel with experience across all disciplines.
Sold Out…
August 13th, 2010Tickets for this year’s Freeplay have sold out.
For those of you lucky enough to have grabbed some, you’ll be able to pick up your pass & program from the registration desk in the State Library’s conference centre. To find it, use entry 3 from La Trobe Street on the map below.
Registration is from 9:00 on Saturday & Sunday. Welcome happens at 9:30 and sessions kick off at 10:00.
Fast Five – Sam Mayo
August 13th, 2010
All good things must come to an end, and other such cliches. But the end of our Fast Five questions means that Freeplay itself is just around the corner! To play us out keyboard cat, here’s Sam Mayo who’ll be talking on our Ask a Game Developer panel.
What are you working on right now?
Just finished up the development of Puzzle Quest 2 for Steam. It’s been really fun developing for Steam, we probably got a little carried away with all the stats and achievements but it was definitely worth all of the extra effort. I’m also working on something that hasn’t been announced yet, which I probably shouldn’t talk about…
What has been the biggest change with what you do in the past 5 years?
Easy: going from being a full time university student to working in the games industry. I learned a lot at university and had some awesome lecturers, but working in the industry is quite a bit different. Game development is the coolest damn thing on Earth, and I love being a part of it.
What do you wished you’d worked on? Why?
Anything Valve have created, especially the Left 4 Dead games. Valve make kick arse games, and command the respect of millions of gamers worldwide. I wanna be them.
What are you most looking forward to?
Whatever comes next! We’ve got some pretty cool projects coming up, but aside from that I’d really like to start attending some conferences overseas. Maybe even work overseas someday.
What is your favourite ever creative moment?
Releasing Puzzle Quest 2 on DS and XBLA, seeing it review well, then seeing it on store shelves locally. We put a lot of hard work into it and I’m very proud of the final product. Also working on the aforementioned Steam version was a blast. I’m a massive geek for excessive in-game stats and achievements, so putting that extra fluff into our game was great.
Sam is currently working as QA Manager and Producer at Infinite Interactive. He doesn’t know how he has enough time at work to be a Producer and a QA Manager, but somehow manages to pull it off.
Fast Five – Neil Rennison
August 12th, 2010
Soon. Soon, soon, soon. Neil Rennison will be speaking on Everything Old is New Again and chairing the One Man Band session.
What are you working on right now?
I am currently increasing the resolution of the in-game UI artwork for our new Gamebook Adventures title, Slaves of Rema for iPhone 4 and iPad. This basically means starting it all again from scratch to maintain pixel quality at the higher resolution! Quite painful!
What thing that you’ve worked on, personal or paid, are you most proud of?
I’m really proud of my art contributions over the years to the various hand-held (DS, PSP, Java, Brew, iPhone) versions of the Need For Speed, Nascar and Juiced series as well as other racing game franchises. Some of these I got immense satisfaction from directly steering the art direction. I’ve also developed my own 3D environment building process over the years. This enables me to create racing tracks very fast, whilst retaining a mathematical structure that enables me to maintain consistent texturing throughout.
What’s a non-gaming entertainment / artistic highlight of the past 12-months for you?
That’s tough and I’ll probably sound quite abstract here, but the birth of my daughter and seeing her grow and change these last 5 months has done more for me on a creative level than I ever imagined. I look at the world in such a different way now – plus it doesn’t give me much time for enjoying any forms of entertainment!
What are you most looking forward to?
Seeing Gamebook Adventures finally available to play/read on an iPad. I’m really hoping that it, in a small way helps contribute to the evolution that is taking place in how we consume literature, interactive or otherwise.
What are you playing right now – digital or otherwise?
Lots of obscure iPhone games when I have the chance. There are some indie gems tucked away on the App Store which are amazing even though they probably only sold 5 copies. I have Alan Wake and Batman AA for 360 waiting to be completed, but I barely have the time at the moment to sit down for more than half an hour with a console game.
Neil is the wearer of many indie dev hats running Tin Man Games, a Melbourne based iPhone and iPad developer. To help pay the bills he also performs art outsource services for larger developers and publishers through his other gig, Fraction Studios.
Fast Five – John Sietsma
August 11th, 2010
Helping to turn Freeplay itself into a game, John Sietsma from Tall Games set up the backchatter code & server for us. He’ll also be speaking on the Beyond the Controller panel.
What are you working on right now?
I’m working on an augmented reality game based on the prank of taking a garden gnome from someones front yard and sending back postcards from around the world. There is collecting, sharing and vicarious travel involved.
And I work on other augmented reality projects for various clients.
What are you most looking forward to?
I’m learning to enjoy the process!
What do you wished you’d worked on? Why?
I Love Bees. It was created by a small team who were quickly blown away by, and had to quickly react to, what could be done through world-wide co-operative puzzle solving. Reacting to your players everyday, adapting a story on the fly would be amazing.
What are you playing right now – digital or otherwise?
Nothing, I’m going screen media free for a month (why did I choose August!). But recently I’ve played; Torchlight, Kyntt Stories, Alien Swarm, Kingdom of Loathing and Psychonauts. I’m always heavily addicted to TF2. I’ve been known to carry a chess board around and I regularly play cards with my kids.
What thing that you’ve worked on, personal or paid, are you most proud of?
My current game. I’m making something I think will be awesome not making something someone else thinks will be awesome.
John Sietsma is an augmented reality games developer. He is very tall and works with the also very tall Finn Morgan, which is why they called themselves Tall Games (http://www.tallgames.net/).
Fast Five – Brandon Boyer
August 11th, 2010
Whoops, we asked for more of these than there were days in the leadup to Freeplay, so we’ll be having more than one for the last few days. We’re very excited to have Brandon Boyer out for Freeplay to talk about how All Play is Personal.
What are you working on right now?
More than it would probably appear! Apart from some light admin on Independent Games Festival goings-on (before the full-on storm hits with the submission deadline, and the judge-wrangling begins in earnest), I’ve generally gone dark to finish off a few bigger projects that have been simmering for too many months now. Things to do with iPhones, and to do with websites — and all to do with indie games, of course. In my “spare time”, I’m trying to make a Facebook app to help the world fall in love (though their API is current stymieing this), and because I don’t feel like that’s nearly enough, I’ve begun outlining a book I’d like to write. And then also there’s two, possibly three, more game festivals to attend/speak at this year, post-Freeplay. Man.
What do you think the biggest change with what you do will be in the next 5 years?
It’s already been a pretty wild ride over the past five or six, since I started getting involved with writing about games, but what I’d like to do with the next five is become more intimately and systemically involved with promoting and championing the best games the indies are producing to as wide an audience as can be mustered — more than simply typing words onto a website. Exactly what form this will take is to be seen (and I have no doubt the landscape will be as unrecognizable in 2015 as our current state was in 2005), but I’m thrilled to continue to be even a peripheral part of This Thing That Is Happening for as long as the community finds whatever it is I do valuable.
If you didn’t do what you do, what sort of thing would take up your time?
Every time I take a half-step back in that direction I find I’m pretty happy to not strictly be in development any longer (I spent five-ish years in Flash/multimedia dev before starting to write full-time), though there’s always at least a good half-dozen projects (games and otherwise) on top of the ones above that I’d desperately like to see created. Beyond that, I sort of half-figured that I’d end up involved with radio (and honestly would still love to be) or music (I’ve got a deep itch to resurrect my old indie label). Strictly speaking, it’s all really the same song and dance: I would like to construct a mountaintop from which to yell about amazing people creating amazing things across all media, and then spend nights tinkering on a few things of my own.
What are you most looking forward to?
Finishing what I’ve started and crossing my fingers that it has the intended effect. Seeing more people from outside “the industry” coming in and creating something no-one could have foreseen (known in some circles as “The Parappa/Katamari/Electroplankton Effect”). The further decline of “games” as market-research-honed demographic-targeted boxed products and the further rise of “games” genuinely appreciated as affecting, creative expression. The flourishing of a market with enough savvy and playful curiosity to sustain that. Both the first truly-compelling, and the very last merely-compulsive, “social” game.
What are you playing right now – digital or otherwise?
Not nearly as much as I wish I could or probably should be! It’s taken me like a year, but I’ve finally become semi-obsessed with Marvelous’s awesomely meta-parodic Half-Minute Hero ( http://www.halfminutehero.com/ ). I’m pretty sure Mikengreg’s ( http://www.mikengreg.com/hello/ ) forthcoming New Thing is going to be a Pretty Good Thing (there are very few reasons why it shouldn’t “pull another ‘Canabalt’”). Tak Fung and Rex Crowle’s Epic Win ( http://www.epicwinapp.com/ ) only barely counts, but I need it desperately to keep me on task, and Capy’s console port of Clash of Heroes ( http://mightandmagic.us.ubi.com/clashofheroes/ ) literally can’t come fast enough. It’s been too long since a game truly made my neck-hairs stand, but I’m more than a little positive Fez ( http://polytroncorporation.com/?page_id=61 ) is going to be that game.
Brandon is the chairman of the Independent Games Festival, and some sort of amorphous, intangible lump of writer-critic-curator-appreciator-promoter of art, with emphasis on the “lump”.
Fast Five – Terry Paton
August 10th, 2010
Not long to go now! Terry Paton will be on the panel A Million Little Ideas.
What are you working on right now?
I’m producing games using a pre-release version of Adobe AIR to get my flash games running on Android phones with the hope to be able to monetise them in the future – and a little client work to help pay for time I spend doing this (more games!).
If you didn’t do what you do, what sort of thing would take up your time?
I’d probably be drawing, painting and looking for other ways to create stuff. I have to make things.
What do you think the biggest change with what you do will be in the next 5 years?
I’m getting more focused with my work and I’d like to start finding people to help make my games – taking them from the one-man-band type to something a lot more polished. Also my new focus on phone games is changing the way I think about interfaces and game design.
What has been the biggest change with what you do in the past 5 years?
The evolution of Flash into having a real programming language has meant I’ve been able to keep making games that can spread all over the net and be played by anyone. Over the last 12 months I’ve worked for myself at home, just making games – it’s been a dream come true.
What is your earliest gaming memory – digital or otherwise?
Back in 1983/84 Playing Horace and the spiders and other classics on my ZX Spectrum – I still dream of creating games that engrossed me so much. They made me want to make games [tears welling up in eyes].
Terry is a flash game developer, mostly making games he wants to, finding sponsorship and earning some ad revenue from them. When he has to he takes on freelance work.
Play at Freeplay – foursquare & Backchatter
August 9th, 2010As our theme for 2010 is play is everywhere we thought it only sensible that we turned the festival itself into a game.
foursquare
We’ve set up an account for Freeplay and also locations in foursquare
Backchatter
Thanks to John Sietsma from Tall Games, we’ll also be running Backchatter throughout Freeplay.
GETTING STARTED
- Register for Twitter if you don’t already have an account
- Follow the game by following bcfreeplay via the webinterface or sending this tweet: follow bcfreeplay
- Pick your first three words by direct messaging the game with this tweet: d bcfreeplay word1 word2 word3 NOTE: no comma between words
HOW IT WORKS
- Score points and win prizes by guessing what everyone at Freeplay is going to be tweeting about.
- Each round, pick three words that you think are going to be popular in tweets marked with
#freeplay10. e.g. awards indie cheese - Every conference session slot is a new round.
- You get points when other people tweet your words. The more players that bet on a word, the less valuable it is each time it scores.
- Check out scores for each round at http://bc.tallgames.net.
HOW SCORING WORKS
- Bets lock at the start of each round. Once a round starts, your words can’t be changed. The three words you picked start scoring for you.
- Words score each time they’re tweeted. When a word appears in a Tweet marked with the hashtag #freeplay10 it scores its value for everyone who picked it.
- The more bets on a word, the lower its value. The more people that pick a word for a round, the less points it will give you per Tweet. Less frequently picked words have a higher scoring value. Note that your own Tweets will never score for you. Common words like “the” and “at” don’t count.