Talk: Games as a Therapeutic Tool

Speaker: Erick Blandin

People have been playing games as a hobby for a long time but they can also be used to help with mental, physical and emotional therapy. Fast moving games are great for ignoring pain, calming games are great for helping with anxiety and games with big repeated motions are good for exercising damaged muscles or just getting the blood flowing.

Hospitals around the world are just starting to think of games as a tool in their practice and are always looking for fun games that also happen to be useful in their therapeutic goals. There are components they look for in games depending on the therapeutic goal, and many games fit these niches without even meaning to.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Thank U, Next: Embracing Change in Stormy Weather

Speaker: Ally McLean

If there's one thing that's certain in the games industry, it's that everything changes. Companies rise and fall, new technologies and business models emerge, and "the way things are done" is in a constant state of flux. What was true when many of entered the industry or started degrees is no more. This dynamic environment isn't settling any time soon, so how do we learn to embrace the chaos?

In a year of particularly turbulent change in the ANZ games industry, this talk will present advice, strategies, stories and questions from people in our community impacted by change, and those making the change, to how we make games. This talk will dig into our community definitions of game development success, and reflect on what remains meaningful in an ever-changing environment. Also, there will be Ariana Grande.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Accessibility as a primary design consideration: the early journey of Blind Sparrow Interactive

Speaker: Drew Taylor

By now, most of us know the importance of accessibility and its numerous benefits. But what does it really mean to the development of your game when you decide to factor in accessibility as a primary design consideration? (Especially if you’ve never done so before, or, more frighteningly, you’re new to game development.) This is exactly the situation that faced Blind Sparrow Interactive, a small indie development studio that was founded on principles of accessibility and inclusion. Through numerous practical examples, the studio will open the doors on it’s journey and the development of its current project, offering suggestions on how you can start to think about - and apply - accessibility features right from your game’s initial design stages.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Why did medieval knights fight giant snails? And what does this have to do with games?

Speaker: Paris Buttfield-Addison

"...vehicles for delight, disgust, and befuddlement..."

"...delightfully detailed (and occasionally rather gruesome)..."

"...silly, dramatic, and puzzling..."

Are these quotes from game reviews, or are they comments made by people looking at late-medieval marginalia? We'll find out together!

Was there a giant snail problem in the late Middle Ages? Illuminated manuscripts from the late medieval period are full of beautiful, dramatic, hilarious imagery of knights fighting giant snails (and many other seriously weird stuff™).

Scholarship on the medieval era is full of such intriguingly titled works as “The Snail in Gothic Warfare”, “What’s so funny about knights and snails?", “Snails: the central problem of high middle ages warfare”, and “Snails—rethinking our ancient foe”.

What’s going on? Was there a species of giant snail, long since extinct? Or some kind of collective hallucination?

What’s the deal? Let’s find out together. Answering this, and other bizarre questions from history, Paris explores why all game developers should learn history, and shows how medieval marginalia (the drawings in the sides of medieval manuscripts) are really just ye olde promotional art, a medieval image-based social network, if you will.

Join a game developer with a PhD in Computer Science and a degree in Medieval History and find out why everyone should learn a little history (and I’ll explain the snail thing, too.) We will look at the world of medieval art, and together we'll find out how and why today's game makers can light the way forward for a better treatment of art and artists by borrowing from the approach of medieval scribes and designers.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: The Art of Void Bastards

Speaker: Dean Walshe

Dean will explore the process behind creating the visually distinctive game Void Bastards.

Looking at both the technical and artistic choices needed to deliver the vision of Blue Manchu’s art director Ben Lee.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Getting the horse to drink: Optimising a high fidelity console game for mobile platforms

Speaker: Megan Bowra-Dean

PikPok's Rival Stars Horse Racing was initially developed at a fidelity level suitable for current generation console platforms. However we also planned to publish a version for mobile platforms that got as close to the console experience as possible. Here's how we achieved that with Unity's recent performance advances and a lot of elbow grease.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Work in Progress: Lessons learned from experience as a 3D artist

Speaker: Jessica Da Silva

This session is built around questions from my mentee where I highlight my experience, the lessons I've learnt and mistakes I've made, providing advice for aspiring 3D artists.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: So you want to make a multiplayer game?

Speaker: June Rhodes

Multiplayer games are huge and have great potential for long term retention of players, and that leads to ongoing revenue for a studio, but to achieve this, you need to make sure your multiplayer experience is excellent. You won’t get that just throwing whatever library you can find on the asset store and hoping for the best. This talk will teach you how to implement multiplayer from the ground up, allowing you to make sure your online player experience is the best it can be.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Using Games Design in Citizen Science

Speaker: Lisa Evans

Most games are designed to be entertaining so they can drive sales or build a big community of players. For the astronomy citizen science project AstroQuest, we care about how much data we get, whether it's usable by our scientists, and whether we meet our goals for astronomy outreach and education. Lisa will talk about the design of the AstroQuest website and the process the team went through in using game design ideas to encourage citizen scientists to produce more and better data, as well as targeting their efforts where the scientists needed them the most.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Sonar Solutions For Accessible Gaming

Speaker: Zander Hulme

A lot of UX design focuses on visual clarity, but what if you can’t see the video in video games? This talk will cover a few of the ways in which indie developers can use sound and music to make games more accessible to players with reduced vision, and improve player immersion overall. When games sound better, everybody wins!

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au