Freeplay’s Developer Program is presented in association with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
Thursday, September 20, ACMI
| 9:15 | Thursday Introductions & Housekeeping |
| 9:30 | Starting Your Own Business You are considering starting your business but where do you begin? Increase your chance of success by being well prepared before you start, understand key success factors involved and the resources/ tools that are available to you in “Starting Your Own Business” John Vine |
| 10:45 | Planning and Scheduling Whether monitoring your own progress, describing to a client how a project will progress, or scoping the scale for a funding application, the skills of planning, scheduling, and developing milestones are essential. This session looks at techniques to successfully handle creation, management, and communication of project plans. Joe Tabor |
| 12:00 | Negotation Strategies At some point in any project’s lifecycle, it becomes necessary to negotiate with the outside world. This session explores the fundamentals of negotiation and how to make sure you get what you want without selling your soul. Vanessa Toholka |
| 13:00 | Lunch |
| 13:30 | Managing Teams Whether 2 people working in someone's house or 30 people spread out across the world, learning how to manage the information & personalities of a team are essential skills. This session explores some of the options for handling both the hard skills of details about the game and the softer skills of interpersonal interactions Trent Kusters |
| 14:45 | Pitching The pitch is an essential part of any project, distilling the complex core of your game down into something consumable and exciting. Our successful developers talk about what does and doesn’t work, and narrow in on the essentials of any successful pitching process. David Surman, Ian Gouldstone |
| 16:00 | Crowdfunding With the incredible success of Kickstarter and Pozible, our panel of experts discuss crowdfunding best practice and strategy aimed at getting you the money to get your project off the ground. Caswal Parker, Jeremy Kool, Rick Chen, Fee Plumley Chair: Vanessa Toholka |
Friday, September 21, ACMI
| 9:15 | Friday Introductions & Housekeeping |
| 9:30 | Tension and Balance During development, it sometimes feels as though the disparate elements of a game - its design, code, art, input, audio - are fighting against each other until, hopefully, they come together in harmony with each other for the final experience. This session explores the tension and the balance of that, drawing grace out of the chaos. Panel Presented by Film Victoria Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Dan Graf, Simon Joslin, Dewi Tanner Chair: David Surman |
| 10:45 | Finding a platform iOS might be the darling of developers, but it’s just as possible to make money on other platforms. Developers working on PSN, WiiWare, XBLA, and in Flash talk about their reasons and their successes, and how to go about finding the platform that suits you and your game. Nicholas Watt, Scott Riesmanis, Andrew Goulding, Thuyen Nguyen Chair: Jon Hayward |
| 12:00 | Platforms and Markets When you are operating your studio as a business, a key decision is which markets you will target and how to best approach those markets. This session will look at some of the markets available to independent developers and how to approach choices of platform, genre, audience, monetization model as well as how they interact with each other and the game design. Chris Wright |
| 13:00 | Lunch |
| 13:30 | Tales from the Trenches A chance to hear from developers and studios at various stages of their life – from early startups to established businesses. Joe Tabor, Seon Rozenblum, Deb Polson, Lynda Mills, Rebecca Fernandez Chair: Matt Ditton |
