Our speakers page has also been updated with the bios of some newly confirmed speakers – currently, we have 41 developers, educators, artists, writers, journalists, bloggers, film-makers, cross-media experts, and students taking part across the two days.

Sessions here.

Speakers here.

These’ll be updated in the run-up to the festival as more speakers are confirmed and we get their bios online.

Intellectual property issues for game developers

Games development is all about creating innovative content – but how do you make sure that you are rewarded for all your hard work? This session will cover the different types of intellectual property protection available to game developers, how to manage and protect your intellectual property and how to avoid infringing others’ intellectual property.

Introduction to DS Homebrew

With two screens and touch input, the Nintendo DS is the leader in handheld consoles. Presented by Thuyen Nguyen, whose own DS homebrew has been featured on Kotaku and Joystiq, this session will be a primer for everything you need to know about getting started with using and developing homebrew for the DS. Topics include flash carts, development tools, homebrew examples and general dev & design tips. This is not a coding session!

Panels & Lectures

The Village Roadshow Theatrette is where we’ll be hosting our lecture / panel sessions.  We want to make these a little bit longer than in previous years to give the speakers more time and also to give the audience more time to ask questions.

Sessions (with more to come) include:

Games and Screen Culture

This session takes a look at the place of games in the wider screen culture, and also showcases projects using games and games technology in unique and innovative ways.

Weapons of Mass Construction.

The talk will look at the massive amount of content which modern games require and at procedural software solutions which allow even the small developer to produce games on a grand scale.

There is an increasing trend in the industry to utilise procedural content generation for everything from textures, animation, vegetation, landscapes, and even entire cities.

Rather than threaten the  artists role in producing content, we should embrace these techniques as they allow us to produce more and better work. Proceduralism is not all about pushing a button to make art, it is fact about allowing an artist, through a sequence of decisions, to produce work of greater scope and detail in a shorter time frame.

Making the leap

How do you become an indie?  What are the challenges involved?  What are the benefits?  And can you actually make a living out of it?  This panel looks at people who’ve made the leap.

Education & Development

The past few years have seen games courses crop up all over the place – from vocational training colleges to university degrees.  This panel explores the relationship between education and development, and what they can learn from each other.

Diversity in the games industry

Those outside the games industry see it as a homogenous blob, chasing the 18-35 male demographic, and producing nothing but space marines trudging through brown corridors killing aliens, or stories of hitmen violently pursuing consequence free sex with prostitutes.

What is the reality?  Is development becoming more diverse?  And does that increase in diversity result in a shift in the types of games we make, and the audiences we can attract?

Where to from here?

At the first Freeplay in 2004, there was no steam, no App store, no XNA, no Xbox Live Arcade, no PSN, and no WiiWare.

This panel looks at where we might be in another 5 years.

Workshops

The Seminar rooms at the State Library will be where we hold our smaller, more focused workshops:

Art Direction

The visual style of a project can have a huge impact on the player’s experience.  This session looks at the challenges & approaches in maintaining a meaningful, consistent style that works in concert with gameplay.

How to make your own games for free

A seminar for anyone who is interested in being an independent game developer but has a restricted budget. Topics covered include an overview of the development process, engines and tools suitable for small teams, the benefits of prototyping and advice on how to commercialize your games.

Making a lot of noise out of nothing

How to get quality audio into a project for little or no budget

Audio has long been seen as an expensive component of film, TV and video games; with studios charging exorbitant fees and audio equipment being some of the most costly tech gear you can buy, many independent developers resign themselves to having little or no audio to support their projects. Creating good audio however is as much about attitude and approach as it is costly tools.

A designer with a good understanding of audio manipulation and how to listen to the world around them can produce excellent work without the need of expensive equipment. This workshop will demonstrate some freely available tools and resources, but more importantly it will demonstrate some simple techniques and ideas that will allow anyone with a desire to create interesting audio to take mundane sounds and manipulate them into new and useful audio assets.

This is a practical demonstration workshop so come armed with questions, be prepared to watch and listen to the creative process and think about what sounds you have always wanted to see created. The audience will be asked to participate by suggesting what sounds should be created and providing challenges to the designer. The more you get involved the more you’ll get out of the session.

Expo & public sessions

Lastly, the Experimedia space will house our public program, incuding demos of games from indie developers and a series of panels devoted to exposing a broader audience to what we do as developers.

Sessions (with more to be announced) include:

Playing in someone else’s sandpit

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.

Games criticism and the danger of the fanboy (or girl)

The games industry has developed alongside the internet, giving everyone with a modicum of technical savvy the ability to have their voice heard – for better or worse.

This panel looks at the issues around games criticism and journalism, and how interaction between creator, critic, and audience impacts everyone.

Ask a Game Developer

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.

Game Design Challenge

A chance to show off your game design and pitch skills.

Teams will be given the chance to workshop and then pitch a small-scale game based on surprise themes and objects to a team of experienced developers, with a prize donated by Infinite Interactive.

Panels & Workshops

If you’ve been to previous events, you know that Freeplay is a diverse event, with people delivering everything from traditional keynote lectures to running interactive workshops to staffing demo machines running their projects, with people from all walks of gaming culture, including independent and professional developers, multimedia artists, students, and games players.

We want to continue that in 2009 and the only way we can do that is to get a broad range of people willing to give up some of their time to come along and be part of the Freeplay community.

So, we’re putting the callout for exactly those people.  We’ve drawn up a draft program, but for now, we want to keep that a little bit secret to see what we get – we’re hoping to be inspired and excited by the ideas that come to us.   If you want to be involved, but you don’t have a specific topic, email us anyway and we’ll work on fitting you in.

For 2009, we want to focus on creativity and ideas and better communication and understanding between creative disciplines.  We want to foster a positive and pro-active vibe across the two days, and we want people to leave the event excited about making games.  We also want to make the event more interactive –which means more panels and workshops as opposed to traditional lectures.  That’s not to say you shouldn’t pitch those, but if you can fit them into a discussion format, all the better.

Email: speakers@freeplay.net.au

Expo Space

We’re also looking for people and teams that would like to demo their game in the Experimedia space at the State Library.  We’ll give you a table, access to power and the internet, and all we ask is that you have someone there to mind your equipment and that you’re willing to talk to the general public if they have any questions.

Email: expo@freeplay.net.au

Volunteers

Volunteers have always played an integral part at past Freeplays – from administrative support to venue assistance, we wouldn’t be able to achieve half as much without them.

In return for volunteering, we’ll give you a free ticket for both days, and give you the chance to peek behind the curtain at what goes into putting an event like Freeplay together.  We’ll also give you the chance to meet and hang out with our speakers, other volunteers, and visit parts of the state library you wouldn’t normally see.

Email: volunteers@freeplay.net.au