Let us guess: you didn’t get to go to the Game Developers’ Conference in San Jose this year. Hell, you can’t even afford a copy of the proceedings. But do not fear, we at Free Play felt your pain, and instructed one of our agents to be your eyes and ears at the star-studded, networking frenzy that is the GDC. We pull out Dad’s slide show gear for the GDC, Independent Games Festival, and the experimental Games’ Workshop and get you up to speed on our professional association behind it all, the International Game Developers‘ Association. And if you‘re lucky we‘ll even throw in a report from Garage Games‘ Independent Game Developers‘ Conference (US).

Come along and explore the outer limits of interface design. You thought using a dance mat or maracas was out there? Try using a rocking horse or a real world playground…

Creative interface design has a long history, from the Atari Pong Paddles to the twin joystick mech dash board of Steel Battalion. While teledildonics remains a wet dream of cybersexers across the bedrooms of the world, there is still a lot more wild innovation going on in this field than you’d think. Interface design remains the last bastion of the crazy inventors and hardware tinkerers.

What truly drives our interface designs? Do we really create systems that suited for humans to interact with? Or are we slowly being trained by computers to adapt to their way of ‘thinking‘? Are we being made slaves to the machine… Our panelists will debate, declare, and demonstrate the latest theories and technology.

The games industry often hires female ’talent’ (as booth bunnies and in industry magazine ads) to attract male developers, hoping they’ll buy their development tools, or apply for a job at their studios. But whatever the industry is doing to attract women developers, it doesn’t seem to be working too well. Why not?

In search of answers to such mysteries, we sent out a team of anthropologists to track down some instances of that perplexing and rare breed, the female game developer. We managed to round up some healthy specimens to give us an insider perspective on what it’s like to be an exotic species in the world of game development. What are the pros and cons of working in an all-male environment, what’s their attitude towards the games they make? We’ve also lined up a token male panelist ready to give us a perspective from the other side of the gender divide.

State representatives holding the purse strings give indies and startups advice on how to access state support through grant programmes, investment, sponsorship and other initiatives.

A demonstration of cool stuff that indie game developers and demo sceners can do for free with the fmod sound system, and a look at open game audio scripting tools.

Respected mappers share their secrets to creating polished FPS levels and prime us for the new techniques mappers will need for the next generation of PC game technology. This session will be of interest to participants with at least a basic grasp of level-editing/mapping.

Working with modern programmable 3D hardware is a unique field, one that can test the mettle of any coder, no matter how experienced. There’s a purity and significance to the idea of chaining together logic and maths to produce, exclusively, aestheticly pleasing visual results.

Writing shaders is an excellent way to turn a novice coder into a standout, or an experienced coder into a star, or even beyond: they have become a platform from which coders have learned to seek aesthetic goals above and beyond the outputs of an algorithm.

This session introduces the main concepts of modern DirectX9 vertex and pixel shaders, and provides an early foothold into the mystical practice of shader writing.

You thought console development was only for developers who could get on a console manufacturer’s ‘developer programme’ and lease a dev kit? Think again. Were you thinking of spending your rent money on Sony’s official hobbyist PS2 Linux kit? Think again, again. Because that’s right – you can develop and distribute PS2 games on your very own retail console and PC. The guys from PSDev.org will show you how.

You may be one of those particularly annoying people who cynical game developers always seem to meet at social functions. If so, you may have already been informed that while you, and in fact many, many people have the ability to come up with an interesting game concept, the real skill of a game designer is defined by whether they can turn a concept – often not their own, and often quite mediocre – into a playable, workable game design.

We’ve roped in a couple of experienced professional game designers to take us on a step-by-step journey through this process.

Running a game modification project can be a tricky business. As a project lead you have to manage a geographically dispersed team of volunteers, organise beta testers, release versions, promotion and build a community…and usually hold down a day-job at the same time!

Our panel of modders report on their experiences of the highs and lows of mod team leadership and share tips on how it’s done.

Ever heard this before: ‘This is just the nature of the game industry. If you don’t like it you can leave.’? Well, according to an International Game Developers’Association survey, game developers are doing exactly that, with half the respondents planning to leave the industry within ten years, the majority of developers having been in the industry for less than five anyway. So what’s wrong with ‘the nature of the industry’ that makes people want to leave? What’s so ’natural’ about the nature of the industry that can’t be changed? Is it possible to change the industry it so that we don’t ever have to leave to get a ’real job’?

We discuss pressing industry issues: can game developer live on pizza and coke alone? Does sleeping under a desk make you hardcore or hard done by?

Film-makers are considered serious artists, while game developers are still considered as manufacturers of trash culture and corrupters of children. How have these societal perceptions arisen, are they fair, and if not, what can we do to change them? What is the role of independent developers in shaping the future of the game medium? Could the videogame and virtual reality usurp film to become the dominant artform of the 21st century?

Game reviewers: serious journalists or corporate-arse-licking boy-whores? In this session, game journos will confirm or deny these and other scandalous rumours surrounding their profession, and give us their unique perspective on the game industry.

Do you have to be a big name developer to get your game covered in a magazine, and what is this thing they’re calling “The New Games Journalism”?

Let’s warm up the arc lamp, turn the tables, and review our panel of reviewers. Expect to be shocked by tales of dubious reporting in exchange for EA-funded adventure holidays, and have a hanky handy for stories of poorly paid writers struggling to keep the games industry honest.

Imagine a reality show where the thing being renovated is a game. It would most likely not be anything like this session. But the thought still counts: a game in early stages of development, three experts in their chosen fields, one hour to strangle the game and beat it into submission.

What’s the point of the game? Is it going to work? Our panel hopes to make it so, by giving the game one fabulous makeover.

Why did Australia make the BMXXX girl put her top back on? And while Lara Croft books in for breast augmentation surgery every year, why aren’t there any third person shooters where female gamers get to stare at Brad Pitt’s arse? In this session we ask: is there a place for sex in games, and if so, what is that place? Come and hear the low-down on the status of game censorship in Australia, and join our panellists in pondering the issues surrounding sex, porn and downright sleaze in games.

Artistic Computer Game Modification, or Art Modding as it is more easily referred to, is a new style of art that started about ten years ago when some innovative game-playing art type realised how much creative potential there was in game engines and consoles. Since then many artists have hacked, modded and co-opted game technologies for artistic uses like VJing, playing live music from, making Machinima animations, abstract video art, interactive experiments, online performative interventions and art gallery installations from.

This screening showcases video documentation of the most stunning, innovative and down-right creepy modding experiments from the Selectparks Art Mod archive, in the relaxed and social atmosphere of the Next Wave Festival Club.

http://www.selectparks.net

Come and see one of Australia’s leading machinima producers, Peter Rasmussen of Nanoflix.net as he describes easy ways to put the fun of gameplay into filmmaking. Machinima is a style of filmmaking that uses a game engine to drive animated characters in real-time. Hours of boring key-framing are replaced by instantly rendered animations. Machinima characters are ‘played’ by human actors in much the same way your standard first person game is played. Peter will show examples of his own work, some of which has been screened in the annual Machinima Film Festival awards in New York, and then describe the easiest techniques for turning your game mod into the next Oscar-winning animation.

www.nanoflix.net
www.machinima.com
www.machinima.org

Effectively the actors of the computer game world, character animators breathe life (and death) into every aspect of our games. They are the ones who make us laugh, cry, or just want to hit things a lot. Anything that walks, crawls, slithers or swims across our screen has been laboured over by these often forgotten meambers of the art team.

So come along and learn the deep dark secrets of what it takes to bring a world to life from these secret puppetmasters of the gaming industry.

Our friendly kick-arse lawyer-come-indie game developer colleague has kindly offered our community a free crash course on the legal issues faced by independent game studios.

From formalising a studio as a legal entity and understanding intellectual property, to your rights when dealing with government grants and the legalities of distribution. All this, and you won’t even have to pay by the minute!

Overviews and comparisons of some of the development technologies available to indie developers.

Including a practical introduction to Blender, the open source 3D modelling package.

Politicians and public institutions claim to want to foster our local game development industry…but what kind of industry? Increasingly, people are turning off their TV sets to consume culture through the medium of videogames. So should the state be supporting Australian games for the same reasons that it funds local content for public broadcasting? That is, for social and cultural good not just economic growth? And are current state initiatives successful in helping start-ups get off the ground?

Our panel of indies discuss what kind of public support for the industry they think would most benefit local independent developers.

GBA developers discuss tools, tips and challenges for Game Boy Advance development.

Don’t let the current cringe factor of politics turn you away from this session. International politics being the dog’s breakfast that it is, game developers are still at its mercy. For example, whilst a post-Columbine movement in the US seeks to ban sales of violent games to youths – America’s Army is free for even the youngest totts to download; an explicit strategy by the US Government to encourage violent behaviour in youth. But the underlying the “violent computer games” issue is a predominant fear in the public over the combination of “serious issues” with “play”. This fear is based on the perceived notions that free-thinking intelligent adults are somehow unable to differentiate between the “real” and the “virtual” and that a side-affect of “playing” is a carefree attitude towards real-life issues addressed in a game.

Speakers in this session will ponder the politics of the videogame as well as discuss ways in which the controversial projects Escape From Woomera, 911 Survivor (which replicated the World Trade Centre moments after it was attacked), and Velvet Strike (an anti-war, Counter Strike mod) have challenged the above notions – simultaneously highlighting the harsh judgements applied to computer games that are not applied to art, film and other so-called “intelligent media” productions of a similar ilk.

How much more fun would school be if all you had to do was play computer games? Since all games are educational to a certain degree – in that you have to learn what strategies let you win – games are an ideal platform for education.

Games also have the additional appeal of competition, which is a great motivation for overcoming the boredom of otherwise repetitive tasks. And, they simultaneously increase a student’s computer skills. Most importantly, the growing interest from the educational sector in computer games makes it a potentially lucrative market for game developers. Developers will discuss their educational games, and share tips of how to sell them.

The way a game company runs it‘s business has an impact on everything – company culture, project timelines, employment policies, pay checks, and product. The idea of imitating standard corporate structures of established fat cat developers can be a daunting prospect to lean new studios starting up on the smell of an oily rag. However, while most existing game developers are run along similar lines, there are many different viable business models being explored by start up studios and independent developers. Often looking for a way out of the established hierarchies and paradoxical “you need to be successful before we‘ll look at you” mentality, these companies have looked at other strategies to help pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

People with diverse sets of knowledge put their heads together to offer fresh perspectives on the age-old problem facing game developers who are independent of corporate publisher tyranny: DISTRIBUTION.
For those of us who can’t afford to purchase shelf-space in Wal-Mart, what’s the best way to reach the gaming public? What can we learn from the indie music, indie film and the emerging indie DVD scenes?

Our panelists will lead a strategy discussion on what we as a community can we do to foster and support the independent game development scene. Likely topics include networks, events, advocacy, organisations, and possibly next year’s Free Play. In this forum in particular we will be encouraging all participants to contribute and have their say.

While Python scripting is increasingly being adopted by professional game programmers to aid development, there is also a thriving community of indie developers who code games entirely in Python. This tutorial will demonstrate Python game programming including 2D and 3D animation, physics with pygame, PyOpenGL and PyODE. People with little or no programming experience are welcome, as well as programmers looking for insight into how making use of Python can streamline development.

Why do the screenshots and demos of next gen games Doom III and Half-Life 2 look so good? A big part of the explanation – and something that’s created a lot of hype – is that id and Valve are using normal maps to achieve their high detail look while keeping the poly count down. We present an introductory tutorial by an artist who used this technique at Crytek building objects and environments for Far Cry.

3D computer games need a degree of conformance to the laws of physics for acceptable realism. Game physics is a computationally fast approximation to real-world physics. This workshop will cover collision detection, gravity, friction and other basics of physics simulation, then go on to focus on the particular problem of simulating vehicle game objects over rough terrain.

Need a texture artist for your mod? Need a physics programmer for your game project? Need a tea lady for your office? Five minutes each to propagandise for your project, outline your requirements and agitate for recruits. All those looking to get involved in a new project should come to this session to check out what’s on offer.

Graduates hold a frank discussion on how their game development courses measured up. Did they learn relevant skills? Were their intellectual and creative horizons broadened? And for those who chose to enter the industry, did their studies prepare them for the big bad world of commercial game development?

Hardware modders demonstrate cool stuff you can do by hardware and software hacking game consoles.

AI coders discuss and demo ideas, techniques and low-down dirty algorithms of game AI. Warning: this session may contain audience participation and robot nudity.