Crating the Indiepocalypse: How you too can create a brighter future for different games

Andrew Baillie (he/him)

In this talk Andrew will outline his process for publishing Indiepocalypse and how anyone else can learn to do the same, though perhaps on a smaller for frequent scale. He’ll also highlight the importance of advocating for smaller, less traditionally commercial games, and how that can help strengthen game making as an art form.

Building a Games Industry in Africa

Michael Oscar Esio (he/him)

The games industry in Africa is almost non-existent. There are studios scattered across the continent, but until recently, there was barely any form of community that not only connected but presented studios as a body. This session is a mini-expose into the African games industry and the works of Africacomicade, a platform for African digital creatives in the games, animation and XR industry.

How To Ship a Game as a Solo Developer

Devon Wiersma (they/them)

Shipping a video game is an overwhelmingly daunting task on its own, but can be incredibly rewarding – so naturally shipping a video game when you’re working alone can be even more overwhelming and even more rewarding! In this talk, solo game developer Devon Wiersma discusses approaches that you can take to create your own games from start to finish, drawn from their own experiences shipping “Bombing!!: A Graffiti Sandbox” and “Lofty Quest”. Devon will cover topics ranging from the pros and cons of solo development, how to scope and structure your projects to avoid burnout and get through the more cumbersome parts of development, and how to make use of publicly available resources to make your game really stand out.

“If And Only If”: Exploring Variables and Conditional Logic in Interactive Fiction

G.C. Baccaris (they/them)

This talk explores how developers and players alike can interpret conditional logic in interactive fiction. The topic will be examined from multiple lenses, including: technical application, the relevance to narrative design in particular, and player perception. Conditionals can range from extremely straightforward to extremely complex. This talk will reference examples from different games, and emphasis will be placed on at least one introductory example of implementation in Twine 2. Ink, Inform7, Bitsy, Ren’py, and others will also be discussed as engines that support conditional logic. Not all games require complex — or any — logic in order to be impactful, fun, or challenging.

Alternate Reality Games and Participatory Propaganda

Justin Bortnick (he/him)

In this talk, Justin draws upon his experience developing the popular ARG for the indie game Frog Fractions 2 to talk about the political implications of game design, and how without caution our industrial design methodologies can be repurposed by political actors to make compelling propaganda, leading to real-world phenomena like QAnon, the Jan 6th attack on the US Capital, and more. Justin also highlights how these design principles have been successfully used to make the world better beyond the games space, both in service of bolstering liberal democratic systems in Europe and Asia and in educational settings at institutions of higher learning.

Relationship Status = Complicated!

Bobbi Augustine Sand (they/them)

In games where players develop relationships to game characters, elements such as player psychology, projection and preferences come into play. How can that be taken into consideration by writers and designers? And what role does player choice have? Should players get a wide variety of romanceable characters to choose from, and be able to shift the relationships according to their preferences, or could it be meaningful to exhort players into having relationships they wouldn’t choose for themselves to convey a specific story?

Cultivating Playful Culture

Duncan Corrigan (he/him)

In a culture that is driven by efficiency and performance, we often devalue actions and characteristics that contradict those notions. This internalised-culture will often make us feel guilty to linger, self conscious to play or anxious to try new things. It can limit how we engage and narrow our perception. In this talk Duncan highlights one of these undervalued and under recognised characteristics, playfulness.

Using Early Access as a marketing tool for narrative games

Tony Howard-Arias (he/him/they/them)

Tony talks about how early access has worked to help us build a thriving community and continually improve our game with user feedback over the course of a long development cycle.

Creating Tools for Goodbye Volcano High: Building custom narrative solutions using ink and timeline

G.C. Baccaris (they/them)

Lead programmer on Goodbye Volcano High would love to present and share their techniques and learnings. At the very bare bones, GVH is a branching narrative, and we have been aiming for very high fidelity graphics, animations, camera effects, etc to give it a feel closer to an animated show than a visual novel, which tend to be fairly static. Because of this, we needed a system that would allow artists and integrator to work in unity without the need for a programmer implementing all of the cuts, effects. This is not a prefect tool by any means, and we are constantly tweaking it, adding new features, and finding new ways to push timeline, and my hope for this talk would be to present our learnings on a novel way of using ink and timeline, and contribute knowledge to the approaches to building narrative games, rather than a polished system that others can pick up and implement immediately.

Surface Pressure: Mental Health in Games Community Development

This panel aims to support to devs specialized in community development as well as indie devs having to work on marketing and social media on their own. Newcomers will be able to learn about best practices on how to handle your time, work load, and protect yourself accordingly. We hope to support devs and give them best practices in order to achieve their goals.

Reorienting How We Make Play: Accountability, Healing, and Restorative Justice in Games

Following the continued years of harrowing stories of abuse in the games industry, for both players and developers, we sense a growing awareness of the systemic issues at play in our industry. In this conversation with Honey Rosenbloom (Friendship Garden Game Developers, Astra Fund, ex-Alphabet Workers Union), Kishonna Gray, PhD (University of Kentucky, Author of “Intersectional Tech”), Javiera Cordero (Threshold Games, Beamable), and — likely — JC Lau (Probably Monsters, ex-Harebrained Schemes) we will discuss how to view and engage harm done in the games industry from a systems perspective, what accountability means and how it can be practiced, and what restorative justice principles can teach us about how to build resilient, healing studios.