Well.  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

Even 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

Paul Taylor

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

Ted Hung, Cameron Bonde

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

Mike Skolnik

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.

Tickets 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.

As 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

• Experimedia
• Theatrette
• Workshops

Backchatter

Thanks to John Sietsma from Tall Games, we’ll also be running Backchatter throughout Freeplay.

GETTING STARTED

1. Register for Twitter if you don’t already have an account
2. Follow the game by following bcfreeplay via the webinterface or sending this tweet: follow bcfreeplay
3. 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

1. Score points and win prizes by guessing what everyone at Freeplay is going to be tweeting about.
2. Each round, pick three words that you think are going to be popular in tweets marked with
   #freeplay10. e.g. awards indie cheese
3. Every conference session slot is a new round.
4. 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.
5. Check out scores for each round at http://bc.tallgames.net.

HOW SCORING WORKS

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Thanks to IGDA Melbourne, after Freeplay winds down on both the Saturday and the Sunday, we’ll be retreating to the nearby Match Bar for our after party.

On Saturday, we’ll have a dedicated space until about 10:00, and on Sunday we’ll have the whole place to ourself. The full bar will be available on both days, with the food menu on Saturday and the snack menu on the Sunday for those who’ll need to eat.

The results are in, they’ve been counted, lists have been checked twice etc.

Our heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who submitted a game, design or piece of art – we had an astonishing number of entries, representing an enormous amount of work put in by indie developers, writers and artists from all over the world.

So… we are very pleased to announce the finalists for the Inaugural Freeplay Awards!

.

Best Australian Game

• Sword Lady & The Viking – Up Down Ready
• Brawsome – Jolly Rover
• Finn Morgan – Colourbind

.

Best International Game

• Mahdi Bahrami (Iran) – Bo
• Anders Højsted (Denmark)  - TryFail
• Yellow Jam (Brazil) – Last Hope

.

Best Design in a Game

• Sword Lady & The Viking – Up Down Ready
• Alexander Bruce  -  Hazard: The Journey Of Life
• The Voxel Agents –  Train Conductor

.

Best On-Paper Design

• Tobye Ryan – Epic Adventure
• Timothy Ryan – iCrazy Man
• Katie Murphy – Galaqua

.

Best Art in a Game

• Farbs – Captain Forever (series)
• Alexander Bruce – Hazard: The Journey Of Life
• KlickTock – Doodle Find

.

Best Concept Art

• Fiasco Studios – Exodus
• Evan Raynor – City Ruins
• CatBus Interactive – Speed Demon

.

Best Technical Innovation

• Farbs – Captain Forever (series)
• Finn Morgan – Colourbind
• Sword Lady & The Viking – Up Down Ready

.

Best Game Writing

• Farbs – Captain Forever (series)
• Alexander Bruce – Hazard: The Journey Of Life
• PVI Collective – Transumer

.

Best Audio

• The Voxel Agents – Train Conductor
• Tin Man Games – Gamebook Adventures 1: An Assassin in Orlandes
• Brawsome – Jolly Rover

Two and a half weeks to go!

We’ve updated our program with new speakers, bios, and confirmation of Brandon Boyer’s Saturday keynote.

All Play is Personal

Brandon Boyer

Games and their creation don’t exist in a vacuum.  Every moment of our life informs our creative process, our personal themes, our unique perspective and need to express something.  But what difference does any of that make to the games that we make?  In this keynote, we’ll take a look at the deeply personal nature of independent gaming and argue that it makes all the difference in the world.

New speakers & bios include: Conor O’Kane, Trent Kusters, Ash Donaldson, Marcus Westbury, Mike Cowap, Alistair Doulin, Rob MacBride, Sam Mayo, and Matt Ditton.

Even though we launched our program, there were still a few sessions & speaker bios outstanding which we’ll be filling in over the next week.

First up is a new workshop session:

From Zero to Hero – Art

“Character development is a long winding process in many of today’s top games. They require a number of iterations and design focus to make the characters come to life.

This session looks at how characters are made and come to life in blockbuster games.”

And we’ve also added bios for Michelle Gilmore, Dan Graf, Steve Bull, Helen Nicholson, John Sietsma, Cam Rogers, Simon Joslin, David Glen, Tom killen, Chris McCormick, and Mike Skolnik

At the end of late last year, after the dust had settled from Freeplay 2009, Eve and I sat down to decide what shape Freeplay 2010 should take. 2009 was very much our first experience of running a festival, and we learned a lot just through putting the whole thing together.  One of the things we felt was the need for a specific theme to bind everything together.  While we curated 2009 pretty closely, there wasn’t a unifying topic or take home by design. In hindsight, the program coalesced around practical, mid-level skills – less about getting started and more about managing the process, less about the state of the industry and more about the opportunities.

In thinking about it, we noted that coming out of 2009, there was a really strong creative energy – a desire to just get out there and make things – that also seemed to be trying to figure out how to focus itself and how best to approach the sometimes thorny issues at the root of all creativity.  In planning 2009, it’s very much that energy that we’ve chosen to focus on in 2010.

Which brings us to our theme and to our program.  We chose ‘Play is Everywhere’ because we wanted to look at the creative process from a wide range of angles.  We wanted to look at how we come up with ideas, how we take them to completion, how we foster the ones that work and let go the ones that don’t. We wanted to look at play in the context of our audience, of the classroom, of the work we do day to day.  We wanted to encourage experimentation and exploration of the form, and a greater awareness of opportunities beyond what most of us consider the industry holds.

We wanted to build a festival of ideas.  We wanted everyone to come away from it with a sense of possibility.  And we wanted everyone to feel part of not just a development community, but an artistic and creative one too.

So, with just under a month to go, we’re launching the program for Freeplay 2010 and putting our tickets on sale.  Over the coming weeks,  we’ll fill in the remainder of the speaker info, give you details of our after parties, let you know the projects you can get your hands on in the gaming expo, and tease some of what you can expect from the inaugural Freeplay awards.

We’d also like to thank our brilliant Program Advisory Committee, without whom this program wouldn’t have been possible.

See you at the State Library of Victoria on August 14 & 15.

For the full program, click here.

For details of sessions, click here.

For speaker details, click here.

For ticketing details, click here.

For the full media release, click here.

We’re excited to announce that this year, we’ll be holding the inaugural Freeplay Awards!

There’s been some really amazing things happening in the indie games scene and we want to celebrate that. Not only will be be looking at completed games, but we’ll also have categories for best concept art and best on-paper design, which opens the awards up to those creative people who aren’t currently working on a game project, or those people who are at the prototyping stage.

There are up to eight categories – Best Game, Best Design in a Game, Best On-Paper Design, Best Art in a Game, Best Concept Art, Best Technical Innovation, Best Game Writing and Best Audio.

To apply, read through the submission guidelines and rules, and enter using our online application form. Files and links can be emailed to us, and CDs or DVDs can be posted.

You have until 19th July 2010 to enter, and the winners will be announced at the Freeplay Independent Games Festival on the 15th August.

We’re looking forward to seeing all your entries – good luck!