tsumea.com‘s coverage of Freeplay 2007, with downloadable footage – click

Tim Ansell – Thousand Parsec

Tim Ansell has been actively involved in the Open Source Game community for over 7 years now.  He has participated in a number of other OSS projects before founding the Thousand Parsec project in 2001.  Tim has been actively involved in trying to help grow the OSS Game community through running events such as the Gaming Miniconf at Linux.conf.au 2007

Mahomed Ayoob – Gridwerx /Aberrant Entertainment

Mahomed Ayoob graduated in 2004 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Interactive Entertainment from QANTM College.  He then joined independent game developer Gridwerx in early 2005.  In mid 2005 Mahomed began to lecture and tutor in Games programming and Maths for Games at QANTM College.  In mid 2006 he made a move to mainstream Enterprise IT, working as a consultant for Avanade Australia.  In January 2007, Mahamed started his own games studio called Aberrant Entertainment.

Ivan Beram – ex Microforte, Far Cry designer

Starting his game dvelopment career at Micro Forte as a Game nad Level Designer on Fallout Tactics, Ivan went on to work at German crytek as their Senior Designer on what would become one of the talked about releases for 2004: Far Cry.  On returning to Australia, Ivan established Intrigue Entertainment.  During this period, he worked on two unpublished titles for next-gen console and handheld platforms, one of which secured development funding from the Australian Film Commission.  Currently he is studying Object-Oriented Systems Analysis, Design, and Programming.  He also writes science fiction in his spare time.

Nick Blackmore – Corrs Chambers Westgarth

Nick Blackmore is a Senior Associate in the Intellectual Property and Technology practice group at Corrs Chambers Westgarth.  He advises a range of vendors and customers on legal issues associated with technology development and procurement, e-commerce, internet media and communications.  His clients include Motorola, Linux, Foster’s Group and Victorian Education and Research Network.  He is an obsessive Football Manager player and has found every hidden item in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow has been an independent game developer since 1996.  He’s been an industry consultant, the technical columnist for Game Developer Magazine, co-organizer of the Game-Tech conference, and founder of the Experimental Gameplay Workshpo, a group that showcases the work of groundbreaking game designers.  He focuses on game-play that is mind-expanding and that connects in meaningful ways to our non-game lives.  He lives in Northern California, USA.

Paul Callaghan – AIE

Paul is currently the Senior Programming Teacher at Academy of Interactive Entertainment Melbourne, but in years past he’s worked at a number of studios around Melbourne, inlcluding Melbourne House, Torus, and IR Gurus, both as a designer and programmer on a number of released and (sadly) unreleased titles.  His professional interests include the crossover of disciplines, approaches to integrating game-mechanis with narrative and development issues affecting quality of life.  Paul is also a published writer of short stories, has written comics, novels, and short filmes, as well as contributing design work to a number of independent projects.  Previous Freeplay conferences have found him talking about stories in videogames and making the shift from programmer to designer.

Rebecca Cannon – Selectparks

Rebecca Cannon is an Australian media mechanic, interested in the production, documentation and analysis of contemporary art.  Whilst engaged full time in the development of the arts website Artabase, she also blogs on Selectparks about artistic uses of computer games.  Rebecca has spoken at international art and technology conferences including Siggraph about the aesthetic and political significance of artworks mae using computer games and her writing on this subject has been published by MIT and Intellect books.

Genevieve Gilbert – MaVie

Genevieve Gilbert is a practicing artist, creative consultant and writer in the contemporary art and media industry.  A graphic designer, video journalist, editor and GUI developer, she has worked for companies such as CIAC, Radio-Canada, Channel Secen and the Quebec Government.  She holds a Bachelor degree in Visual Arts and is completing a Masters Degree in Experimental Media from the Ecole Des Medias of Montreal, a leading experimental media research institution in Canada.  After receiving a scholarship to study a post Graduate Diploma in Multimedia at Monash University in 2001, she started own consultancy Kastor_Fakto interactive.

Justin Halliday – Escape from Woomera

Escape from Woomera Producer Justin Halliday is a video game producer and designer with over fifteen years industry experience.  during this time he has worked as a designer and producer on a number of titles, including Shadowrun, True Lies, KKND, KKND2: Krossfire, Le Mans 24 Hours, Grand Prix Challenge, Transformers, Heroes of the Pacific, AFL 2006, Lucinda Green’s Equestrian Challenge, and AFL 2007.  Justin currently works as a Senior Producer at IR Gurus in Melbourne Australia.

David Hewitt – Tantalus Interactive

David Hewitt is the Creative Director at Tantalus Interactive.  He stumbled into the games industry quite by accident and is still waiting to be found out.  In the meanwhile, he has workd in a design capacity on fourteen published titles across PC, console and handheld platforms, with several more currently in development.  H efounded the Melbourne chapter of the IGDA in 2004, and has spoken extensively at AGDC, FreePlay and games events…occasionally even when he’s been asked to.

Amelia King – Film Victoria

Amelia King has worked for Film Victoria since 1998, introducing successful programs such as the Attachment Scheme and Producer Business seminars.  She moved into her current role of Digital Media Fund Manager in 1999.  In this period Amelia has reviewed the Fund’s activities a number of times introducing new programs to ensure they reflect the changes within the creative digital media industry.  She is directly responsible for the Prototype Development and production investment programs and oversees the implementation of the Fund’s other programs including the Digital Scoping, Digital Media Internships and producer support.

Luc Le Quiniat – Game Mechanic

Luc is currently a partner in Game Mechanic, the world’s largest outsourced game design company in the world that he and his partner Jim Batt know of!  Luc wandered into the QA department at Melbourne House when it was still calling istelf Beam, many years ago and was never thrown out.  He moved into the design department for Transformers:Armada and then onto Lead Designer at Jumbuck Entertainment before teaming up with Jim Batt at Game Mechanic.  Over the last few years they have worked on numerous titles for every platform you can think of with companies both locally and overseas.

Dr Seng Loke – La Trobe University

Dr seng Loke is a senior lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at La Trobe University.  His research interests are in pervasive computing, including sensor-based systems and context-aware computing.  He teaches Mobile and Pervasive Computing at La Trobe.

Thomas Mayer – IR Gurus

Originally a factory worker, Thomas decided in 1997 that computers, rather than welding, were his forte, inspiring him to enter the world of IT.  He worked in this area for seven years before realising that programming business applications was as entertaining as watching paint dry.  thus in 2004 Thomas quit his job and attended the Academy of Interactive Entertainment where he studied game programming.  In mid 2004, Thomas joined ThatGame to work on the action flight game, Heroes of the Pacific.  Throughout his game development career Thomas has worked on six released titles in various capacities across four different platforms around the world, including Tomb Raider: Legend at Crystal Dynamics.  thomas is currently working as Lead Engine Programmer at IR Gurus on exciting new titles.

Chris McCormick – PodSix Video Games

Chris McCormick is a hacker, musician and 3D modelling hobbyist.  he is the director of Pixelbox Networks Pty Ltd, a web hosting company, and PodSix Video Games, a one-man game dvelopment company.  His primary occupation is freelance programming and game development work.  He has lectured on game development at Murdoch University and Edith cowan University, and has spoken at Free Play, AGDC, and Linux.conf.au on a variety of games related topics.

Christian McCrea – Swinburne University

Christian McCrea is a games writer and Lecturer in Games and Interactivity at Swinburne University.  For the past seven years he has researched and taught in fields relating to cinema, culture, games, art, technology, aesthetics and politics, and occasionally he finds himself making pronouncements on these topics in places such as conferences, online forums, in magazines, and on the radio.  He has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences.  He has also been playing games all his life, from Colecovision, intellivision, Atari (2600, 5200, 7800), Apple IIe and ST, Commodore 64, NES, SNES, Master System, Megadrive through to everything that’s come out in the past ten years, with the exception of any 3DO machine, but including a very brief ownership of a Virtual Boy.

Django Merope-Synge – Mod DB

Django Merope-Synge has been a volunteer at Mod Db since 2005, originally as a staff writer; covering mods, games and the independent development community as a whole.  He has been on the development team of a number of mod projects, giving him an understanding of the processes and difficulties behind mod and indie game development.

Paul Motion – Atari

Paul Motion is an experienced Recording and Micing Engineer and Localisation Producer, particularly in Asian and European languages.  For the past five years, he has been the Localisation Producer, Asia, at Atari, and before then was Localisation Manager at Eidos Interactive, A/V Studio Manager at SDL Interanational and a Sound Engineer at Matrix Studios.

Andrei Nadin – Tantalus

With game industry experience dating back over 17 years, Andrei has worked at a select group of companies including Teeny weeny Games / Perfect 10 Entertainment, Hasbro Interactive, Runecraft, Empire Interactive and Codemasters, holding a wide range of positions including producer, Senior Producer, Creative Director and Studio owner.  He has worked for developers and publishers in the UK, and also set up and ran his own development studio.  Andrei is passionate about his work and is driven by a long held commitment to making great games.

Chris Nelson – Seven Valleys

Chris Nelson lectures in Computer Game Design, 3D Graphics, Animation and Multimedia at the University of Ballarat.  He has had a longstanding passion for art and 3D graphics which led him to study a Bachelor in Applied Science in Computing in 1987.  After this he went on to work as a programmer while continuing his creative practice in painting, drawing, photography and multimedia.  His intersets in compartative religion and mysticism drew him to the Baha’i Faith in 1993.  His latest project The Seven Valleys was recently exhibited at the Banff Centre in Canada as part of their Computational Aesthetics conference, and also at the Australiasion Computer Science Week conference.

Binh Nguyen

Amateur Game Developer and Artifical Intelligence Nut Binh Nguyen barely passed his first programming subject, but was bitten by the game development bug and somehow ploughed through his degree.  He is currently attempting, with some considerable trepidation, a PhD in Artificial Intelligence.  He has dabbled with 3D Game Studio, the Unreal 2 engine from Unreal Tournament and the Source engine from Half Life 2.  He holds the ‘Get Your Feet Wet’ session roughly once a month for high school students at La Trobe University in the hope of tempting them away from respectable professions such as accounting and towards the dark side of computer science and game development.

Courtney O’Sullivan – Rabid Penguin Games

Courtney O’Sullivan has just copmleted his Bachelor of Information Systems majoring in Games Technology, and has begun working in the video games industry.  His research interests are in Alternate Control Systems in Games, Game Development.  He has been programming games in an indie / university group called Rabid Penguin Games for the last 2 years.

Gordon Pedersen – Rabid Penguin Games

Gordoon Pedersen is an Honours student at La Trobe University, studying Computer Science for Games Technology.  His interests include pervasive gaming, alternate controls ystems and immersive games.  He hopes to create games which do not fit current stereotypes.  He is also a member of the Rabid Penguin Games Group.

Eve Penford-Dennis – AIE

AIE’s senior art tutor, Eve Penford-Dennis initially joined the games development industry in 1992, working for a variety of high profile game developers across the UK including Psygnosis and System 3.  In her early career, Eve was responsible for the artwork of some now legendary games, including Wipeout 2097 for the Playstation.  In 1998, Eve joined Infogrames (now Krome) as a senior artist.  Eve has contributed to many titles on a variety of platforms, including: Krazy Ivan, Wipeout 2097, The Last Ninja, DethKarz, Looney tunes space race, Le Mans 24 hours, LeMans 24 hours 2, Racing Evoluzione, Mission Impossible: Operation Surma and Stuntman.  Eve is a Women in Games group founder and is a valued contributor to Australia’s videogame industry.

Scott Reismanis – Mod DB

Scott Reismanis first began playing and working with PC game modifications in 1998, which sparked a desire to know everything about them and help indie-developers go from an idea to a total conversion.  In 2002 after numerous websites were made and abandoned, Scott created the Mod Db with the catch-cry “play something different” which aimed to centralize the listing of mods on the internet, and offer a place for developers to get their work in front of an active community.  Now five years on, Mod DB is the leading modification site on the internet with 170, 000 members and over 3,000 modders releasing and sharing content on a daily basis.

Christian Rubino – Chit Chat

Christian Rubino is a Lecturer in 3D Graphics for Game Design, teaching in courses at RMIT and Victoria University / TAFE.  At the end of 2005 he completed Chit Chat, a collaborative, multi-player game project based on the Unreal Engine 2.  In 2005 Chit Chat won ‘Best Real-Time Animation’ and ‘Best interactive’ at the Centre for Animation and Interactive Media (AIM), RMIT Universit, and it was then hosted on Selectparks website.  In 2006 Chit Chat was accepted and screened at the London Games Festival Fringe and Artful Gaming.  In the same year Christian wrote his Masters thesis on level design optimisation guidelines for game artists using the Epic Games: Unreal Editor and Unreal Engine 2.

Damian Scott – Primal Clarity / Swinburne University

Damian Scott has long been associated with the mod scene in Australia, having been with Team Fortress software before its acquisition and adoption by Valve into the Half-Life franchise.  Damiean currently heads an independent games company Primal Clarity Productions that specialises in Unreal engine consultanct and prototyping.  He also works for Swinburne University as a lecturer in games and interactivity, with research interests in the psychosexual aesthetics of gaming.  damian writes a monthly column on mod development for PC Powerplay called ModLife, which deals with issues of independent development.

Alistair Smith – Rabid Penguin Games

Alistair Smith is completing his Bachelor of Computer Science this year.  He has been interested in game programming since high school, along with 3D modelling and design.  He has been programming games in an indie/university group called Rabid Penguin Games for the last 2 years.

Robert J Spencer – Interzone Entertainment

Robert J Spencer (Rj) is Cheif Operating Officer of Interzone Entertainment, a global game publisher headquartered in Chicago with their main development studios in Perth, and subsidiary studios in Guangzhou and Sao Paulo.  Robert is a game industry veteran with a wide range of strategic, sales and business development experience.  Before co-founding Interzone, Rj was Strategic Business Manager of BigWorld, where he worked with numerous developers on a range of massively multiplayer online games, continuing his long association with online game development that started with a groundbreaking prototype in 1994.  robert has also launched and published three high quality computer games magazines; Australian PC Gamer, G+ and PC Games Plus, which was simultaneously published in the US, UK, Australia & Canada.  Well known as a strong advocate of grassroots game development, Rj believes that the independent game development community is not only essential for the ongoing success of the more commercial game developers by also an ideal path for the exploration of interactive entertainment as art…and a great deal of fun!

Helen Stuckey – ACMI

Helen Stuckey is the Screen Events Programmer of Games at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) where she curates the Games Lab, a space dedicated to addressing the significant contribution of videogames to screen culture.  She initiated and project managed the groundbreaking virtual place acmipark created by Australian artists and game developers Selectparks.  She was recently a curatorial advvisor on the game world exhibition for Laboral Centre for Arts and Creative Industries, Spain.  She is a judge for the Independent Games Festival held annually as part of the Game Developers Conference (San Francisco)

Joe Velikovsky – RedTribe

Joe Velikovsky is a game designer, writer and producer at Redtribe Melbourne Studio, and previously of A-Rage PtyLtd, and Ratbag Games in Adelaide.  Past credits include Saturday Night Speedway, Sky Invaders 3-D (an Augmented Reality Game) and also the upcoming Looney Tunes: ACME ARSENAL which is due for release in September 2007 (on Ps2, Wii and Xbox 360).  He studued Game Design, and film and game Screenwriting at AFTRS, and ahs worked for Fox Studios as a film script assessor.  Currently he is greatly enamoured of things which are cathode-green in colour.

Thanks to Souri from tsumea.com for filming the sessions

Lecture Program

Workshop Program

About

Freeplay 2007 took place at ACMI on 18th August 2007.  It attracted more than 300 people, including a significant number of grass-roots independent and emerging game makers and developers.

Free Play, held over two spaces at the Australia Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), featured more than 15 lectures and workshops and involved more than 30 presenters. Respected international and local speakers addressed topics ranging from making a start as a game developer, to tackling political issues through gaming.

International keynote speaker, Jonathan Blow, award-winning creator of Braid attracted keen interest from all the delegates. He spoke about strategic ways to break into the gaming industry and offered practical advice on how independent game developers can gain enough confidence to pitch their work.

“You want to be the person where your game is so awesome that the publisher calls you without you ever having pitched it to them. That’s what you’re aiming for. If your game is that compelling then you’ll get a deal because you’ve differentiated from everyone else,” Jonathan said.

Jonathan Blow also featured examples of his game prototypes and took the audience through the intriguing journey as to home he came to develop Braid. (Examples can be seen here).

(For a comprehensive analysis, and discussion, about Jonathan’s presentations at Free Play visit Jason Hill’s Screen Play blog at the Age Online, here.)

Australian keynote, Robert J Spencer, spoke about the importance of independence in game-making and drew from his extensive knowledge and experience in the Australian games publication industry.

The popular workshop sessions enabled a wide selection of local game developers to discuss and demonstrate games they have worked on. Some examples included sessions that explored motion controllers, free development tools and open-source technology.

Free Play 2007 was supported by Film Victoria, Arts Victoria, ACMI and Crumpler.