Alternative Paths in Indie Dev

[Music] outside of the internet I make arts that people call games I started doing this in the late 90s early 2000s and at that time it was considered net art but my interest in art on computers has always been more complex than that my most recent project is everything is going to be okay as you can imagine this sort of work isn't exactly financially sustainable it doesn't pay for itself people do support it and sometimes pay with the pay what you want option but I largely pay for making this out of my own pocket the pattern my career has taken over the years is to do contracting work mostly web development to pay for making this I live as meagerly as possible so that all my resources can go into this this is my passion it's something that I have to do I view myself as an artist and making this as my drive the conversations of business and financial success

surrounding my art have been a strong point of contention throughout the time that I have been doing this to me it's not about the money to everyone else it should be otherwise I am a failure as a functional member of society good work is often measured against how much money it has made in order to be considered good that being said I'm not a business success but I am going to discuss my own personal measurement for success and the success of my art I very much believe that some of the important things in life can't be quantified by monetary value and art is one of those to me art is about descent raising questions pointing at the beauty of life or making the darkness and life tolerable it's uniquely expressing views and giving a voice to topics that need to be expressed sometimes these topics aren't popular there's a comfort zone of acceptable or successful content that people are willing to consume and I feel like art is about challenging that comfort zone and pushing for more art like this

doesn't sell like entertainment does most art relies on grants or external support to exist for example my grandfather was a popular sculptor in Slovenia his work was strongly anti-capitalist most of his best was socialist inspired commentary about for example rich people putting poor people into meat grinders in order to make meals for the rich upper-class poor people carrying crosses up a hill with rich people depicted as Devils and top hats mocking them and so on as you can imagine his work would sometimes get him in trouble this was true for many artists coming from his background art raised descent on the other hand this descent wasn't a sustainable financial model but this is why our society needs art art is a conduit for social change oops despite the obvious financial or social setbacks artists will make art anyway this is not sustainable for me but making art matters to me because art is a vital for the health of a society

so here's an interesting challenge worth considering art like this will often not be recognized in a historic timeframe that it is made in and for it will often be laughed at but these struggles can lead to social change and inspire others to work outside of established comfort zones some messages are too political too edgy too controversial but need to be said anyway it's difficult to weigh money is a metric for success against art like this the going stereotype is that many artists die in poverty well we laugh at today ends up being the misunderstood genius of tomorrow whose work after death makes money were they a failure wildlife can we recognize this work while it's socially relevant did sales define their arts value you cannot place a price on things like descent yet artistic descent is a critical component to the health of a society and things like this improve life here I don't think money can define value for example you cannot financially measure sentimental value one might be one item might be prices to

one individual and to everyone else at his trash applying a price on some things may even diminish their value because it does not take into account things like human impact social impact sentimental value or personal worth my first project was released in 1999 it was political commentary about poverty war homelessness and refugees and yeah that's the name blue suburbia most of it was presented as interactive literature a combination of an animated feature that you interact with and experience the writing in you and Ravel messages as you interact over the years I have received what feels like thousands of messages from people saying that it has helped them touch them change their life made them want to pursue a creative career and often help them through some serious dark times I used to get about a message every day because the project had a stylist email form that fit one of the environments I've also received a handful of messages from people that said that it saved their life if you make work that speaks to a deeper human condition and admits a type of

brokenness in our society I feel like it's a message of solidarity for others that are undergoing the same many of these emails were very personal but there is something about art that gets people to open up and examine their lives art like this makes people feel less alone the topic might be dark but the fact that it admits this darkness speaks to a type of hope even when admitting hopelessness that admission gives people hope like I said it speaks tremendously to solidarity it was a lot to take in at the time but at the same time it showed me how important it is to make stuff like this one conversation that I think about sometimes was a kid in Japan that emailed me thanking me for this project they said that they were inspired to make a virtual simulation to help their friends stop self harming their idea was if they could do it in a virtual environment they wouldn't do it in real life on the surface this is very grim but this is this was a real problem that they wanted to fix this is exactly what art is suited for addressing issues

that you won't be able to address in any other capacity especially in a consumer entertainment it's about challenging social stigma and talking about things we don't talk about it was a very personal conversation but this is exactly the value measurement that i quantify art against the human value is the true value here my peers would criticize me for throwing my talents away on social criticism in my art for example why does something this beautiful have to be so depressing anti-capitalist heavy-handed have this kind of message at the time in these commercial circles it was very uncool to talk about social injustice poverty war and so on this was a very commercial crowd they were by popular standards very successful in their business why risk appearing opinionated and controversial so if you can make money challenging things is risky but it is exactly this risk that makes art so valuable so it was an interesting contrast to my peers I was a failure and wasted talent to people that played this I changed their lives

so how do you place value on this if I quit pursuing this art I would be a successful create a successful creative professional if I pursue this art I am socially viewed as lacking ambition or wasting my talent how our culture dictates value has always fascinated me if we didn't measure value by money then I feel like art would matter more money serves a purpose but it isn't the end all defining factor of success to me lives touched people influenced making the world better as what matters as artists we have a social responsibility to do that I realize how cheesy that sounds but this is why I do it I believe artists should exercise their talents in a way that will make the world better bring social change or challenge people to be better we assert humanity through our work there is something valuable valuable to be learned from art and artistic descent in regards to how we measure business success financial success or even entertainment success the bigger picture here being how he can help society and benefit those around us

through our work thank you rumba Robin Baumgarten from wobbly game hello everyone so I'm gonna talk to you today about horror games and how I make them and how I live of them and yes that's that's gonna be about so it's me I'm living in London I used to do mobile games but now I'm knee-deep into experimental hardware games and most recently also doing that full-time and I'm gonna talk to you today about how that came to be and how it works for me doing this stuff so first of all I have been doing experimental art and experimental games horror games for about like five years six years this is

the first thing I showed there was the first alt control GDC is like a dozen sliders it's only eight of them but we turn on the volume please like automatically moving little sliders yeah it was a cool little experiment but it was just kind of very self-contained and good start to to experiment with this another thing I built yes is this a moving knife on a on a motor this is not a commercial game but yeah it's it's set up so it doesn't quite cut through the skin so it's I built this with three friends at a game jam and it's a quite a nice experiment into pain another thing I built and I was showing this this year at the old control TDC exhibition it's called wobble garden so it's like a lot of little Springs and they kind of

light up and are pretty so you can see it from tomorrow at the alt control GDC exhibition amongst a lot of other cool exhibitions but yeah so these are my experimental games they're on my website there's other experiments and I mostly make them like as part of game jams or kind of just to see what I can do was force feedback or different sensors and so on and one of those experiments that I did at a game jam is called line wobbler and that's what I'm gonna talk about today but mostly so that is one dimensional dungeon crawler and I made it about three years ago at a game jam together with Matias magic and it works like this so it's basically you have this green line and you kind of try to reach the top and as different obstacles on the way is little red dots and you can defeat them by wobbling this spring joystick and there's different levels like this waterfalls or like more enemies and you kind of can see how you can have to shake the controller and

yeah this started as a little experiment but the feedback for this was very positive so I decided okay maybe there's something here that I can take further and show it at more places and that's what I've been doing basically for the last three years yeah if you want to know more about the making of this game I gave a talk last year together with Alex Fleetwood he works on beast of balance which is a cool hybrid stacking game and there's the title of the talk and yeah so there I talk about the making off and the challenges in the industrial design as well for example making custom Springs spring factory because her normal ones weren't strong enough especially when like kids played or drunk people it's and yeah and the iterating designs through a lot of play testing like this it's it's a very helpful ket at the local hex pace but yeah so if you have these games there's different ways you

can approach taking them further and one so like this three ways I've kind of outlined here so that it's doing small-scale installation art that's basically what I'm doing and I'm gonna explain how you can take a prototype to this installation art process another option is licensing it out so like arcades type companies so talk to a hospital briefly and bandai namco but it didn't work out with them but it's definitely a way to go and i know they're looking for hobbyist inventors for their new toys at all times so it's another way and kickstarter mass production is another way so that's what the beasts of balance guys did fairly successfully but it's a lot of business overhead and all the parts involved are not that interesting to me that's why i haven't done it basically but it's definitely a viable way to go so however if you do like keep it small and do this like art route in quotes i guess that it's like a thing called I

call the exhibition progression and it's basically showing it at more and more general events so I started out showing line wobbler and other stuff at like old control GDC which is like one of the best ways to show like weird stuff and it doesn't really need to be finished or I mean maybe finished but not very you know well polished amaze me Berlin is an amazing festival if you haven't been to Berlin it's a good way to see the city and see Europe's best festival fantastic arcade shows weird stuff and then once you've shown it a few times or even before you can show that more normal conventions like Eurogamer Expo Gamescom Tokyo Game Show and they are becoming more receptive to weird art like experimental Hardware games and you don't necessarily need to send them a built SiC of them it works was trust I guess or if you have shown it before they believe that it could be a thing that runs

yeah or more general artsy events are possible too so like music film festivals South by Southwest although I had big issues with Lyme wobbler at South by Southwest because they didn't fit in the game cutter he said I should just submit it to the design track and it designed said uh no this is a game you should submit it to the game track so it's like it's somewhere in between which is kind of fun but it's yeah so I haven't shown it their Maker Faires another cool way to show games there's a lot of kids there strongly playtesting your game so this for example was at the Digi play spaces which is part of the Toronto International Film Festival it turns out film festivals have really good budgets so they usually pay more for showing stuff so this was one of one of my favorite exhibitions actually so it's like really well curated and they flew me in so if that would happen every month I'd be set but only happens once so yeah and then later on you can show that museums so once you've shown it enough then chances are curators will have noticed your game and they contact

you or I can contact them to show it at more general museums so that leads into how are you getting how can you get paid for doing this and so contacting museums is the first step so for me it has mostly been passive so I can't really give you much advice on that so I've been emailed by curators but they said they have seen it at you know indicate and all these events so showing it as much as you can it's definitely one way to attract the attention the next step is negotiating price so that's always I kind of like a weird black box of figuring things out luckily for me one of the first things where I showed it they said are we have a fixed price of 500 euros we can give you for a one-week showcase and suggest this is very good and I send it to them and this kind of been my benchmark from then on so like sometimes I try to go up and then usually it would work so I'm kind of still figuring out where you know where to price it and it obviously depends on the size of the museum maintenance is a big issue obviously if

you do hardware things things break constantly you don't only have software box but you also have hardware and figuring out which of the two it is it's often very tricky I had a lot of issues with a spring for example that used to break all the time because people would pull on it instead of doing what they should but yeah so if we're funding there's several ways and I'm gonna go through them fairly quickly so Commission installations is one way to do it this is I think my favorite thing I've done so far it's a Christmas tree installation of line wobbler so this is like - I'd like a double helix 25 meters long of LEDs and Lima habla you can play lime wobbler on it and it looks a bit Christmas maybe because I change the colors to be flickering so this is like a short video of it yes so it's kind of empty because we have to set it up like it 2 a.m. in the morning when the station is closed so it's a very long nights but I was sponsored by the London Games Festival so they I approached them about something else and they said oh yeah actually we are also talking to

train stations right now and then they give it demo at the train station of like you know their portfolio and someone said hey this looks like a Christmas tree installation or like you know decoration and we don't have a Christmas tree yet so it came together fairly randomly and outside my control but it's a cool thing also if you want to go further into installation art like light festivals one of rentals that's the thing I've done most it's good for short events there's usually no maintenance issues because it only takes a short time or like they only have it for a short time and you can reuse the kids another thing is selling so I'm still I haven't really fully figured out how to do that I mean by doing it but like maintenance is a big open question you know what should be the warranty how long should I support it should I make lots of spare parts all the time and production of the kits itself is a question that I haven't figured out that I'm making them all by hand right now

and it takes about one to two days for each copy so the drives the price up obviously and then the price itself is an open question because like you know museums you should add the artist fee if it's friends or idols you look up to it maybe it's lower price so tim schafer really wanted one and of course I sold him one at cost and has one now so I'm quite happy about that leasing is another option I haven't really looked into that much because it's it is tricky to set up a good contract for that but it makes the maintenance burn clear and it's easier to plan for venues as well and it's a more regular way to get income and yeah so just quickly going forward I want to do bigger installations in the futures like festival of lights could be really cool and arcades and bars are the next step for line wobblers so I need to make it really like spill-proof and you know angry drunk people proof that's gonna be a very interesting challenge and obviously making new games along the way that's all for me thank you hi everyone what's up GDC my

name is TJ Hughes I'm a game developer and technical artist from st. Louis Missouri Midwest represent you know so I'm gonna do a that's where I started my solo comedy terrifying jellyfish as you can see here but yeah I'm gonna do ten takeaways or nine takeaways in ten minutes rather so without further ado so yeah these are just gonna be all anecdotal takeaways like I've learned from working on a experimental game so here we go so um so just a little bit about my game so it's a food art game called noir and it's a game where you just like play with your food as if you're a kid again you're just like mash buttons and have fun so there's no goals or objectives to extract you from the fun that is just like throwing noodles and other food items into just like a

ball of food horror so uh and it's controlled by a MIDI Friday 3d so that's this device it has 16 buttons on it and they all glow and shiny and so it's usually a controller used by like producers to make music and stuff like that but you can already see why this is like a game that required an alternative approach to be brought into existence so takeaway number one the fact that your project is weird isn't a disadvantage at all when you tell people about your so game it's probably a breath of fresh air like they're probably like it's okay to receive a surprise door in credit incredulous reaction to someone seeing your game idea this was actually an advantage during Norse Kickstarter because while people are exploring the video game section I think the last thing they expected to see was a bowl of ramen like does this even belong here and so never have a negative or

deprecating attitude towards your games unusualness takeaway number two when your game's satisfaction or feedback based players expect that feedback immediately and I learned this the hard way once I was demoing Noora at a bar last year and someone came out to play the games bubble tea scene it's the same where you're just like mash buttons and like throw boba into a cup and like it's it's nice and fun right at the same at the time the scene wasn't complete yet for some reason this infuriated that man what should it be because if anything there was supposed to be like calming and relaxing but so some of the buns were reacting is expected but the ones that didn't react yet seem to have elevated him into a state of rage and rudeness and so he actually kind of raises his voice I mean who said something along the lines of like okay when I press a button like I expect something to happen I need this feedback like before his State of Rage reached like violent levels I had to just like quickly

explain to him like yo yo the game super early in development not every button works yet like I totally get what you're saying and he's like yeah okay okay I get it but still I mean people are gonna expect it they're gonna suspect something I happened he then apologized if he seemed abrasive but in that moment I knew what it felt like to be like an overwatch developer when their mercy got nerfed anyway so that was probably the most valuable piece of feedback I've ever received from a play test session like gif player input equal and apparent and feedback or you just might start a bar fight number three the user game's uniqueness to carve out a niche that no one knew existed a guy from the who's been on the Food Network till we did about my game I think how happens I like tweeted at Guy Fieri seeing like hey I'm making a food game you should check it out but of course he didn't respond like he's a busy dude like he's a living meme he's not gonna really see that but um but like it got

enough retweets that someone who's been on the Food Network got tagged in it and he actually checked it out and like thought it was super cool which I like that was awesome to me because here's a crossover I never thought what happened a prestigious chef tweeting about a weird indie game the same nor wasn't about food and it was like a space-themed turn-based strategy game like if a food network chef tweeted about it like that'd be cool but it probably wouldn't be the most valuable piece of like indoor something you get during your campaign so from that I learned just like don't let me your outreach to just focus on the games industry expand your reach to like people and completely different industries or adjacent industries like you never know who's interest you might be number four don't be scared to have unusual inspirations a lot of gamer the games are derivative on format some games focus on first person shooter format some take from cinema like heavy rain but my game is inspired mostly by like Instagram videos and Tumblr posts of really will

photograph food that I collect so you kind of believe I was kind of stumped with the first time someone asked like what inspired noir but like I have a candid response I'd go with now but like at the time it's just like I I don't know it's a kind of subconscious I just like to see a lot of cool pictures of the internet so and I kind of want to replicate that in 3d and this kind of showed me like if there's a feeling or a mood or an aesthetic that you want to capture an interactive form don't hesitate to chase it like no matter what medium it was introduced to you in number five don't be afraid to take feedback from how you see others play your game so the middie Friday 3d has an accelerometer accelerometer in it for our tilt controls and a lot of the scenes ignored there's this magnet button which will kind of pull everything up into like all one ball in one spot but when I saw players press this button I noticed they were also tilt the controller like even though like that wasn't a thing that the game reacted to and like it would be is easy to tell them like hey that doesn't do

anything but I think a really observant developer should take this as a hint because your players subconscious is basically designing the game for you so if if there's a functionality the player expects I'll gratify them on that or else I risk almost starting bar fight again so the open-endedness of the game really allowed me to do that when designing for where controller you can try making your design flexible since not everyone's gonna have a 200-dollar MIDI controllers sitting around I made newer compatible with keyboard and mouse and this was an easy fix it but I still wanted players to experiment with how the game was controlled so I made the game compatible with any MIDI controller that you plug in so if you wanted to play Noren like a launch pad or an amp UK mini you can do that and this kind of became a medic game in itself because everyone was kind of scrambling to see what kind of increasingly ridiculous controllers they could play the game with it's sort of just like the recent meme where people try to run doom on the most ridiculous devices they can someone has to be like

yeah this doesn't mean I can play neuro might like MIDI guitar and I'm like sure maybe but it adds a lot of potential to the games of rurality because then there's a joint of discovery and finding out the different ways you can play and so that's kind of how I use the game's wear control scheme to its advantage 7 scope out interest in your game early collect as much feedback as you can I'm gonna first show it off screenshots of new areas before it was even a game really it was just a art test to see how delicious I can make a 3d model look but any time I'd show people like what I've done it started with like the boba tea scene the response was always like oh man this is making me so hungry this makes me crave bubble tea and so I Kame fascinated with idea of like making people feel hunger through visual stimuli and this was just a fun side project for me to experiment with but around last year my tweet if this like 3d ramen gift blew up and then polygon decided to cover game and that's when it that's when I realized like okay maybe I

should like make this into a full project but so after seeing how amused the internet was about 3d food gives a judge there there was enough interest in the game to justify a Kickstarter but this was really ideal because it showed that my projection for success wasn't based off of chance it was something that I already knew about the games hype and like how much engagement my game was getting and so if every project could be that sure of its own appeal I think that that would save a lot of project managers a lot of stress number eight don't be afraid to put your personality into all layers of your creation so noir is a very me project as you probably see like how I'm dressed right now and like yeah I try to put as much of myself into the game as I can and this is not only applies to the game itself but just like in all ways of how I present it so I I really think that this can help also in the like marketing and crowdfunding campaign because I've always found that things that have a

human voice behind them get more engagement than just like a company or corporate sounding voice and so like this person brand or brand person oriented branding logic can apply to like many aspects of your project so for example during nurse kickstarter one of my reward tiers what was called sweet dog oh where you could submit a picture of your dog I would record a video of me analyzing and rating that dog on a scale from one to ten usually they got in eleven but like this was just like a fun thing I would do on live streams every now and then but like when I first showed this like to peers for review they were like are you sure you want to include this but I was just like okay this is just me knowing my like audience and so I was like sure but since it was a joke I made it like a limited tier only one person get it but this turned out to be a mistake because like it was highly requested so I upped them out and it like sold out just like immediately so this told me that there's value in being playful not only in your games design but in every way that you present your game as well and lastly number nine

don't be afraid to make a game that isn't a game when I was making newer at some point I played around with the idea of goals and objectives and but I was more concerned with making nor a fun and memorable experience for all rather than just making it fit the standard expectation of what a game is the goal of Noir isn't objective it's actually kind of subjective objects objectives and traditional storytelling usually involve conflict and in games especially that conflict is solved through battle however I wanted to take the experience of tasting food and abstract that into a virtual experience but eating isn't necessarily a conflict driven activity lecture you might have the liked eater you'll lose health conflict but exploring a concept like taste and translating it to visual stimuli is something that you can't possibly express through like a score or a combat ISM and I think that this is where we as developers have to get clever so thanks

I couldn't make a like sign off screen so I just uploaded the back of my business card thanks a lot [Applause] cool all right oh yeah just a quick reminder this will be brought up again at the end of the talk I mean at the end of the like panel but please rate this session it'll help all of us and we're good people we deserve it in our hearts okay so this is my talk I didn't realize that we were supposed to give them specific names so I'm gonna be calling mine ultra crime hell my name is Heather Robertson hi I'm Heather my pronouns are she hurt one time I was at this bigshot industry party and this guy they didn't know walked by with a couple of CEO types like following behind and he just kind of said hey that's Heather she ate paper once that was that was about a year ago and I still haven't recovered I feel like that explains a lot about me as a person so I make games I make too many games these are some of the games that I have made since the start of 2017 each

of these is some is one that I am proud of except for that one in the top left that's a b-movie game but every time you beat it it gets faster that was a pure two hours of shame so a quick caveat before we get going capitalism is super messed up and I'm super lucky to be in the position that I'm in where I'm able to make all these games and even in my position this is super risky I have a lot of fears about how I'm going to be able to pay rent in a couple months burnout is something that you really have to be aware of and game developers super Nita Union and so proceed with caution when implementing what I'm about to tell you about which is called the Heather method because I'm egotistical as hell so this is how you maintain consistent output while also putting out work you're actually proud of which is a very difficult thing to do so let's look at that graph at the bottom right there on the top row you have a developer who puts out a game every couple weeks every month and each of those games is very strong very

interesting and does exactly one thing very well and then on the bottom you have the developer who spends multiple months or even a year or even multiple years on a sentient on a single game and each of those games is long and soulful and has their entire heart packed into it and expresses a lot of things that they've been thinking about for a long time the Heather method is to be both of these people at once now this might seem like double the work and it only slightly is but it also but these two sides actually feed back into each other in a really interesting way because these smaller games that you're working on can actually be tests for the bigger game say in your longer game you want to add say a grappling hook mechanic now you could put that into the longer game and see how it works in that environment but that might involve messing with a very complicated architecture so another way that you could do it is just make a smaller game that is specifically about that grappling hook make it in a hour a day a week no more than a month put it

out into the world and just see how people react to it and you can take that test and take the results of it and put it back into the original project this also gives you a lot of showstopper pieces with the bottom games that bring attention back into the smaller free games that you've been making which get 300 downloads on it because they're free so I've done the cycle three times so far I'm currently working on the fourth and fifth iterations of it on the far left there is 10,000 years which is a ruins exploration poetry game about a nuclear waste disposal site 10,000 years in the future I made that in 2016 following that up with secret spaces which is about being gay and in a hole in 2017 and following that up with Jen direct with the incredibly talented Ryan Ayers ACI in 2018 which is a post-apocalyptic gender Punk visual novel about making out with monsters it's rad you get to beat up a tree so

I'm currently working on the fourth and fifth iterations of the cycle right now with extremely links forever which I'll talk about more later and eternity if you want to hear more about eternity which is a stealth horror game about a monster who can change the past come to my talk at 120 in North Hall got that little promo for ya um so here's what this has been working so far pretty well it's it's alright um it's good it's hard but you know difficulty is rewarding I feel like we're all in this room because we really like doing difficult things for goddamn reason patreon is 100% of how I make this work patreon is a godsend for this specific creative cycle because it allows you to because the small games give that consistent output that patreon really craves and that constant and the larger games get people interested in your work in the first place that's how you get your con your customers who keep coming back with the shows their showstopper

pieces now of course this is how it's been going so far so let's talk about the future for a minute cuz this is a cool thing I made 30 games last year I think that's really cool but I want to outdo myself this year and so that's kind of what I want to talk about next I am making a new game this summer called extremely Punk's forever which is a serialized story based hyperkinetic anti-fascist mech brawler about punk rock cryptids and giant robots made of meat and I it is an episodic game which means that I am going to be putting out a new episode every so often most of the time when people think of episodic games they think of games that come out once every few months like life is strange or Kentucky route zero please God give me act 5 and this is going to be going at a somewhat faster pace this is going to be a game that comes out every two weeks the first season of it is going to be

six episodes and I'm gonna be trying my hardest to make my body physically do that and as you can see there there's visual novel sections and action sections and a bunch of weird murder poems because that's just kind of how I roll so this is the plan for the next I don't know several months of my life where I am going to try and blend these two sides of development into the same thing hopefully this will mean half the work instead of twice the work but knowing me it'll probably be twice the work so it's taking the shortness of the short games and the easy repeat time of the short games and fusing it to all the short games together into a longer experience which will hopefully make something that is rewarding especially over a long period of time so there are some questions that I like this is an experience an experiment and I do have some questions that I plan on

answering and hopefully next year I'll be able to give you a talk about how this turned out I hope so first off is this feasible is this something that I can do in the amount of time that I have been given to do it because I need to pay rent this summer is this reasonable is this a thing where I can put it out into the world and get more back than I put in and finally will this work can my body physically do this it's a lot of work I really hope the answer is yes so these are the three questions that I am attempting to answer I'm doing a lot of interesting stuff with social media engagement for example if you tweet with the hashtag meat punks you have a chance you have a chance for your name to end up as a character in the game and because of the fast iteration time and the serialize nature of the game that means that you can tweet about one update and immediately be in the next one which I feel is a really powerful

thing I really hope that I can like build a strong community around this I'm sort of basing some of this off of the podcast the adventure zone if any of you have heard of that all right we got like two snaps in a room alright cool so yeah those are the questions that I am going to attempt to answer the summer and right now that I can truly say is let's find out together all right thank you I'm Heather Robertson [Applause] okay hello my name is caja Wahby I'm a game designer a media artist based in New York City I design and build games that are physical and are often multiplayer games I make circuits and build custom controllers for my games with the hope to engage people with each other in ways they wouldn't normally

otherwise and this is the reason why I make games this spark this fleeting moment whatever you want to call it between people this is really the reason why this ok this is the reason why I make the games that I make today I'm going to talk about not so much my games but the path that I've taken to get to becoming an independent game designer so I grew up in a Japanese household in the US and we played a lot of games together as a family since we were in a foreign environment and my mom actually designed a lot of games for her dinner parties and things and so my parents were always understood the potential of games in these social environments I also grew up you know learning how to code and

hacking electronics and things I just loved making things with the computer and trying to figure out how things worked oh and after college I became a fashion designer that was a childhood dream of mine and I did that for a while until it became a little bit repetitive and and then so I went to graduate school to learn how to embed electronics into clothing and I learned how to use sensors and solder circuits and while I was there I took my first game design class and this was that parsons design technology there are people here from there and I took my first game design class we make 14 oh and Katie salen was the director there and so games sort of was something I stumbled upon and it was

great because this is the first time I felt like I found something that satiated everything in my brain all the things that my brain had been craving you know games have to do with like systems thinking logic creativity design technology storytelling all these things that I love and also the social impact of games really connected me to my childhood and playing together games together as a family this is the wearable tech stuff that I did in school and then after I graduated in 2005 kept working in fashion design and I didn't know what I wanted to do with the things that I'd studied and like an interaction designer was still kind of this big job title in companies and I tried a little bit to teach a little bit and I didn't

know if maybe joining another corporation would would be similar to my fashion career and then I wanted to look into becoming an artist but I didn't know what that meant and so it took a while to sort of interview and find out more about things out there trying to connect really what I wanted to do with what was out in the world the biggest change came in 2010 when I became a fellow at I beam aren't in technology center this is a nonprofit that supports media artists in New York City that's located in New York City and it would support me for the next year and a half with my art practice of making social physical digital games and tech and wearables and IBM is organization that also supports open source technology and culture so it

encouraged me to do to share my practice with the public and and so I had a chance to really do that through workshops through talks through other community involvement and this is where I started a monthly playtesting event would come out and play which ran for about three years sort of supporting the community that existed between art and games and in 2013 with i-beam support I was I was able to start a free after-school program for high schoolers called playable fashion where they learned about programming game design building circuits for custom wearable game controllers which is essentially my practice and I teach that program now with a collaborator Ramsey Nasser and we've been sharing the content with educators and librarians

recently in pedagogical development workshops and at I mean I was oh this is from the playtesting I'm sorry it's from playtesting others Eric Zimmerman's game that he was play testing Oh Natalie Posey and Eric Zimmerman's game and this is some content from the after-school program just the embroidery hoop with printed inkjet printed sort of almost like a map to guide people through lessons to learn more about soft circuits and then I did another workshop series the six-part workshop series called beyond the joy sake and which has grown over over the years into a class that I teach at the NYU game Innovation Lab where I'm currently an artist in residence and and

so it's funny because I didn't I never really thought of myself as an educator I like to think of myself as an artist sharing her practice and exploring idea was with students no matter how young the students are what is what is most surprising is that I found creativity in education and because I view it as sort of that I'm designing an experience for the students and it's been super satisfying for me so sometime during my career sorry sometime during my career I started really it hit me especially at high beam that I need to make decisions I have to be creative with my career as as much as I am with my work and so I

would ask myself questions like where can my work exist is it in economics art games in formal formal education in DIY and it was an important thing for me to realize to be open to various opportunities and to be able to imagine my work existing in different ways and places so now my work focuses on costumes as game controllers exploring questions like when you dress up as an avatar in a game when you dress up as the avatar in a game can you become the avatar if our costumes are embedded with sensors and we can move and act like an avatar does that experience just the experience become more dramatic or immersive and I'd be lying if I said my career is stable education helps and also applying to these are grants

contests and residency's also helped but I've been really grateful for the support structures and for the for the opportunities that have allowed me to continue down this path path and when I'm lost another thing that has helped guide me is asking myself what makes my brain happy right instead of following my heart I follow my brain and in the past like parts of my brain have been happy at different times in my career but trying to find something that satisfies all of my brain has always got me closer to where I want where I want to go always thank you all right all right everybody so my name is Tamara Duplantis

y'all can call me Tammy I'm a game developer and a composer from Baton Rouge Louisiana I make games I make games and perform music as tambul aya like jambalaya but with the tea and I'm here to tell you about my alternative path to indeed have success now first things first before we talk about the path we need to define our destination as we've kind of already seen kind of in parts of the session you know success is kind of a it's a vague concept and it gave me many different kinds of things to many different kinds of people depending on what you're looking for so as an artist I you know I see myself as an artist I feel that my goal is to express myself and to assist others in expressing themselves and as an added bonus to pay rent if I can so if I can fulfill each of these goals then I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing well so how do i express myself I compose experimental music I write text

scores I create generative art tools I do a whole bunch of strange experimental art stuff that experimental art people do but I'm speaking here today because I compose I design experimental sound art games for game boys here's a couple screenshots of it but some so hmm so my most well-known game Atchafalaya arcade which these are screenshots of it's a little bit of each of those things that I mentioned it's a gameboy game in which players improvise chaotic chiptune music with each other while generating abstract by you pixel escapes interspersed with poetic reflections on Louisiana life I have a video for it we will see if it works and mix wonderful sounds if not well you can at least see it over here maybe or not

sorry this is not my computer yeah well there's a wonderful video I promise so um yeah so why develop for Gameboy well for me it started off as a um for me it started off as kind of just an attempt to learn C by myself because I'm an I'm an art student I was on art students and I thought it'd be a fun way to learn C programming just make something you know make something weird with it but it became my favorite canvas because of its computational limitations there are only so many sounds that the Gameboy sound ship can make so it becomes a fascinating compositional challenge for me to use them efficiently and as I started to release my games I began to realize that these works had an audience partially due to the prevalence of chiptune if there's anyone here unfamiliar with chiptune yeah cool yeah

genre of music repurposes the aesthetics and hardware of video games to create new music it's not so surprising in retrospect but it turns out that the people who are well versed in the sound palette of game boys are really interested in programs that stretch its boundaries to the limit okay but why sound art well as I mentioned I'm an artist and that's kind of my background I kind of fell into games from the experimental art world but I made art in the first place because it's it's therapeutic for me I make my games to work out my anxieties my grief my you know hopelessness feelings on mortality and in the case of Atchafalaya arcade the pangs of homesickness for southern Louisiana which is a place I've loved in a place that I call home but it's also a place that's rapidly disappearing due to coastal erosion and climate change and it's you know it's politics is kind of inhospitable for a wonderful trans woman like me so when you know that your grandmother's house with all its memories in case within well one day pretty soon probably sink into the Gulf

of Mexico it makes every day away from it feel so much more painful so this is how I dealt with it by making this game and this generally is how I deal with all of my difficult emotions so I'm going to keep making these no matter what happens it's a function of how I process life so then the question for me as a as a working artist becomes how can I use the art that I'm already making and the skills that I use to make it to help me achieve my other goals well the obvious first step is a game developer is to release my game so the public so I post all my games on both HIO and gamejolt you can play them there or download them and run them on your computer if you have any owners so they're there for anyone to download and play I then you know as expected I take my games to festivals or conferences here we have a picture so there's my my rig of two game boys Super Nintendo in in this

particular rig they would be playing like three different instances of the game everyone is playing their own game but cycling through different instruments so they're playing together as an ensemble I really wish all could see this video so um so yeah so I bring them the festivals conferences I showed it at a mod e Gras Ball last month it was wonderful said so yeah they showcase my games at their events so the catch with these works is they aren't just games but they're also musical instruments so their best experience I think when approached with that mindset as an instrument that you you know play with so in releasing these games and having other people play them I'm getting my expression out there but also the people who play my games are finding musical and artistic ways to express themselves through plain checks out my two goals another thing about my games hybrid nature is that it opens up a variety of different methods for presentation so

what else do I do well the obvious first step is a musician is that I perform my games at artistically minded music venues on that Super Nintendo so again I have my Super Nintendo I hook it up to whatever projector is there and then I could up to the speakers and I just play through my games as a as a experimental music set yeah so and then I play through them in the most expressive way that I can in fact I've been I've been talking about a chili arcade as a game but it started life as a piece of music for a quartet of electronic performers which by the way premiered across the bay at Mills College in Oakland so then sometimes an event will ask the feature one of my works and for whatever reason I can't physically be there so in that case a an electronic musician will go and perform my pieces for me this happened last year with the laptop orchestra of Louisiana they wanted to play my they wanted to play Chapel

arcade as a piece of music so I sent them the rums they got the hardware and they had performances of Atchafalaya arcade all around Baton Rouge yeah so that's my place so this is kind of functionally no different from like streaming a game you know but the context is markedly different if you like because in most rooms I've seen although the streamers in control of the game and shaping the experience that the viewers are watching I find they often rhetorically position themselves as kind of part of the audience like hey guys look at this game that I that I found I'm controlling everything but we're gonna pretend we're all going to be part of the audience but when someone's up on a stage and that's a fine way to you know interact with games and everything it's super cool I like streamers but being on a stage in a concert hall or a music venue it changes that context because in that setting everyone involved is very clear that the people on the stage are just as involved in making the arch as the people who

thought up the art in the first place so I'm expressing myself it's helping the performers express themselves check so before I go I want to address that last goal that hasn't really come up much paying rinse do my game sell yeah but not a lot do I make money from my gameboy performances yeah but not a lot so to fulfill that goal as a as a game designer you know as everybody I do freelance I take on short-term programming jobs mostly helping to design and implement unique generative musical systems in the game if I yell I'm available just just don't ask me to make a PowerPoint yeah and as a musician I teach piano I'm a piano teacher and yeah and I take on accompaniment jobs at children's theater and that gives me life it is one of my favorite just jobs period and you know I probably it wasn't

invited here to talk about that aspect of my life but I think if there's anything to learn from an alternative path it's that I found the one that works for me by identifying the things that make me feel fulfilled and saying like to hell with devoting my life to an industry not just this industry just any industry that I can be successful in different fields you know fine searching for my goals and in different contexts and I can use my successes in one field to help set up successes in another and vice versa help you know helping each other build up so to my mind there's a no difference between you know the game design the musical instruments the children's theater lake there's no difference because they all for me reach to the same goal expressing myself helping others express themselves and that shapes not just how I make my art not just how I present my art but ultimately how I live my life and I

highly suggest y'all find the things that you want to find and find your own path thank you you