Fast Five – Yangtian Li

Posted on by meredith

Today’s Fast Five comes from Yangtian Li, who will be appearing on our What We Were Playing panel.

Tell us a bit about yourself

I am an emerging digital illustrator and animator, who currently works at The Voxel Agents as the lead artist.

What are you working on right now?

Currently I’m working on the next game at The Voxel Agents, developing concept art and visual style of the game – and then make all the graphic assets for the game too. Ha ha.

What is your favourite ever creative moment?

When I struggle with inspiration and suddenly a good idea comes up. And it’s kind of like ‘Wow, inspiration you finally come! Let’s have a date!’

What are you playing right now – digital or otherwise?

I’m playing Tiny Tower, Cut the Rope and Tiny Wings on my iPhone, meanwhile I play Zelda on 3DS. Please don’t take me as a pure casual player though, I did play a lot of games that are too Asian to tell.

What is your earliest gaming memory – digital or otherwise?

It was when I was 4 or 5 years old and my parents bought my grandpa a handheld for playing Tetris – I don’t even know what the name of the handheld was. But as you can tell, it became more of a toy of mine that my grandpa.

A few new volunteers…

Posted on by Paul

As Freeplay draws ever, ever closer, we’re looking for some additional volunteers to help ensure that things run smoothly.

Volunteers are needed to help usher and check tickets in the conference centre, staff the information table in Experimedia, hand out feedback forms, direct attendees, and provide general event support across both our Playful Program and Weekend Conference & Freeplay Arcade.

If you’re interested, fill out the google form or drop an email to volunteers@freeplay.net.au if you have any questions.

Fast Five – Sayraphim Lothian

Posted on by Paul

Three weeks today we have our first event – The Games That Made Me at the Bella Union. Thanks to the Emerging Writers’ Festival for partnering with us on the program for that event.  Before that though, we still have a lot to get through, including more of our Fast Five interviews with speakers. Up today is Sayraphim Lothian who will be on our panel The Next 12 Months.

Tell us a little bit about yourself

My name is Sayraphim Lothian and I’m an artist and crafter, I make puppets and theatre, I’m a teacher and I work in a museum making awesome experiences for visitors.

What are you working on right now?

I’m working on 2 participatory games for museum visitors with members of Coney, also I’m working on a game titled Drinking From The River for my company Terrible COMFORT, a one on one experience called A Moment In Yarn crafting people’s warm memories and a pirate puppet show for Fringe called X that’ll probably end up with participatory moments from the audience.

What is your favourite ever creative moment?

That is one of the hardest questions I’ve ever been asked. It’s so hard to choose a favourite.  After much thought, I think I’d have to say the moment I realized my superpower is to make anything I can think of in 3d soft sculpture and/or knitting. That was pretty cool. Once I realized I had this superpower, I first tested it by knitting a Nyarlathotep. Which turned out to be very pleasing.

What are you playing right now – digital or otherwise?

We play a lot of board and card games including Scrabble, Uno and Skip-bo. We’re very big on Fluxx at the moment, mostly Pirate Fluxx and the original, and we’ve just bought a couple of dice games, Zombies and Cthulhu dice. And we own an old version of Panic, which we love although it makes us shout in panic every time we play it.

What is your earliest gaming memory – digital or otherwise?

Sitting on the cold tiled floor of my grandmother’s laundry on stupidly hot summer days, playing Skip-bo when we were children.

Or scaring myself silly playing the text based computer game Hunt The Wumpus on the family’s Commodore PET computer in the early 80s.

What’s a non-gaming entertainment / artistic highlight of the past 12-months for you?

Finding out one of my artworks was being placed in the National Gallery of Victoria’s archives was pretty damn exciting.

Fast Five – Joe Tabor

Posted on by Paul

The second of many. Joe Tabor will be running the Cultural Design workshop on Saturday.

What are you working on right now?

I’m currently working as Producer and Lead Artist on preproduction for Peleda, an online browser based game, working with Vishus Productions, ABC and Screen Australia.

What is your favourite ever creative moment?

Being a dad, though I guess you want something more Freeplay focused. Aside from working on Peleda it would be enabling a team working on a little N-Gage project the space and time to do a proper preproduction.

What are you playing right now – digital or otherwise?

Currently playing Bully and Trine from the recent Steam sale and waiting for the names of Deus Ex 3, Dead Island and Heroes of Might and Magic to turn into links.

Enjoying the odd game of Warmachine/Hordes.

Wanting to play Horus Heresy (board game) though need to find 5 hours and someone willing to play…

What is your earliest gaming memory – digital or otherwise?

When 5 or so, cheating at Monopoly to make the game last longer…what was I thinking?

What’s a non-gaming entertainment / artistic highlight of the past 12-months for you?

Hmmm there are things other than games? Film-wise I really loved ‘The American’, and reading through the Dresden Files.

Joe has been working in games for 12 years as an environment artist, lead artist, art manager, producer, business development manager and is now director of his own company, Fiasco Studios.

 

Program update…

Posted on by Paul

Just because it’s launched doesn’t mean we can’t keep adding things to our program:

Rue Bebelons will be our venue for Lemon Joust Club

Taking place on Thursday, August 18, Lemon Joust Club will take you into the yellow belly of Melbourne to experience the world’s grubbiest – but nicest smelling – underground competitive sport.

The Games That Made Them…

Our initial line up of speakers for our Pecha Kucha style night at the Bella Union is:

  • Vanessa Toholka
  • Ben Pobjie
  • Yug Blomberg
  • Matt Riley
  • Aaron Styles
  • Paul Callaghan
  • Crystal Ashdown

With more to come.

Both The Games That Made Me and Lemon Joust Club are part of our new Playful Program.

Conference Program updates

We’ve added new sessions and new speakers including:

Tiny Speakers

Stephan Schutze

Just because the devices are small doesn’t mean we need to skimp on audio quality. This session looks at ways to squeeze the best out of our back-pocket gadgets, and some innovative ways of using sound and design to create new portable experiences.

How Every Little Decision Can Bring You Closer To or Further Away from Creating Art

Christy Dena

A (self-described) “handsome and debonaire stranger” said to me the best way to avoid creating boring or bland projects is “don’t work for shit companies” and “only go indie if you have a brain”, but what happens if you (think) you don’t work for a shit company and you have a brain? Are there still little things you can do that gradually and inevitably steer your project into the sea of mediocrity? This open session is a discussion about how all of those little decisions build and how best to stay on top of them.

How to Design the Same Game, Twice

Thuyen Nguyen, Andy Simons

Two different designers (representing their respective companies) compare and contrast how they approached creating games based on the AFL. A lively discussion about design approach, limitations, license restrictions and other random things in the context of sports games.

Fast Five – Paul Callaghan

Posted on by Paul

Between now and the festival, we’ll be running daily interviews with speakers, judges, past award winners, associate producers, advisory committee members, and whoever else we can find who we think might be interesting.

First up is our director Paul.

What are you working on right now?

Freeplay. We’re close now. Really close. This year more than previous years has been a rollercoaster, but I’ve reached a point of zen-like calm now. Every day is another day of solving problems, putting things in place, and prepping all of the new things we have in store.

I’m really excited about our new Playful Program as an expansion of the core festival, and I’m both trepidatious and hopeful about our (un)keynote, but running a festival is about findin the balance between a continuation of what’s gone before and experimenting with as many new ideas as you can :)

What has been the biggest change with what you do in the past 5 years?

Going from working in a studio to teaching to being a freelancer and to working on this festival. Along the way I’ve found the things that I’ve become interested in shifting to something broader. I’m still hugely interested in videogames, but I’ve become more interested in them as cultural and artistic artefacts and how they influence – and are influenced by – more pervasive models of play.

And I’m constantly amazed at the technological shifts we’ve seen. It seems like more creative and independent development has become something not only viable, but essential to the games’ development sector. There are so many exciting ideas and new genres happening all the time both locally and around the world, that I really think there’s never been a better time to be working in games.

What do you wished you’d worked on? Why?

I’ve been pretty lucky recently in the projects I’ve been able to work on this year. A few of those though, I wish had gone a bit further. I often find myself wondering about the games that got away and trying to figure out what could be salvaged in another form.

What are you most looking forward to?

Quite a lot :) Freeplay, obviously, but also what I hope is a shift towards seeking out more personal, more human, and more playful games and experiences locally. There’s so much changing in tech, in art, in culture, in games, and in play, and it’s really cool to see all of that stuff coalescing and the start of what should be some really exciting projects.

What is your favourite ever creative moment?

There’s more than just one, but they happen in similar ways on every project. I really like the moment when you’re in freefall and you aren’t quite sure how you’re going to solve a specific problem, but just by doing the work and pushing forward, you find something that can be quite surprising. We saw it with our (un)keynote this year – something that we think is cool, but that only came about through having to solve issues around funding and programming.

Paul works his day job as a freelance writer & game developer, directs the Freeplay Independent Games Festival, sits on the board of the Game Developers’ Association of Australia, and occasionally finds time to write his own fiction.

2011 (un)Keynote

Posted on by Paul

In the absence of us being able to bring international speakers over or finding someone locally to hit some of the keynote ideas we’d sketched out, we knuckled down and tried to think what else we could do that would still be inspiring and could still connect to our 2011 theme of Handmade.

And what we came up with was an idea that turned into a plan which turned into something that we hope will be unique and kind of cool.

Here’s the idea:

  • Crowdsource our keynote (or unKeynote as we’ve christened it).

Here’s the plan:

  • Think about what you’d tell a room full of developers, students, artists, educators, critics, writers, that fits in with our theme of Handmade
  • Make up a single powerpoint slide that illustrates that.
  • Fill in the presenter notes with enough to fill around 30-40 seconds if read out loud. That’s about  60 – 80 words. Try not to go over that.
  • Email the slide to unkeynote@freeplay.net.au

Here’s what we hope it will turn into:

  • We’ll stitch them together, try to find the common themes, and present them all together as our Freeplay 2011 unKeynote on Saturday, August 21.

Feel free to spread this around, ask as many people as you can, and find (or think of) as many ideas and opinions and images and left-of-field thoughts about what Handmade might mean.

And we’re live…

Posted on by Paul

Few changes around here :)

We’re very excited about not only the launch of our new website, but also our 2011 conference program, our new playful program, and information about both our tickets and our free events.

2011 Conference Program

Returning again this year are our 2 days at the State Library looking at games, culture, art, design, code, audio, and everything else related to game development. We’re still locking down some parts of the program and some of the final speaker details, but hopefully there’s still enough to whet your appetite.

In response to feedback we’ve tried to mix up the format a bit more this year, with less panels and more talks and microlectures, while still retaining a healthy amount of debate and discussion.

We also have an announcement about our Saturday keynote event percolating. More news on that very soon.

Playful Program

When we sat down to plan this year’s Freeplay we had a bunch of ideas that we wanted to do but that we also felt might not fit into the weekend. We really wanted to do some of them though – and so the Playful Program was born.

This year we have 3 events on Wednesday August 17 through Friday August 19 that we hope can be a bit more boisterous and playful than the weekend. Setting them in bars shouldn’t hurt either.

Free events

Taking place in Experimedia will be the Freeplay Arcade and Expo, giving audiences a chance to play locally developed indie games and meet their creators, as well as finding about pathways into game development.

And for the first time, we’ll be running a free Interview Series with local creatives in the Wheeler Centre on Sunday, August 21 in parallel with the Conference Program.

Ticketing

We’ve worked incredibly hard to keep Freeplay accessible to everyone, but we’ve also had some funding decisions that didn’t go in our favour this year and as a result, we’ve had to revisit our ticket prices.

To offset the change, we’ve introduced a range of ticketing options for those who only want to come to the weekend, those who want to come along to everything, those who only care about the playful program, and those who might only want to come along to one thing.

Still things to come…

We still have some tricks up our sleeve and we’ll be filling in the extra session and speaker details as they come to us. Keep an eye out for more info here, on twitter, facebook, or our mailing list.

We’ll see you all in August.

State of Design – Something From Nothing

Posted on by Paul

Over the weekend, we ran a bit of an experiment at the State of Design Festival’s Design:Made:Trade event based on Adam Saltsman’s Idea Bucket Game that he did at Gamecity (thanks to both of them for inspiration and permission).

We ended up with a bucket full of creatures, backdrops, and items – 96 after we scanned them in and cut them out – and on Sunday, John Sietsma and Aaron Styles made two games out of them in 7 hours.

Aaron’s game has the player trying to eat the apples before the other monsters. You can also yell into the microphone to chase the monsters away. Play it here.

John’s game is a single button game with spinning, advancing monsters. Let the green ones out and knock the red ones back. Play it here.

Thanks to everyone for coming along & drawing, to John and Aaron for making the games, and to State of Design for hosting us.

Freeplay Awards – Last day for submissions

Posted on by Paul

A gentle reminder, if one were needed, that the Freeplay 2011 Awards close today (Monday, July 25) at 11:59. Finalists will be announced the week of August 8 and the winners in each category will be announced at the Freeplay Independent Games Festival on August 21.

Categories for the 2011 Awards are:

  • Best Game
  • Best International Game
  • Best Design in a Game
  • Best On-Paper Design
  • Best Art in a Game
  • Best Concept Art
  • Best Technical Innovation
  • Best Game Writing
  • Best Audio

Full rules, submission guidelines, and the online form are available here.

Once we’re through this order of business, we’ll be launching our program and details of how to buy tickets for this year’s event(s) :) Stay tuned.