Games Connect Asia Pacific 2018 The Walls We've Built Ourselves

0/10 - “Worst game I have literally ever played.”

11/10 - “I love this game, what a delicious treat that shines uponst me in all it’s glory. I would die for this game, for I simply could not live without it.” - 11/10

5/10 - “It was fine”

It’s 2018 and user reviews play a major part in the perception of your game. The tidal wave of feedback is coming and you best understand how it’s going to crash over you and your beloved creations. Who knows, maybe we can build you a raft.

This talk will cover user reviews, what combine to be your game’s “score”. On iOS that’s 1-5 stars and on Steam that’s a review percentage. Why do people write reviews? What impact can they have on your game’s success? What can you do to sway the odds in your favour? How do you crack their hard shell and harvest their sweet, sweet nectar of wisdom?

Darcy is here to help you understand all things user-reviews across iOS, Android, Steam, Xbox One and PS4, referencing delicious anecdotes, scrumptious data and delectable statistics. Oh and he can also help with the creation of obscure analogies too, if that’s up your alley.

Effective and ongoing mentorship serves as a valuable tool for underrepresented people to break through barriers to their success, but mentorship programs are the perfect storm for impostor syndrome and self-doubt. "Have I achieved enough to be a mentor?" "Do I deserve to be mentored?" Ally McLean, Director of the Working Lunch mentorship program for entry level women in games and recipient of the 2018 NSW Young Creative mentorship grant shares a retrospective of a year of mistakes, valuable lessons learned and strategies developed for the future of mentoring for under represented groups.

Based on the Allies Workshop developed by the Ada Initiative and the IGDA Allies Special Interest Group, this talk helps people understand how being an ally can create meaningful change that is important for everyone. The session includes an overview of a behavioral framework that can be used for intervention in different circumstances as well as a discussion of common scenarios in game development where acting as an ally can lead to stronger and more inclusive teams and better products.

How I might describe the talk in a blurb: Unless you’re making a game that only you will play, every game you will ever work on will make more sense to you than it will to the end user. A little copy of you will not ship along with the game to navigate the player around a bug, your players will invariably wish you had created more content no matter how much you produce, and your specific sense of fun is probably applicable to a smaller percentage of the world than you realize. This talk aims to explore how to let criticism and impossible demands fuel your designs, as taught by years of computer roleplaying game development. While most relevant to game designers (as the talk will primarily explore various hits and misses of game design), the talk is intended to be philosophically applicable to developers of any discipline. Even rougher draft that’s intended purely for this application process: This talk is a sort of career-retrospective with a focus on my evolving sense of what my job actually is (vs. what I think it should be/ought to be). Having gone from a junior designer with stupidly out-of-scope ideas to a project director with the power to pulverize hopes and dreams, I’ve come to firmly believe that even if you’re not making ‘games as a service,’ you are a servant to the player. You have your job because your judgment and tastes are maybe a little better than that of the average gamer, but to think your imagination is superior (or to consider yourself immune to feedback) is how forgettable games are made. I mostly envision this talk as heavy on RPG systems/narrative design, with the binding theme being lessons of temperament that held true across multiple projects, teams, and roles. I’d go through post-mortems tidbits of various titles I’ve worked on in the last decade or so, with a focus on times where our ability to deliver a fun experience came by way of balancing that which we personally like and that which is best for game and the player.

DELETE Jam has run twice at Bar SK in Melbourne, and each time it's received great feedback from attendees and confused backlash from online articles. With the simple twist of deleting games at the end of a jam, DELETE has asked questions about digital preservation, designing for experiences, the worth of short term projects and how we approach game jams as an industry and a culture.
This talk will highlight some of the commonly held beliefs that can hold back our industry, such as our belief that developers must suffer to make a game in a short period, or that the worthwhile result of a game jam is a piece of software, or that everyone has a right to play the game you've created.

There's a lot of fear and mystery around asking the wrong questions. Especially when it comes to transgender issues, both in video games, and in real life.

How do you ask for someones pronouns? What's the difference between a non-binary person, and a genderqueer person? How do I write transgender characters into my game, without being disrespectful? How can I make my workplace more transgender inclusive?

Sav Ferguson, Charlie Cassidy, Snow McNally, Fae Daunt and Damon Reece assemble as a panel of gender diverse games developers, programmers, and writers to answer the questions you've always wanted to ask, but weren't sure how to phrase.

Come sit down, and have a chat with us.

Submit your questions here: