2010 Session Details

The Design of Everything… – Design / Creativity

Deane Taylor, Michelle Gilmore, Ian Gouldstone, Andrew Drage. Chair: Marcus Westbury

Every expressive medium is different, with unique strengths and weaknesses.  Exploring each one requires different approaches to the creative process – but some fundamentals remain.  This session looks at the creative process from a variety of perspectives, and highlights how design – from character to structure to usage – creeps into each of them.

The First and Last 10% – Design

Simon Joslin, Adam Saltsman, Nathan Thomas, Rob MacBride. Chair: Paul Taylor

At opposite ends of the development process are the prototyping phase and the polishing phase.  But should they be so separate?  And how do we know when to stop iterating over our ideas?  And when should we stop polishing something and get it out the door?

This session looks at those two stages of a project and asks – what really happens in that first and last 10%

Government Secrets – Biz / Culture

Mike Cowap, Brad Giblin, Fee Plumley, Alan Gibb.  Chair: Chris McCormick

Locally and nationally, there are a wide range of funding bodies, all focused on different things, all offering different levels of support, and all with different requirements and processes.  In this session representatives from Screen Australia, Film Victoria, The Australia Council for the Arts, and MMV talk about their programs.

The First One is Free – Biz / Culture

Stephan Schutze, Elliot Bledsoe, Chris McCormick. Chair: Fee Plumley

It’s all just 1s and 0s, and copying them is cheap and easy.  Anything you put in digital form will be ripped, shares, duplicated a thousand times over.

This session looks at the free, remixing, and digital culture and explores how to use it to your best advantage.

Beyond the Controller – Design

John Sietsma, Steve Bull, Jane Turner (Truna), Hugh Davies.  Chair: Morgan Jaffit

Pervasive games, locative games, transmedia, cross-media, arts based projects. How do they use the tech for things? How do they use what games people know? What can games people learn from them?   This session looks at what happens when we remove the controller and how that changes the sorts of experiences we can create.

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.

Pipeline and Tools Development – Code

Glenn Watson

One of the essential elements of development is bringing outside assets into the game itself.  This workshop looks at the role of tools and pipeline development for indies, explores the needs of disciplines beyond code, and presents practical solutions for integrating code, art, and audio.

From Zero to Hero – Art

Chris Concepcion

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.

Getting Started with Unity – Code

Ben Britten Smith

The technology landscape for independent developors has changed dramatically over the past few years, with a number of free and mature toolsets becoming available for use.  This workshop takes an in-depth look at the Unity engine, focusing on rapid prototyping, iteration, and its content pipeline.

Franchise Thinking for Indies – Design / Biz

Christy Dena

This session will cover how creators with any budget can think in transmedia terms. It shares world-creation techniques that ensure your property is designed to work across media from the beginning. This is part of the transmedia phenomenon: where independents and conglomerates alike are thinking in terms of creating properties that include a game, not just are a game. You could create a web comic to go with your mobile game for instance, or a have big plans for a graphic novel or film as well. How does franchise thinking affect the concept development and technical development production phases? What changes are there in terms of story and character design? What processes ensure continuity across the various elements of a property, which are oftentimes created by different people? What skill-sets are needed for transmedia creation? How can an existing game property be transformed into a transmedia property? This workshop will take you through some of the lessons learned from transmedia creation, and apply them to your own projects. Ideally, every participant will come with an idea or even an existing project. But creators without projects may also be welcome.

Artists Way at Work Workshop – Creativity

Sally Mazak

Using tools from the world famous ‘The Artist’s Way at Work’ and other inspiring methods, this workshop will provide you with a few powerful seeds of knowledge to sow and grow. How can you overcome your creative blocks, begin to take risks and produce awesome results? Did you know that inspiration doesn’t ‘just happen’? How can you be relaxed and still come up with cool ideas under pressure? There are three types of Creatives. What type of Creative are you? Learn steps to actively become inspired and push your boundaries.

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.

Play and Games and Video Games and Us – Design / Culture

Adam Saltsman

Most animals play as soon as they can move.  But why do cats jump into boxes?  Why do dogs play tug-of-war?  What does that have to do with anything?  Let’s follow a thread that starts before humanity and leads to a form of mixed media that could only be imagined by the greatest minds in science fiction.

Twisting Space – Design / Culture

Javier Candeira, Dan Golding, Alexander Bruce, Troy Innocent, Hugh Davies.  Chair: J.Turner (aka Truna)

From cities in the sky to dockside container mazes, games have endlessly adapted real-world spaces.  But what happens when we realise that the in-game space doesn’t need to conform to physical laws?  And what happens when how people experience space begins to bleed out into the real world.  This session takes a look at the intersection of the real and the virtual and hopes you don’t get lost in either.

101 Things I Learned in Game Design School – Design / Education

Helen Stuckey, Christian McCrea, Malcolm Ryan, Peter Henry, Matt Ditton, others t.b.c.

There’s a wealth of thought, teaching, and experience about games and game development – from academic theory to the indescribable sense of when something just feels right.  This session looks at the (slightly less than) 101 things academics, teachers, developers, and students had been told in school.

One Man Band – Design / Biz

Seon Rozenblum, Andrew Goulding, Chris Watts, Matt Hall. Chair: Neil Rennison

Hardware, digital distribution, middleware, and outsourcing have allowed an environment to emerge where a single person with a single idea can pull together a project and make it work.  This session looks at the creative and business forces at work on those one man bands.

A Million Little Ideas – Design

Farbs, Terry Paton, John Lycette, Ash Donaldson. Chair: Simon Joslin

Everyone has an idea for a game (or a million of them), but how do you identify which ones to pursue and which ones to leave by the wayside.  And how do you evolve that idea into something workable, incorporating everyone else’s ideas along the way.  This session looks at the pursuit of that one brilliant, shining, life changing moment – and the work that goes into making it real.

Freeplay Greatest Hits & Awards

Throughout Freeplay, we’ll be handing out feedback forms & asking people to vote for speakers they’d like to see again, and put forward specific questions you forgot to ask.  We’ll then bring them back for this final session, ask them the thorny questions, watch them squirm, do some prize-giveaways, then let you loose back into the world to start creating your newly inspired indie projects.

Story Driven Game Design – Design

Dan Graf

Games are, like stories, designed experiences.  While there are unique elements to both storytelling and gameplaying, there are also things that we can learn from thousands of years of storytelling lessons.  This workshop takes a look at one method of deconstructing stories and how that can apply to game design.  Please note: This session is highly interactive, and spaces are limited to first come, first served.

IP for Indies – Biz

Cam Rogers

Developing and maintaining control of IP is one of the driving forces in developers moving into the indie space.  This workshop looks at some of the necessary issues in creating and exploiting it from a legal perspective.

It Came From Software Development! – Design / Production

Ivan Beram

Game developers have cannibalised production processes from software development such as waterfall, spiral, iterative, or agile, in true Dr Frankenstein fashion – but what if there was a better way?  One that was targetted specifically at the arcame mysteries of game development?  Drawing on research, this workshop looks into a design-centric methodology that, while being broad in application, is aimed at aiding indies of any disciplinary background, to craft more than just a B-grade project.

A Live Prototyping Challenge – Design

Michelle Gilmore, Ben Hendry

Prototypes raise questions around content, functionality and importantly feasibility. They allow us to explore unknowns and test our thinking.

Ben and Michelle are the founders of Sydney-based Service Design company, Neoteny. Neoteny means the retention of juvenile characteristics in adult life.  This plays out through curiosity, experimentation and a collaborative design process where everyone can get their hands dirty.

This 60 minute workshop aims to demonstrate the value of rapid prototyping through a live prototyping challenge. Ben and Michelle will ask for challenges from the audience and prototype a solution with their participation.

This is a great opportunity to see how easy and playful thinking-with-your-hands can be.  It also shows the importance of facilitating a process that balances technical feasibility with business strategy. The audience also get the chance to see how valuable it is to test and iterate concepts or ideas during the early stages of a project.

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.