Over the past few weeks we’ve presented a bunch of thought-provoking, alternative game design workshops for the adventurous beginner to the comfortable intermediate game designer in you. Below is a comprehensive list of our forthcoming workshops over the next two months. Hopefully you can find the one just for you to expand your game design knowledge. Click on the title of each workshop to learn more details as to what you can expect to learn, as well as basic skill/experience requirements and thoughts from the workshop coordinator on the inspiration behind each workshop!

For more information on pricing and other details like upcoming workshops, keep an eye out on our Experimental Game Workshops page.

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Establishing Scene: Crafting the Beginning of a Game​

This workshop will show participants how to define the expectations of a player in the very first parts of a game. Not just for establishing setting or mood, but for purposefully crafting the mind of the player around what your game might be. A carefully crafted image for conducting powerful experiences.

Coordinator: Taylor Bai-Woo / @fromsmiling
Taylor Bai-Woo is a game maker (artist, programmer, designer) from Toronto, Canada that co-owns a studio called Gloam Collective (working on a game called Bravery Network)! Outside of her studio (sometimes inside) she tends to make weird explorative games, usually ones that set an expectation and then break it in the best ways possible. She cares a lot about characters, atmosphere, and building a world that doesn’t necessarily make sense, but gives a feeling.

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When: Sunday, April 21th, 1-4pm
Where: Electric Perfume (805 Danforth Ave, Toronto, ON M4J 1L2, between Pape and Donlands stations)
Facebook Event Page

Forget Virtual Reality, Try Actual Reality

Video game designers tend to fixate largely on creating experiences to be shown on a digital display. This workshop is aimed to get designers also thinking about the social and physical aspects of the games they create. There’ll be discussion about real life rules fuzziness and playing to the strengths of your chosen medium. Then participants will be encouraged to test their physical game rapid prototyping skills.

Coordinator: Damian Sommer /@damiansommer
1/4 of the Gloam Collective, currently working on Bravery Network. In a previous life he made the IGF-nominated storytelling game The Yawhg, as well as the randomly generated Chess-like, Chesh.

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When: Sunday, April 29th, 1-4pm
Where: Electric Perfume (805 Danforth Ave, Toronto, ON M4J 1L2, between Pape and Donlands stations)
Facebook Event Page

Gardening for the 4th Dimension

In the 4th dimension, anything can happen. What kind of plants would you grow? Luscious roses or vicious venus flytraps? In this workshop we will learn how to animate short loops and place them in Unity3D! The instructor will provide a project for Unity3D pre-loaded with a few scripts and example scenes. Participants will make their own assets, and we will work through the process of composing a landscape together. Create the garden of your dreams/nightmares!

Coordinator: Paloma Dawkins / @Palomadawkins
Paloma Dawkins is a cartoonist turned virtual reality and video game artist based in Montréal. An alumni of the HES Artsy Games Incubator: Animation Edition (2014), Paloma has been creating wild and loopy art games ever since! Her work includes Gardenarium (GDC Mild Rumpus), Alea (Comics x Games), and Palmystery (A MAZE Johannesburg), all of which can be played here.

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When: Tuesday, May 15, 6:30-9:30pm
Where: Toronto Animated Image Society, 1411 Dufferin Street, Unit B (North of Dufferin Station)
Facebook Event Page

Phaser.JS ProcGen Party

A workshop in how to write procedural games in javascript using the Phaser.js game engine, and how to work in a narrative more meaningful than the usual “grab item and go.” We’ll provide a working, current boilerplate to get Phaser packed with Webpack and transpiling using Babel. We’ll go through how to maintain a game state using Redux, developed to maintain Facebook’s game state. On the creative side, we’ll be learning how to think through making a game a little stranger by starting with something familiar and changing it to something more personal.

Coordinator: Alex Leitch / @aeleitch
Alex Leitch is an award-winning kinetic sculptor and digital artist who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Their most recent work includes the Nebula Space Derby, a game about racing whales with your brain developed for a LARP bar night in Toronto, and Hothouse, a Toronto Arts Council-sponsored installation of large-scale robot flowers for Come Up To My Room 2017 at the Gladstone Hotel. Alex teaches Game Design 1 at OCADu. They love video games that make life’s little indignities into unsettling interactions.

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When: Saturday, May 20th, 1-4pm (Edit: Rescheduled from May 5th due to conflict with TOJam)
Where: Electric Perfume (805 Danforth Ave, Toronto, ON M4J 1L2, between Pape and Donlands stations)
Facebook Event Page

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This program is made possible by the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council. Got any questions or comments? Send them to info@handeyesociety.com.