Month: April 2018

Over the last week I was in Wellington, New Zealand to attend the Play by Play games festival.

Play by Play runs over a week, with a series of events and workshops, many aimed at those looking to enter the games industry and school aged persons, culminating in a day long conference and awards night on the Saturday.

LVL² was selected to be a part of a games exhibition in the Wellington Museum, and was also nominated for an award – the “That Game From Across the Ditch” Award which was open to games from Australia (all other categories were for New Zealand developed games only).

I had heard some great things about last year’s Play by Play from those who attended, so I was already keen to attend this year. And when LVL² was nominated for the award, that sealed the deal for me.

I was in Wellington for five days, and met up with a bunch of people, both from the New Zealand game development community and from Australia who had travelled over for the festival. I spent a lot of time wandering around the city which is of such a size that it’s really easy to pretty much just walk everywhere in the central city. Someone described Wellington as a city made up of just the laneways of Melbourne, which was pretty apt I thought. Almost every bar had different beers on tap to try and everyone there was really friendly and welcoming. I had a great time.

The conference on Saturday was a single track series of talks of 15 to 30 minutes and covered a wide range of topics including text formats, consent in games, nostalgia and studio culture.

I heard a little bit of criticism that the talks were a bit ‘light on’ in terms of technical detail and evidence. But I think that the conference was more aimed at those beginning in the game development industry rather than those who had been working in the industry for a long time. And seeing as that describes me quite well, I quite enjoyed most of the talks. But I can understand that criticism as well.

And, because there were so many game devs there, a lot of the conversations that I had were about game development (surprise!). I noticed a change from the last conference I was at. Previously, when talking about LVL² it was treated like a student project. But at Play by Play we talked like fellow developers, with people asking about development plans, what our release plans were, what we planned to do afterwards, and how our studio was run.

So that was a combination of “this is really cool!” and “Oh god I hope they don’t find out I have no idea what I’m doing!”. If anyone did they didn’t say anything though, so that was nice.

Then, at the awards ceremony on Saturday night LVL² did not win an award. Instead we lost to Florence by Mountains Studio. Which is fair enough really. It’s an excellent game, developed by very talented people and thoroughly deserved the award.

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Anyway, I had a great time at Play by Play and would definitely recommend attending in the future!

Well It’s official!

Glitch Crab Studios Pty Ltd is incorporated and registered. We’ve officially formed a company to develop Level Squared into a full release.

The last couple of months have involved a pretty steep learning curve as we worked out how to go about incorporating, what it involved, and what it meant for each of us in the team.

There was a fair bit of discussion required to work out who was going to act as a Director for the company, and be held responsible for day-to-day decision making and record keeping and so on. Then we also had to decide who wanted to be a shareholder in the company – effectively who wanted to be the owners of the company – and who was happy to not join the company, and to just be part of the team for the development of Level Squared.

On the bright side, no-one was totally opposed to forming a company or continuing to work on Level Squared, everyone was keen to keep going with development.

In the end we have probably ended up with too many of us joining the company, and that’s going to make it difficult for us to be sustainable over the long term.

But that’s something that we are going to have to address as it crops up. I didn’t feel comfortable making a company if it involved jettisoning the people who had worked on Level Squared up to this point. I guess that probably makes me a not too good business guy. And I think I’m OK with that.

So now it’s done. We’re small business owners, we’ve signed up for Liberal Party memberships and started lobbying for tax cuts to help the economy is some unclear but still very important way…

ahem.

So now we’ll be moving forward with the development, in a bit more of an established position, and a bit more secure in our ability to engage with other companies and funding bodies on a more equal footing. And also start to transition away from referring to ourselves as student developers and instead as game developers.

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On a more personal note, Given the establishment of our company and my pending trip to New Zealand for the Play be Play conference, I thought it was time to update the ol’ business cards.

Got a bit more info to put on them nowadays, and a bit of a more official sounding title too.

I’ll have these with me for Play by Play next week (holy shit next week!) and I’ll be handing them out pretty liberally!

Oh no! I was busy working on level design stuff and forgot that I had to write this post.

Sorry folks, very bad on my behalf.

So, as John Oliver says, just time for a quick recap of the week…

We’ve been working on new test levels to try out the new mechanics that I spoke about last week. I was really hoping that we would have some new things to show off at Play by Play in a couple of weeks, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to be the case. We haven’t got anything built to the point that we’re happy showing it off yet. So we’ll be showing the same build that we used for PAX Australia. This is a bit disappointing, as we were hoping to have something new, but a lot of the work that we have been doing is on behind the scenes stuff, that doesn’t lend itself to easy display.

We had a quick team meeting this afternoon (well, 6 out of 8 of us did) and we discussed some of the problems that we are having with keeping working in situations where we aren’t able to meet up. So we’re going to trial online meetings and task allocations in an effort to communicate better and stay on target for development. Hopefully this will help us to keep development moving as we transition into a post-university phase.

I’ve booked accommodation and flights to New Zealand and will be in Wellington from Thursday 19th to Monday 23rd April. So if you’re going to be there, let’s try to meet up!

There wasn’t any uni over the Easter break, so I decided to take it easy and learn how to use Yarn Spinner (a narrative system for games) cos I don’t have enough to do already. So I’m making a small walking sim style game based on this very creepy SCP Foundation entry – SCP-087.

 

See you at the bottom of the stairs folks…

For the last few years I’ve challenged myself to read a wider variety of authors. Essentially I’m trying to read more books by non-white, non-male, non-English-language and non-straight authors.

And as part of that, I’ve been posting a list each Easter on Facebook of what I read that year, both as a bit of a brag, and as a conversation starter.

But this I have this blog just sitting here waiting for content, so I figured I’d put the list here and be able to have a bit more room to discuss some of the books.

So, without further ado, here’s the list (in Alphabetical order, by Author surname):

No	Author	Title
1	Naomi Alderman	The Power
2	Michael Chabon	The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
3	Wu Cheng’en	The Monkey King’s amazing adventures
4	Claire G Coleman	Terra Nullius
5	Timothy Conigrave	Holding the Man
6	Jennifer Egan	Manhattan Beach
7	Gustave Flaubert	Madame Bovary
8	Mohsin Hamid	Exit West
9	James Joyce	Ulysses
10	Eka Kurniawan	Man TIger
11	Min Jin Lee	Pachinko
12	Jon McGregor	Reservoir 13
13	China Mieville	Kraken
14	Haruki Murikami	The Wind-up bird Chrnicle
15	Nnedi Okorafor	Who Fears Death
16	Ruth Park	The harp in the south
17	Laline Paull	The Bees
18	Sarah Perry	The Essex Serpent
19	George Saunders	Lincoln in the Bardo
20	Lutz Seiler	Kruso
21	Ernest Shackelton	South
22	Vivek Shanbhag	Ghachar Ghochar
23	Ali Smith	Autumn
24	Kim Stanley Robinson	Shaman
25	Jesmyn Ward	Sing, Unburied, Sing
26	Josephine Wilson	Extinctions

Probably my favourite read of last year was Terra Nullius by Claire G Coleman – because half way through there is a very slight change in context, and the entire book up to that point changes. It was really well done.

Exit West was a great escape story about all of the other times during an escape when you aren’t travelling. Extinctions was an interesting examination of aging and reflection. Holding the Man left me crying in the pub as I finished the last few chapters.

But really, there weren’t any books there that I wouldn’t recommend checking out.

There’s a pretty good mix in there of new books and older “classics”. Some award winners, some obscure ones. Translated texts and books form a pretty wide range of places.

Though, on that last one, I’m going to try to read a few more books from the global south this year. I’ve had books from a wider range of places in past lists, and I dropped off a bit there this year. There were no books from African or South American authors, for example.

Anyway, have a look through and let me know if there is anything there that you’d like to know more about, or suggest anything that you think I should try to get to in the coming year!

Hit me up on Twitter (@kipslife)!