Videos: Full Indie Summit 2015

The Full Indie Summit 2015 is an annual event of some 500-odd attendees, mostly indies, of which I am a co-organizer. The latest edition took place in Vancouver, BC, recently and there was a lot of well known speakers such as Valve’s Zach Barth building a VR game in 20 minutes, Darkest Dungeon’s devs, Indie Megabooth’s Chrispopher Floyd, Towerfall’s Matt Thorson and more all sharing their experiences and knowledge that ranged from nitty gritty coding development of software up to the business side of marketing and partnerships.

We wanted to share the talks with the community at large and accorginly have made the videos available online:

Matt Thorson (TowerFall) about Friendly Fire: Designing TowerFall

Notes from the process of designing a local multiplayer hit. TowerFall is at once a casual party game and a hardcore tournament game. This talk will explore how TowerFall was designed to explore both styles of play simultaneously, and transition players smoothly between them. 

Zach Barth (Valve): Developing room-scale VR games

Developing games for VR presents many opportunities, but also many challenges. In this talk we'll explore some of the common problems encountered when designing and developing VR games and look at solutions developed by Valve and other game studios. Topics covered include the exciting game design possibilities of room-scale VR and using SteamVR to write hardware-agnostic games.

Tyler Sigman & Chris Bourassa (Darkest Dungeon): The Heart of Darkness

Drilling deep into the conceptual and thematic core of your game can take you places you never thought you'd go! This talk breaks down our creative process on Darkest Dungeon - one that is characterized by a strong commitment to our game's identity. Working outward from a clearly defined vision gave the game a life of its own, and demanded that we step out of our comfort zones in order to do it justice.

Christopher Floyd (Indie MegaBooth): Submissions and Indie MEGABOOTH

You want to show at the Indie MEGABOOTH. You submit your game, and then what happens? Let's talk about that. Q&A session to follow.

Justin Smith (Envirobear, Desert Golfing): The Bear Necessities

Tales of features I didn't add and how to amp up the minimalism in your game.

Clara Sia (Seriously, Clara?, Twitch Streamer): Twitch + Indie Devs = <3

A brief overview of why indie devs should keep streamability in mind, the potential synergy between broadcasters and indie devs, pitfalls, and the power of community and peer reviews.

Ty Taylor (The Bridge, Tumblestone): The Art and Science of Procedural Puzzle Generation

Puzzle lovers know that the best part of any brainteaser is the aha! moment—the stroke of genius that comes from performing some seemingly counter-intuitive action to reach a solution. While designers are certainly capable of creating great puzzles, the most interesting puzzles come from procedural generation which doesn’t take into account any heuristics that a human player has an instinct to use. This talk details algorithms and AI used to generate and solve any type of discrete spatial puzzle.

Jeff Vogel (Spiderweb Software): Pricing, Sales, and Bundles: Building a Sustainable Business

In this tough, competitive market, it is important to extract as much cash from your game as possible. At the same time, there is still much that is not known about the right way to price a game, both initially and during sales. This talk hopes to provide some possible answers or at least help you to ask the right questions.

Kimberly Voll (Fantastic Contraption, Radial Games): Game design in VR

VR places players literally in the game, the believability of that experience based on the interactions supported and the affordances implied by the presented environment. Violations of these expectations expose the player to the artifice, often abruptly compromising the immersion and illusion of presence. This is an in-depth look at VR design through supporting natural player behaviour, building player trust, and uncovering hidden affordances using Fantastic Contraption and other VR work as examples. Key to this design approach is starting simple, observing, and filling in gaps to create a perceptually whole experience for the player.

Aaron Isaksen (NYU Game Innovation Lab): Designing Better Games Using Artificial Intelligence, Automated Play Testing, and Computational Creativity

Making great games requires searching a massive space of all possible games to discover the hidden gems — which takes a huge amount of effort from designers and many hours of play testing. At the NYU Game Innovation Lab, we have developed methods to automate this process and assist designers in improving their games. I will show how we use artificial intelligence and player simulation to estimate the difficulty of different variants of Flappy Bird, using automated play testing to help a designer understand the effects of changing each game parameter. I also will show how we use genetic algorithms and computational creativity to find new variants of Flappy Bird that are as different from the original as possible. This talk will focus on practical methods coming from academic game labs which indie game designers can try to integrate into their own design process.

Tommy Refenes (Super Meat Boy): Friendship, Partnership, and Hardship: Mixing friendship and business

When the desire to create becomes so strong that an individual or group of individuals wants to throw caution to the wind and start a gaming studio, the instinct for most people is to work with their friends. This is usually because people feel like “This person is my friend, this will be awesome”. This can turn out great, or it can turn out terrible. After a highly successful game, some legal problems, and a few hurt feelings I will share my wisdom on common pitfalls people should avoid and plan for when mixing business and friendship.

And a little extra: a video from Em Halberstadt based on her talking to people at the event about the role of communities for indies and what it means to them. This goes to the heart of what Full Indie is trying to achieve as it is vital for independant developers to connect with each other to foster future collaboration, from providing feedback to starting a new studio together. I know that participating in my local community has allowed me to up my game (so to speak...) considerably. With the Summit we want to offer an occasion to switch local for global and kick things up to the next level.

Enjoy,
Alain-Daniel for the Full Indie Summit