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VIRTUALISATION Freeplay bringing indy and professional game developers together
VIRTUALISATION Freeplay bringing indy and professional game developers together | Freeplay bringing indy and professional game developers together |
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| by Mike Bantick | |
| Thursday, 13 August 2009 | |
  
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“It is a diverse and exciting event,” Callaghan said “Freeplay is Melbourne’s independent games festival, it’s one of the few events that take place around Australia, or even the world that just focuses on independent game development. It was started by Next Wave in 2004, and it ran in 2005 and 2007.” There will be plenty of speakers ready to impart their accumulated video-game knowledge: “Our Biggest coup is our International Keynote speaker, a guy called Petri Purho from Finland,” says Callaghan “he has done two things that really impressed us. The first was making a game called Crayon Physics Deluxe, which is on iPhone and PC at the moment, in which you draw the objects to interact with the game to solve the puzzles.” “The other thing he does, which is insane, is that every month he makes a game, he sets himself a seven day time limit to do that, so we want to ask him why?, Why would you do that?” “We have a public program that is running in Experimedia, which is free entry. We have some locally developed independent games, we also have some locally professionally produced games, just off the top of my head we have the new Ashes [Cricket] game that was done by Transmission games, which has just gone number 1 in the UK. We also have PuzzleQuest and de Blob which were also developed in Melbourne[Infinite Interactive and Blue Tongue], which we are excited about.” “There will also be panels related to the broader gaming culture; things about games journalism are happening there, we have an ‘ask a games developer’ session, basically six game developers up on stage where you can come along and ask them whatever you like.” Speaking about the crossover between indie and professional games development, Callaghan remarked “yeah, one of our goals with Freeplay was that we want to foster, develop and nurture independent developers, but there is this culture of professional developers wanting to share their experience and knowledge, people that have been doing this for ten fifteen years. So there is a lot of cross pollination, it is important to us that that is there because the feedback we have had from previous years is that independent developers come away with having learnt something, and professional developers go away going ‘That’s really exciting’, and get ‘geed’ up wanting to get involved, and apply what they have learnt to their projects. It’s win-win for everyone.” Callaghan wants to open Freeplay up to more than the somewhat “insular” game development industry. There will be people involved from screen culture, artistic endeavours and writers of a variety but all with a common interactive entertainment thread. Freeplay begins in Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria on Friday August 14th and continues on Saturday August 15th. Ticket and session details are available at the website, here . |
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