This is the thread to post all about your opinions on what worked and what didn't work at Free Play: Next Wave's Independant Game Developers' Conference 2004.
What did you like best about the conference? What you didn't like? What needs to be improved/omitted/changed, and any other thoughts and suggestions you might have!
Conference was great, especially in a value for money sense. I missed out on a ticket for the friday but I still managed to hear and learn a lot of great stuff. I deffinately think that the work shops needed to be expanded. I really wanted to go to the one on normal mapping, but allas, there was no room. Other than that I thought it was great. With most the conference selling out I had freinds who missed out. Maybe the success of this year will lead to bigger sponsership, and next year will become bigger and better!
I was one of the volunteers at Free Play and overall I thought it was brilliant. I was thoroughly inspired, as was my cohort, and it was great to network with people of a like mind. There were also things previously below my radar which were fantastic to discover, and have bolstered my enthusiasm in general. It was also great to discover some faces behind the names, and to have a talk to them about many things.
Harvey Smith was my favourite speaker; he was inspirational, and cemented my decision to strive forward as an indie, and to get active within my part of the community. It was just what I needed.
Now, onto the not so good parts of the conference, and some general suggestions.
There were some sessions which seemed to gloss over the aspects they were covering, rather than giving anything useful. Sessions that seemed to be like this included the Vertex and Pixel Shader Workshop and the Game AI Workshop. The bulk of the attendees were competent programmers and wanted to see at least some code examples and a how-to on putting them into the larger context of their code, not just slides and videos. It may be ideal to introduce a "crash course" stream, where a limited number of attendees sign up for a one-day long session and actually learn something.
The preparation and public speaking skills of a couple of the speakers was pretty bad. It may be wise to insure that speakers have prepared adequately before they arrive at the conference. It may be a little presumptious to ask this of speakers if they are very busy, however.
Another thing would some more "roundtables", where people are on an equal level with the "speakers". It's less of a psychological barrier to people asking questions. This would be most appropriate for game ideas or hypothetical game designs.
Of course there was the Indie Game Jam idea as well. That would be excellent to see.
Some more audience participation would have been good. I don't think I even got the chance to speak to any Sumeans (I arrived on Friday morning), though I think I recognised some from hearing their names. Which leads me to... name tags! NAME TAGS! I'm surprised no-one picked that one up.
Combining the E3.1b with the Recruitment forum may be an idea. Attendees may not necessarily have a demo at the conference, but they could speak about their project. Most people at the Recruitment forum were there just to have a look, though not actively looking for a project. Making it more of a public forum may pique the interest of people who hadn't decided on entering a project.
Anyway, overall a brilliant first conference, and I look forward to helping out next year.
Cheers,
Paul.
about the workshops thing, the size of the crowd in there is great for a class, but lots of people missed out on what they wanted to go see, if the signup sheet is posted on the internet beforehand to get preliminary numbers and then again have a phisical signup sheet to get actual numbers, you could run certain workshops twice or even 3 times depending on the popularity of the event
and also have skill rating on the title, i came across a few people who thought it was going to be more advanced that it was and got bored.
even though the LAN was really really small, i managed to get a game of quake3 in with Ian Shanahan which was great, relieved my withdrawal from staying away from my pc for 3 days to come to melbourn. i suggest having then lan in a more open area, and at least 12 pc's for that 6 on 6 team action,
incoorperating the lunch break ideas with the gaming- if more indie games get loaded up next year could we have competitions in a lunch break, the reason i think "in the lunch break" is because we all have Lan's in our home towns and really arent going to travel to melbourn to play games, most of us are there for the lectures, increasing the length of the conference by even 1 day is a bit much so time is precious for the 3 days.( sorry about the way that paragraph is structured without grammer etc etc.)
i like the 2 hour lectures, having a topic run out of discussion is a great thing,,means youve covered all the bases and everyone is happy. if the time's were shortened people wouldnt get to say the things they want or make important points.
where overlap is concerned, i didnt experience any grief over that, so no comment.
souvinir's for fund raising, not sure on the viability of this ideas since we are all poor. i do know that Souri sold alot of his t-shirts :O), fridge magnets keychains,, personally i like ornaments( i knw alot of peopel like clothes, but plaese give us a variety i dont like t-shirts)
the overseas guest speakers were great to have there, i hope they enjoyed themselves soo much that they will come back next year just for the fun and games and bring there friends :O)
Hrm...well I guess I have an opinion on everything so here goes :)
(thinking)
I thought that the social events were excellent, not because of the free beer (I didn't get to have any anyway) but just the chance to meet everyone from around the place who work or have worked in the industry was very good.
The price was good :) But I've heard that they won't get anywhere near that level of state funding for next year, so it's likely that the price will either go up, or the venue will change (to something cheap like a University) so that's something that will have to be tackled. I think alot of people went simply because it was so cheap!
I can't remember the guys name, but he was the left-most (from audience's perspective) panel member (organised the indy hip-hop/electronic conferences) on the 'building the independent game community' panel - he was pretty spot on in saying that we need to possibly move away from alot of 'industry evaluation' talks (which didn't entirely focus on 'independent' as much as it focussed on 'wannabes') and more into technical discussions. Especially as I see the tech in independent games taking a different path to blockbuster style development (look at the content required for both levels of development to see what I mean).
Anyway, I think the venue was passable for a first attempt, it wasn't bad, but I wouldn't have minded a more comfortable setting. Perhaps keep the bar a bit further away from the talks (but not too far - hehehe) and keep the room sizes large enough for all the talks - I can't complain too much about room 2 because I NEVER GOT INTO IT. :P
Umm - also I think alot more workshops would be good, perhaps even classifying the level of experience required to get the most out of the workshops...alot of them were pitched a bit low from what I've heard, and as nice as it is to show beginners a few tricks (and we MUST continue to do so) some higher-level workshops would be nice too.
There's a bit of discussion about having some kind of indy-game-jam style thingo...I'm all for it, I think if it's well timed we could even tie it in with the sumea 48 hour competitions (programming and the art and otherwise things). It obviously can't go on during the conference (well it could for maybe the first day, but it's a bit of a drain on the people who would be in the competition) so the two days beforehand is okay if everyone else was into it.
The expo was good, but it was cramped, and I can see the benefit in increasing the venue size for that purpose. Perhaps having a bit more of a schedule for the expo as well, they had a big-ass projector screen but it was hardly used for the expo.
We definitely need to make people aware of this site too! It got a fair bit of 'pimp'age at the conference, and I think alot of people are aware of it, but it definitely needs to be built upon and made better. I dunno how feasible it is, although alot of indy game developers lurk here, it would be nice if it would also get more attention from the general australian gaming and independent gaming public.
I dunno...that's the end of my ramblings.
Looks like there's been a few posts while I was afk thinking.
Umm - name tags - I didn't mind, I felt it was nice to just introduce yourself and not sort of just look around at name tags. I ended up talking to Harvery Smith completely by accident! (poor guy having to suffer my musings).
I meant to get a shirt off Souri but he left early on Sunday while I had Harvery cornered - I'll get one off you one of these days - mwahahaha!
Okay, back on topic. I think posting up some of the talks early and getting numbers on how many people are interested would be a very good idea, or at least having more than 30 places...either way.
I definitely think a bigger LAN would be nice. The room was oh so tiny! And it would be much nicer if there were 20 or so computers...not so that we can spend $30 or more to come to Melbourne and play games that we can play anywhere else, but so that everyone could sample some of the indy mods and the indy games when there weren't any talks or they just felt like a break from listening to ppl :) A 3-day style expo room would be good, I guess it depends how strong the community is in that regard, if there isn't anything to expo then there isn't likely to be a need for a room for the expo being open all weekend.
I was only there for a day (sunday) but ill share some of my ramblings and opinions with you.
Everyone seems to menion that a lot of the talks were aimed to low and even myself learned nothing new at say the AI confrence... and i havent even left high school (though it was entertaining dont get me wrong, just not to benificial). But there were others (like the game dev grads one, ahhh now that was actually pretty entertaining ;) ) that were really good so dont feel its all bad :P.
The venue.... now im sorry but the venue was pretty laughable, room 3 was bloody hilarious, i was debating taking my camera out next time i went that way. For those who werent there:
Upon climbing the 3-4 flights of stairs to get to the confrence you then had to go arond the back of the floor through a hallway and go down a really rickety flight of stairs (which i noticed had a do not use these stairs sign on it at one point, despite free plays little encouraging notices pinned up on the wall like "keep going, your allmost there") then down into a garbage filled alleyway out the back which some guy sitting on a milk crate directed me out of to walk down the street, past an intersection and into a different building to down another flight of stairs.
Naturally i turned up late for my first talk in that room.
the building was ok in part but some rooms were too small, the bar was right behind a talk area which crossed it off as a social area (so as a consequence we went out to a bar for lunch and missed 2 talks or something). I know this isnt the AGDC but it coulda used a bit more space.
the expo was pretty neat, i liked how there was people showcasing there games around the edge which you could sit down and play (i got to watch derek play escape from woomera which i had hoped i would get a chance to see so that was great) and it was all in all a fun social atmosphere. The projector was used to show off piccys of old ataris and the like, next time lets have games running on that thing!! Like 1vs1 fighter (soul caliber or tekken or something) tournaments woulda rocked.
So all in all id sum up my opinions for the free play people with:
different venue (room 1 was too close to the bar, room 2 was too small and room 3 was down the street...)
Make the talkers aware of their audiences skill level or tell them what sort of understanding you expect the audience to have to avoid people going to talks aimed too low for them
Make social activitys more recognized, things like a break for lunch (so you dont miss out on talks while you nip out for food) and whatever other things you can think of (bigger LAN n whatever)
True, it is kind of nice to say hello to someone, but I noticed a lot of people not talking to anyone. Not to mention, I was looking for any Sumeans as well as several GarageGamers who I'd arranged to meet up with. I was supposed to meet up with David Michael before his keynote, but I had to wait for his keynote before I even got to say who he was.
I didn't expect so many American accents to be around, so I found it hard to find the poor man.
Unsure of the costs involved, but a game demo CD/DVD for the conference would be very cool. Exhibitors could distribute their demos through it and if it was done far enough ahead of time, speakers might be able to put whatever source/example material they have onto the CD/DVD too.
Harvey Smith was fantastic, getting some more game designers of his calibre out for future conferences would be teriffic. Perhaps a design workshop on a small example game - looking at refining aspects of the game. Harvey mentioned the Mechanics/Dynamics/Aesthetics stuff that Marc LeBlanc has done (excellent stuff by Marc at: http://algorithmancy.8kindsoffun.com on this subject)
Maitrek: Kenny Sabir was his name, IIRC.
Yeah I'd be similarly interested in some more technical discussions. I'm not one for public speaking, but I'd be happy to help out with running programming skills/software engineering workshops or something along those lines. Vaguely wondered if having a "bring your buggy code and get some help to fix it" session might be valuable (a little impractical for a conference?). Or perhaps get a panel of seasoned developers to take some code and look at strategies for refactoring it?
It'd be great to get someone to present an introduction to some of the agile development methodologies (eg Extreme Programming - see http://www.extremeprogramming.org/ if you're wondering what this is about). I don't know if anyone in australia uses these for game development, but they seem like they'd be very easy to adapt to game development.
The indie game jam thing sounds interesting, but I do wonder whether the deprive-yourself-of-sleep-to-hack-up-a-game is just reinforcing the industry expectation of low-quality code and unsustainable hours for employees.
Which reminds me, the "Game Industry Fine Print" handout was great, I wonder if someone could post a link to the PDF for others to read?
Cheers,
Mark/CW
I just wanted to say that I had an amazing time at the conference. I learnt heaps of valuable infomation and meet some kewl people.
I commend the conference organizers for bringing out game delvelopers from the US. I enjoy all of what they had to say. David Michael and Harvey Smith where great to listen to!... Brody Condon was extremely moving. He really made me view art differently. He made me realize many things. If I had of seen his presentation maybe 5 years ago. I may have channeled my artistic drive into computer art. I guess all i'm saying is I really enjoyed listening to his presentation. And I didn't know who he was before.
As far as improving the conference... First of all I liked the relaxed atmosphere. It would be great to get a bigger venue and have more people attend. However I liked the personal approach of the conference. So if it goes bigger, keep that in mind. In room 1 the desk with the speakers really needed to be rased. Becasue much of the time I couldn't see them! I learnt that you have to sit in the first 5 rows to actually see the people who where talking. That is something I would like to see improved. All it would take would be a little stage and your set. Even bring in a portable one.
As far as the content goes I thought that the conference covered just about everything I wanted to know. Within the conference the content was well rounded. Sure, we could have had more specialized workshops. But I guess we would need to make sure that people would attent them.
The demo room was also very kewl! It's great to actually meet people who are serious about delveloping their games. Or just to showcase their talent. I think the direct contact between delvelopers and everyone else was great to see. E3.1b was another great way to meet people who are currently delveloping games.
We go to the conference to learn and meet people like minded. From my point of view I think that both were accomplished. I'm all for meet and greet type scenarios. The Mod and Game Project Team Recruitment Forum was another great place to meet people!
I hope that this event goes on year after year!!!
Hi all,
First of all, let me thank everyone who came along to my normal mapping talk. I had a great time, although I was a little hungover [:p] and I've never done any kind of public speaking before, so everyone did well to hang around till the end.
I hope you all got something out of it.
[url="http://www.garthmidgley.com"] As promised, I've uploaded my Powerpoint presentation to my website. [/url]
I don't have any notation of my actual talk, so I don't know how useful this will be for people who didn't attend, but it may be a good reference for those who were there.
Those who weren't there, but still want to learn more about it, check out the other links I've got on my main page to the polybump (same thing but different name for normal mapping) tools that Crytek have available on their website.
My thoughts on the Free Play Conference in general are very positive. I found it had a very cusual atmosphere and I met lots of new people (was good to meet you Souri) and caught up with heaps of old friends as well.
The venue was a little small, but they didn't expect quite so many attendee's, so that's understandable.
The bar in the venue made it a great place to hang out instead of leaving to catch up with people for a drink.
The LAN was a great idea.
The name listing on the rooms was a good idea, however in the case of my talk there was a list of about sixty names and then come 12:05 Sunday, the room wasn't even full. A lot of people put their names down and didn't show up, while others who wanted to come and would have been there didn't bother even trying. Maybe next year it'll be best to do it on a first in best dressed basis?
But, as I said, all in all it was a great effort on behalf of all those who organised it and I look forward to attending it again next year.
cheers,
Garth
i cant believe i forgot to mention this
Dont make the confrence the weekend before mid year exams!!
i know a few people on these forums didnt go because of this and theres probably more people who didnt make it because of the date. A lot of indy developers are uni students and the like and this is mid year exam time. I personally was only able to attend one day of the confrence (instead of all of em) because of this. Seriously my biggest gripe with the whole thing had to be its date, next year (should there be one, i hope so) check with some students or something that your not putting it on at a bad time :p thats why the AGDC is good (date wise) as its holiday time for most students in december.
Howdy guys...
toke me way long to get onto these forums... i just came back from Sydney so thats my excuse..
ill have my pics up soon (Souri... LOL, you looked like a god! har har)
my thoughts... overall it wasnt too bad for its price, the social event was great, got to meet a lot of people in the field, and got some great tips.
some of the talks were rather boring, and wasnt enough discussion, they were hoping that people had things to ask, and due to no one having anything to say it would end early.. the workshop was better.. but they were expecting everyone who was there had no knowledge of programming so never went indepth with their topic, which was a great shame.. as i was hoping to learn a lot.
The LAN room. i spent a fair bit of time in there, pity only Urban Terror was the only game that worked, i was hoping to see the other mods that were around. oh well.
and room 3... way too far away.. only reason why i went was for the grad tells all which was sooo funny... heheh :D :D
anyways, good to be part of sumea! har har har har har
bring on the flames! MUAHHAHAH
quote:Originally posted by Anti-Gremlin
some of the talks were rather boring, and wasnt enough discussion, they were hoping that people had things to ask, and due to no one having anything to say it would end early.. the workshop was better.. but they were expecting everyone who was there had no knowledge of programming so never went indepth with their topic, which was a great shame.. as i was hoping to learn a lot.
Do you mean the python workshop ?
I'm sorry about that. There were a few python experts in the audience and I meant to have a discussion about python Vs. C++, look at some advanced methods/tools etc. But got a bit side-tracked... Also, I spent all saturday and sunday morning installing software on that machine and a lot of it just didn't work in time. doh.[:p]
Anyway, I've put some recommended downloads up on my website for people to check out:
http://arrowtheory.com/
As for the conference, I thought it was a bit of a shambles [8)], but I met lots of great people, and had many interesting discussions. And that was cool.
Simon.
I attended mainly to coerce my partner into going, and found some interesting stuff out and a lot of inspiration, as I'm a total beginner. (It proved quite profitable for him too, I think..)
I ended up having to volunteer as the tickets were all sold out when we rang up on the friday morning, and yes, I can garauntee you that they weren't expecting so many people and were under staffed, and the venue was too small due to this. However, for a first time I think it was a great effort.
Room 2 was a hard one to handle as a volunteer, the list would be overflowing but the room would be close to empty, because it was so small people constantly coming and leaving seemed to be quite disruptive as well.. I think that first come best dressed could solve this problem, just so long as the volunteer locks the door after the room is full.. The lists seemed to serve as a restriction device, and this helped out a lot in not having the room overfull, but a lot of people also missed out due to this. Running the same session a few times, perhaps for people at varying levels of experience could work quite well I think.
As for the timing, it was held as part of the Next Wave Festival which ended at the end of May, so I don't think it really would have been too viable to push it back that little bit further.
The speakers were great, I particularly enjoyed Harvey Smith's talk, and speaking to him outside the conference was awesome. He provided me with a lot of inspiration, if only I knew how to use it, goddamnit..
Hope to see you all next year, hopefully when I know a little more about what I'm doing..
-Meta
I didn't go to the conference, but I was wondering if there's a conference next year could a video/DIVX be made up? I e-mailed this idea but got no response. Melbournes a long way for some of us. :(