Category: My News

I had a great time when I spoke at this year’s Emerging Writers’ Festival, and now I’m excited to say that I’ll be a part of their special Digital Writers event happening in Brisbane.

On 15 October, the Emerging Writers’ Festival want to run a mini-conference called Digital Writers: taking your words online. The event will equip writers with ideas and inspiration about sharing their work and word with audiences online. Panel discussions full of practical advice will explore how to write for online audiences, and where the opportunities are in the digital space. Our talented line-up of writers will share how they use new technologies to create, to market and to make money by their writing.

What is also great is they’re jumping into all aspect digital and crowdfunding the event through the Australian service Pozible. At the special Pozible page you can see the great line-up for the event, and the benefits of contributing. Yay! 🙂

In my last post I announced a panel I curated for the Freeplay Independent Gaming Festival: How Every Little Decision Can Bring You Closer To or Further Away from Creating Crap

A (self-described) “handsome and debonaire stranger” said to me the best way to avoid creating dull projects is “don’t work for shit companies” and “only go indie if you have a brain”. But what happens if you (think) you don’t work for a shit company and you have a brain? Are there still little things you can do that gradually and inevitably steer your project into the sea of mediocrity? This session is a discussion about how all of those little design and process decisions build to make or break your game.

And now, thanks to Stephan Schutze, we have the audio from the panel!:

I opened with a short intro, and then moved to Floyd Mueller, who directs the Exertion Games Lab at RMIT. He spoke about how you can avoid crap game design during prototyping:

Freeplay2011-Avoiding Crap Game Design-Floyd Mueller by christydena

Then David May, Lead Programmer at Big Ant Studios, shared things he’s learnt from working for 12 years on mainly console games:

Freeplay2011-Avoiding Crap Game Design-David May by christydena

We then introduced Tom Killen, co-founder of The Voxel Agents, who generously replaced the flight-disrupted Luke Muscat. Tom spoke about methods his company use to prototype games:

Photo by Jason Poley, 2011
Freeplay2011-Avoiding Crap Game Design-Tom Killen by christydena

I then quickly wrapped up (we were running out of time), with some quick methods I’ve learnt regarding writing:
Freeplay2011-Avoiding Crap Game Design-Christy Dena by christydena

Let us know what you think! 🙂

For the next Australian independent gaming festival, Freeplay, I’m curating a panel on gaming decisions:

How Every Little Decision Can Bring You Closer To or Further Away from Creating Crap

“A (self-described) “handsome and debonaire stranger” said to me the best way to avoid creating dull projects is “don’t work for shit companies” and “only go indie if you have a brain”. But what happens if you (think) you don’t work for a shit company and you have a brain? Are there still little things you can do that gradually and inevitably steer your project into the sea of mediocrity? This session is a discussion about how all of those little design and process decisions build to make or break your game.”

The panel includes (in alphabetical order):

• Christy Dena, Director, Universe Creation 101
• David May, Lead Programmer at Big Ant Studios
• Floyd Mueller, Head of the Exertion Games Lab, RMIT
• Luke Muscat, Lead Designer and Executive Producer at Halfbrick

It is shaping up to be a cracker panel with lots of war stories and advice on design and process decisions for a variety of games — console, mobile, pervasive, exertion — at the wonderful Freeplay Festival this Saturday. See you there!

P.S. I’ll also be helping out at the Lemon Joust Club organised by the wonderful Leena – a kick-ass fun game that Tassos Stevens introduced us to with his Secret Agent Training.