Katrina Irawati Graham talks about the power of bystanders to create grassroots cultural change and shift the discussions around gendered violence in the games industry.

In this talk, Rena will cover her experience as a game developer and an illustrator in Indonesia. She will share the process behind her works When The Past Was Around and She and The Light Bearer.

Breaking down how she takes stories and cultural details from her beloved country and translate it into video games.

Grace will be covering her journey in game development, from starting a network entirely from scratch to finding a way to develop games sustainably without sacrificing what’s important about her work.

This talk will cover the process of making the Frog Detective series, her consulting work, and her adventures in the business side of game development.

What makes morally challenging games engaging?

What skills are involved in making moral choices in games? And what exactly is the point of "moral meters"?

In this talk, We will present the findings of a 10-year multi-disciplinary research project investigating moral decision-making in videogames and the lessons they can provide for designing morally engaging gameplay.

Presented by: Dr Malcolm Ryan, Paul Formosa & Dr Dan Staines

Do developers want players to look for clues and feel smart before that all-important-thing happens in the game? Do they want to reward players for figuring something out before the game reveals it to them? Do they want players talking about the game online and theorizing about that super secret mystery?

Getting players engaged with finding and figuring out hints is more than just having them hear an ambient noise over there or finding a lore book dropped here. The more invested players are in the game and the more engaged their imaginations, the more likely they are to search for the clues—or revelatory trail of breadcrumbs—the team leaves for them.

Attendees will discover tools for building player engagement, which includes designing more believable characters players will get invested in (whether they love or hate those characters) and using the game’s narrative design to drop hints about those characters’ circumstances. In effect, the relationship between the investment in the characters and these hints become a language narrative designers devise to help players hunt and piece together “What happens next?” before the game reveals the answers.

This talk focuses on why players identify or empathize with characters and how that makes them more invested, and gives techniques for creating “messy,” more authentic characters and designing multi-faceted storytelling in-game that will encourage players to find answers to the game’s mysteries.

Screenwriters are used to writing dialogue for actors. Comic writers will just see their words on the page. And the game writer? The game writer can do both...

This talk is a gentle reminder that written and spoken languages are different. That you'll have to change your perspective when you switch from one way of writing to the other. That different words have different meanings. And that language will be understood differently when read vs when spoken.

Multiple examples from games and other media show will inspire the audience to think about the function and effect of their in-game dialogue. Did you realise that some grammar constructions work better on paper than spoken? And that some jokes work in audio, but not as written words? Start thinking about dialogue writing in a different way, and learn to make your choice on whether to use voiced or non-voiced dialogue early in the process.

In 64 Ways of Being, Melbourne is transformed into a playable city via a free-to-play app launching in 2020. People and place are connected at multiple locations across the city through augmented reality encounters that capture different ways of being. These experiences re-imagine Melbourne's identity as expressed through its creative, linguistic, cultural, social and urban diversity.

The game is made by a collective developing urban play encounters that reconnect people with the city as a lived experience. Blending public art, live art and game design our collaboration brings together artist gamemaker Dr Troy Innocent, live arts group one step at a time like this, and game developer Millipede working with the Watershed Pervasive Media Studio to realise Playable City Melbourne.

This talk provides practical advice on the challenges and opportunities presented during the production of an ambitious AR game that engages with creative cultures, project partners and audiences outside the traditional mobile gaming space.

Topics covered range from technical tips on situating AR in diverse urban environments, working with theatre and performance artists, engaging in meaningful cultural consultation with First Peoples, wrangling divergent stakeholders, and marketing strategies for an experience people haven't had yet.

Mini Motorways is a relaxing game about building roads to support a growing city. The game is a follow up to Mini Metro, and after 9 months of prototyping and 9 months of production, was a launch title on Apple Arcade. These three things: creating a successor to an indie hit, being a new platform’s launch title, and a very short production timeline, meant that the road to success was a bumpy one. In this talk, Tana Tanoi from Dinosaur Polo Club will go through the challenges faced during the development of Mini Motorways, covering topics like how Apple Arcade’s requirements shaped the game’s development, how quick tools were developed for a small team on a time budget, and the process of defining a brand through prototyping and iterating.

Creating an engaging experience for your players is hard, and not knowing who your players are makes this even harder. A model will be presented for Designers and Producers to simplify and clarify player behaviour, removing ambiguity to create concrete features with players' personas in mind.

This will give you the ability to cognitively organise the players' minds, allowing you to provide mechanics and interaction methods to enrich the players' experience. We will look at what player personas are and they role they play in existing games, how they have been applied in the past, and how you can craft personas for your own game experience.

Scrum is a team-oriented framework that relies heavily on building team synergies, trust, and communication.

This presentation is a deep dive into the Scrum Rituals - why they are done, what the team needs to get out of them, and some best practice techniques to help do them well in the games environment.