The Conference

This lecture aims to provide an introduction to the design of free to play games and show why free to play is a great fit for the indie developer. It will give a succinct definition of the F2P (free to play) business model complete with it’s advantages and disadvantages. This lecture will also provide some useful tips and advice on the actual design of F2P games along with a few common mistakes to avoid.

Martin has studied architecture and worked as a freelance 3d artist, as a level designer, scripter and game designer. His last employment was as Lead Game Designer for Gameforge. He is now a freelance game designer with his Sharkbomb Game Design Services.

www.sharkbombs.de

A talk about how to evolve ideas for games and how to get them out of our heads to create prototypes.

Mario von Rickenbach (1987) is a game designer and developer, based in Zurich, Switzerland. He first started to study architecture, but then decided to do a Bachelor degree in Game Design at Zurich‘s University of the Arts instead, where he also works as research associate nowadays. His recent works include Mirage, a quirky game about a surreal creature and Krautscape, a generative racing game.

www.mariov.ch

From the first moments of the design process, most of the Game Designers incorporate notions of “value” in their games (What value does my game going forward it to the player?) or even notions of “trace” (That he will remain in my game once the player has finished?). And this notion of value is directly associated with the cultural heritage of the Designer. Yet it is much rarer than the same Games Designers, at least in Europe, directly integrate elements of their own culture in their game… Our European cultural heritage has certainly no reason to be ashamed next to our Japanese and American colleagues … So isn’t it our role, as Game Designer, to do radiate our heritage through our modern creations?

Thierry Platon is a video-game industry veteran with a musician, actor, stage director, comic books and science fiction writer background. As early as 1985, Thierry worked for Atari France in the localization of the very first Atari 400 games, while publishing numerous articles in various games magazines. His career as a freelance Game Designer eventually led him to the creation of the BiP media studio, of which he is the Creative Director. Thierry is also vice-president of the SNJV (Syndicat National du Jeu Video) and the PRIMI (Mediterranean Transmedia Cluster), organizer of the European Indie Game Days in Marseille.

www.bip-media.com

The game design process involves an understanding of how the game, the player and the designer relate and connect to each other. Thomas Bedenk tries to illustrate and integrate different researchers points of views on interactive processes into an imperfect mapping of the cognitive aspects of this relation. He raises the question in what way these findings of psychologist might help us to make better games.

Thomas Bedenk is creative lead and co-founder of Brightside Games. He studied Media Design in Nuremberg and Human Factors in Berlin. Currently he is also teaching at the TU-Berlin, Games Academy and Mediadesign Hochschule. Before focusing on the games industry he was freelance interactive/web designer and developer for about 10 years and worked on special effects in the movie industry for a while. He started his love for games playing Pac-Man against his twin brother on the Atari 800XL.

www.brightside-games.com

Vlambeer explains how believable, solid nonsense is an important yet undersung aspect of videogames. Using recent games as Super Crate Box, Yeti Hunter, LUFTRAUSER and GUN GODZ as examples, they'll explain how a consistent and complete fiction is the only way to creating a great game.

Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman, bringing back arcade games since 1776. Creators of Super Create Box and Radical Fishing.

www.vlambeer.com