Keynote

Join Rae Johnston as she interviews Australia's own Siobhan Reddy, Studio Director at Media Molecule, the visionary team behind Little Big Planet, Tearaway and Dreams.

Katrina Irawati Graham talks about the power of bystanders to create grassroots cultural change and shift the discussions around gendered violence in the games industry.

Grace will be covering her journey in game development, from starting a network entirely from scratch to finding a way to develop games sustainably without sacrificing what’s important about her work.

This talk will cover the process of making the Frog Detective series, her consulting work, and her adventures in the business side of game development.

In 2018, Riot Games committed to transforming our company culture to be safer and more inclusive for all Rioters.

In this talk, two leaders from the Diversity & Inclusion team share what we’ve learned as a company and key takeaways for game developers and studios to implement in their everyday work culture.

Hosted by Soha El-Sabaawi & Audrey Gallien

[Proudly presented by Film Vic]

With the average career duration of 5-7 years in games, there is a shortage of people to offer insightful and professional mentorship in junior and intermediary roles. There is also a general lack of understanding about how to design a mentoring relationship, on both sides of the equation.

This talk will look at the who, what, when, why and how to have a great mentoring relationship. Often folks don't feel ready to be mentors - they believe they have to have loads of expertise before they can offer valuable insights to people earlier in their careers. Their imposter syndrome gets in the way of wanting to share knowledge. Mentees know that they don't know things but they aren't sure how to go about getting a mentor and they feel awkward asking for guidance. Better understanding both sides of the mentoring relationship will help you decide if you're ready to be a mentor or mentee!

Making videogames is hard and people are weird, then imagine trying to make money doing that too. In this talk League of Geeks co-founder and director, Trent Kusters, details the pillars and practices (and many, MANY missteps) that have assisted them in building their renowned culture that has taken LoG from a tiny out-of-hours indie outfit to one of the world's most respected Triple-I studios with 40+ team members. For people managers, producers, studio heads, or frankly anyone who cares about the 40 hours a week we spend making videogames together, come hear LoG's beliefs on how game development can be better.

Morgan Jaffit as he interviews one of the industry's most iconic and interesting indie developers, Mike Bithell, creator of Thomas Was Alone, Volume, John Wick Hex, Subsurface Circular, Quarantine Circular and The Solitaire Conspiracy.

Talk: What Australian gamemakers told me about making games in Australia

Speaker: Brendan Keogh

Since the beginning of 2018, Brendan Keogh has been funded by the Australian Research Council to investigate the state of game development in Australia. So far Keogh has conducted 150 interviews with gamemakers in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Tasmania; he also conducted a nationwide survey that attracted another 280 responses.

Across these interviews, Keogh identified a wide range of identities, challenges, and ambitions driving Australian gamemakers. Some of these were specific to different local contexts; others were felt similarly across the nation.

In this session, Keogh will report back to the community some of the preliminary findings of this ongoing research through directly drawing from quotations and statistics from this ongoing research.

The goal of this is to help individuals in the audience to better understand their own local and national context as game developers, ensuring that collective challenges they face are not felt as solely individual failings.

Further, by presenting this national and local snapshot of the experiences of Australian gamemakers, it is hoped this talk’s information will help local gamemaking communities consider collective responses and strategies to the near-ubiquitous feelings of precarity and instability observed in this study.

Also featuring final remarks from Sav Emmett Wolfe and the GDAA team.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au