Free Play
Australias Independant Game Developers Conference.
by Shane Sweeney (Access)
"Gabe Newell is a prick" exclaims one game designer at Free Play 2005, one of the most obscure events in the international gaming calendar.
The Australian Independent Game Developers Conference (GDC), over the last few years has become increasingly important as video games become mainstream, evident from the growing numbers of tanned muscular people or trendy Emo’s appearing in Electronic Boutique. As a result, these conferences are the last bastion of hope to get meaningful, honest discourse with people who actually have an impact on the games industry. GDCs get limited exposure in the press, so developers can afford to be brutally honest, and I emphasize brutal.
E3, and similar events, have grown less important in the gaming world, because of their focus on marketing and Hollywood style glamour, starring CEO's instead of celebrities. Honestly, I don’t know which one is worse, too much glitz or too much hype. It’s hardly new though, designers have been appearing less and less at E3 replaced by marketers of Electronic Arts (EA) and Sony. Both of which trying very hard to convince everyone that playing their games is equivalent to being let into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. However, they fail to mention the GDC's, the Slugworths to their Wonkas. Game developers conferences skim off that top layer of sparkle and expose the heart of the industry; the people that slave over a keyboard to increase the stock value of some publisher half a point. Everyone’s heard of the tortured artist.
Free Play 2005, the world’s largest Independent GDC, is held in Melbourne, Australia. I arrive to find the venue stocked with the usual assortment of attendees; journalists, wannabe game designers, university lecturers and a handful of actual game developers. Various conversations littered the floor: pseudo-intellectuals in black square glasses and turtle necks discussing the "dramatic aesthetic" and the advantage of Machinima over traditional cinema, opposite bearded George Lucas-esque men discussing problems about debugging expired platforms like the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum; and inevitably the 20-somethings boasting how the next generation Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft console is going to "own" (or should I say ‘pwn’?).
Over the course of Free Play, events were offered in the form of technical workshops where people from within the industry educate the audience on some of the finer points of creating games. Some of the highlights of these included:
- An enlightening introduction to biofeedback devices for gaming
- A workshop on creating scripted cut scenes and/or Machinima, using the Sims 2 and the Unreal engine, lectured by Thuyen Nguyen and Travis Draper from one of Australia’s oldest and largest developers: Melbourne House
- A breakdown and demonstration of some of development issues when working on the Nintendo: DS versus the PlayStation Portable (PSP) (with no clear winner being named)
- An elementary introduction to AI in gaming
- A detailed demonstration on graphics programming and tips for tidier code
- And finally, a humorous workshop on hacking hardware and homebrew PSP games.
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