• Ask A Game Developer
• Game Design Challenge
• Games Criticism and The Danger of The Fanboy (or girl)
• Playing In Somebody Else’s Sandpit
• From Start To Finish

Opening & Welcome

The New iKid on the Block

Kynan Woodman – Development Director at Firemint
Neil Rennison – co-founder of Tin Man Games
Paul Motion – Senior Producer with IronMonkey Studios

Launched in 2007, Apple’s iPhone has, in its brief lifetime, created a new market for independent developers looking to create highly-innovative, smaller-scale projects. This panel explores the issues, challenges, and successes that the iPhone brings to traditional developers.

Agile Development

James Hudson – Nocturnal Entertainment

Agile development is an attempt to allow development to be more reactive to change, to increase iteration speed, and to increase communication between members. This workshop looks at the pros and cons of using agile in a real world game project.

Playing in Someone Else’s Sandpit

Cameron Lee – Development Director at Electronic Arts
Blake Mizzi – Lead Designer at Torus Games
Tarwin Stroh-Spijer – Director at Touch My Pixel
Craig Duturbure – Freelance Games Designer

Australia has a reputation for delivering licensed titles – including Spongebob Squarepants, Transformers, The Fast and the Furious, and others. This panel looks at the challenges involved in working within the constraints of somebody else’s idea – and how you maintain your own creative voice while doing so.

The Art of Getting Things Done

Rory Hart – Head of Development on the virtual worlds project ExitReality

The collaborative nature of games development is one of it’s most rewarding facets, and also one of the most difficult to get right – from estimating tasks, to scheduling milestones, to handling communication, many starting developers struggle with this shift away from their core discipline.

This workshop looks at the fundamentals of managing projects and teams.

Petri Purho – Keynote

Petri Purho, creator of Crayon Physics Deluxe, makes a game every month within a strict 7-day time limit. Freeplay asks him the how and the why of it all.

Interview on ABC 774 – click

Byte into IT on RRR – click

Q&A on the Screenplay blog – click

iTWire article – click

Ben McKenzie, who moderated some of our sessions, blogs about Freeplay – click

Rick Cuddy blogs about the 2 sessions he saw – click

Speakers and musicians, Celsius and Derris-Kharlan, blog about us – click

Gamedev.net forum thread – click

Kotaku reports on the event announcement – click

Forum thread at indiegamer.com – click

George Dunford, from our advisory board, blogs about our keynote – click

One of our speakers, Thuyen Nguyen, has put up the links  & pdf from his talk – click

Over 200 people came along to our panel, lecture, and workshop programme taking place in the Village Roadshow Theatrette and Seminar rooms, hearing from over 50 speakers including developers, educators, students, programmers, artists, film-makers, and cross-media practitioners.

For the first time, we held a public expo program that took place in the Experimedia room at the State Library.  Over 300 people had the chance to play locally produced independent and professional games, take part in discussions about games and the broader gaming culture, and workshop their own ideas in a game design challenge run by Infinite Interactive.

Our international speaker, Petri Purho, drew large crowds to talk about not only his process for creating games, but also the role of creativity in creation and play, and his return in our Freeplay Greatest Hits Panel saw him create rag-doll peggle in under 5 minutes.

In the wake of Freeplay, we’re hoping to continue to build the creative community, supporting independent developers through discussion spaces and events, and putting together our plans for 2010 – stay tuned for details.

Thanks again.

Jason Hill reports on Petri Purho’s Keynote at Freeplay – link

A blog entry from hackpacker – here

We’ll write more about the experience from this side of things, but day two of Freeplay was just as exciting as day one.  Running from space to space, seeing the workshops constantly full of people, hearing the discussions and debate bouncing back and forth in the theatrette, watching people playing games and taking part in design challenges and panels in Experimedia, was simply amazing.

Thank you to everyone who came along – whether you bought tickets day one or simply stumbled into Experimedia.  I hope you got something out of it.

Day one of Freeplay is over.

And wow. just wow.

A long, exhausting, brilliant, surprising, invigorating, challenging day.

We’re home prepping for tomorrow, and we’ll write more later, but I just want to say thanks to everyone who came along. I hope you all got as much out of it as I did. Even though I was running around making sure things happened, I saw enough of the panels, and read enough feedback, and spoke to enough people, to know that Freeplay worked in its new venue and under its new directors.

Looking forward to tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll see you there.

Big news is that Petri Purho, our international speaker is in the country.  We picked him up early this morning and whisked him off to a hotel to recover.

And for those who missed Byte Into It on RRR last night, the podcast is up here.  I talk about Freeplay, video games, twitter, and sandwiches.