Freeplay 09

About

Freeplay 2009 took place at the State Library of Victoria on August 14 & 15. Over 200 people came along to our panel, lecture, and workshop programme taking place in the Village Roadshow Theatrette and Seminar rooms, hearing from over 50 speakers including developers, educators, students, programmers, artists, film-makers, and cross-media practitioners.

For the first time, Freeplay held a public expo program that took place in the Experimedia room at the State Library. Over 300 people had the chance to play locally produced independent and professional games, take part in discussions about games and the broader gaming culture, and workshop their own ideas in a game design challenge run by Infinite Interactive.

Our international speaker, Pteri Purho, drew large crowds to talk about not only his process for creating games, but also the role of creativity in creation and play, and his return in our Freeplay Greatest Hits Panel saw him create rag-doll peggle in under 5 minutes.

In the wake of Freeplay, we’re hoping to continue to build the creative community, supporting independent developers through discussion spaces and events, and putting together our plans for 2010.

2009 Speakers

Anna Dunne

Anna has been a writer for the website AustralianGamer.com for over two years and in that time she has interviewed high profile developers and provided in-depth reviews, previews and feature articles. This year, Anna has begun appearing regularly on Channel 31 as a game reviewer and host for long-running show, Level3.

Ashley Leach

Ashley Leach started modding games from the ripe age of 16, he studied Software Engineering at Flinders University and The University of South Australia, where he also lectured. He also mentored young game developers. In 2005 he started a small Indy studio – Silhouette Studios, which has worked on many Indy Games, Serious Games and BioMed Prototypes. In 2008 he published and had presented a thesis at CGAT08 in Singapore on “Cost Estimation and Middleware aquisition in small Software Entertainment Companies”. He moved to Melbourne in January 2009 to work at Torus Games. He has 9 years experience working on games and specialises in the Garage Games engine set. Currently Ashley is working on a series of Children’s Edutainment Projects and IPhone Projects as well as undisclosed Torus Games Projects.

His interests are AI, Gameplay, Cost Estimation and project decomposition….
….he’s also been know to rock climb and jump out of planes for the promise of cake…. no one mention cake.

@Ashley_Leach: “Making it look hard is easy, making it look easy is harder”

Blake Mizzi

Blake Mizzi started down the dark path of Industrial Design where he studied his BA at Swinburne University of Technology and completed a leg overseas – studying design from ze Germans. Returning to Melbourne, Blake joined THQ – Bluetongue – as a Level designer on the Nicktoons series (completing three titles), at this time he also began his Masters in Multimedia Design – with a focus in Information Design. In 2007 Blake left for Japan, Tokyo, to pursue other opportunities, where he worked as a freelance designer, english teacher and has experience with the Japanese game developer – Cyberstep – in a Biz-dev role. Blake is now the Lead Designer at Torus Games, Melbourne, has a number of million plus selling titles under his belt and has recently completed Scooby-Doo: First Frights for WB Games, to be released later this year.

… some say they’ve spotted him in a peloton of lycra wearing wilder beasts on a sunday morning ride, but this is yet to be confirmed.

@Blake_Mizzi: “Its not easy being easy”

Cameron Bonde

Cameron is an independent games producer and co-founder of www.MaschineSimulations.com who specialise in accurate driver training
and racing simulations.

Currently he is lead programmer on ‘KartSim’ and a lecturer at Victoria University’s games course.

Cameron Lee

In his current position as Development Director at Electronic Arts and prior Producer roles at both Transmission and Tantalus he has produced games on all current generation platforms including PS3, Xbox 360, PC, Wii and DS.

Cameron has ten years of management and leadership experience from his time in the games industry and as a founding director of a successful software company that provides enterprise project and portfolio management software to large corporate clients.

EA studio, Visceral Games Australia is currently working on two unannounced AAA titles and core tools used throughout EA.

Conor O’Kane

Conor O’Kane has worked in the games industry since 1999, as an artist at Funcom in Dublin, and a lead artist at Tantalus in Melbourne. He has been credited on over 10 released games on various console, computer and handheld platforms. He began developing his own games independently in 2007. He currently works as a freelance artist and game developer and is teaching at RMIT University in Melbourne. Further information about his games and other works can be seen at cokane.com.

Christan McCrea

Christian McCrea is a theorist working in the Games and Interactivity program at Swinburne University. He has researched and taught in fields relating to cinema, culture, games, art, technology, aesthetics and politics, and has developed game studies subjects at several Australian universities.

Craig Duturbure

Lead Games Designer Craig Duturbure began his career at Melbourne’s Beam Software, working on SNES platform games. In the past 15 years he has worked on most platforms in most game genres with most companies. He believes that there are genuine merits in both licensed and original I.P., and he believes that good coffee underpins them all.

Damian Scott

Damian formed Primal Clarity Productions after he left Team Fortress Software in 1999 when it was acquired by Valve Software to research and develop a production pipeline for the Unreal engine for not only game development, but rapid prototyping, and pre-visualisation.

Researcher, teacher, and passionate independent developer, Damian has spent years advocating what he calls “professional mod development”. He has worked with Universities around Melbourne to formalize game curriculum’s around the Unreal engine, and believes the time is ripe for design collectives such as his to bolster traditional game development studios with a suite of pre-production services to maximize the creative and commercial success of their products, whilst funding their own development.

Daniel Kirchner

David Hewitt

David Hewitt is an eleven-year veteran of the Australian game development industry. He has designed or provided creative direction for sixteen shipped titles in that time, across multiple genres and hardware platforms, including handhelds, consoles and the PC. He was the founder and coordinator of the Melbourne chapter of the IGDA, and is a regular speaker at industry events, including AGDC, GCAP, Game Loading, Freeplay, X-Media Labs and the Korea Games Conference. David is currently the Creative Director at Tantalus, and based in Melbourne.

Drew Taylor

Drew Taylor’s passion is videogame culture and independent games critique. He is the publisher and editor of the one-shot JumpButton magazine and ongoing web site project, and worked for three years as the Associate Media Relations Manager of THQ Asia Pacific, working alongside development studios such as BlueTongue, 5th Cell and Studio Oz. He has written across a wide range of media, including a stint as a columnist for US game culture web site Game Set Watch, and is currently a feature writer and games reviewer. He would love to be given millions of dollars to produce videogame-related street art around the world.

Erik Sjovold

Celebrating his 10th year anniversary in the industry this year, Erik has worked on small, short-time productions as well as critically acclaimed, big budget developments involving teams of 100 people or more.

Currently working as Lead Level Designer for Krome in Melbourne, Victoria, he has previously worked in the UK and Sweden for companies such as DICE, Starbreeze and Midway.

Eugene Davoren-Britton

Gary Groeneweg

Gary Groeneweg (b 1972) is a Melbourne based visual artist. His involvement with video games over the years has been captured in a series of landscape paintings, which feature video game environments as seen in games like RoadBlasters, carmageddon, Deus Ex and Grand Theft Auto. He is currently involved in digital imagery in its various manifestations.

Georgia Patton

With four years professional experience as concept artists, 3d modeler and all around art monkey, Georgia has also contributed to various independent projects as designer and writer. Currently working on several iPhone games, her other pursuits include reading, playing bass guitar and throwing cats.

Harry Ravenswood
Harry has worked as a Lead Designer for studios in Australia and overseas for the last eight years or so. The majority of his career has been in the UK working for Kuju London (Headstrong Games) and, more recently, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE London). In the last year, Harry has returned to his hometown of Melbourne and is now Lead Designer at Krome Studios Melbourne.

Helen Stuckey

Jarrad Woods

Hi, I’m Farbs. All nine of the commercial projects I’ve worked on since 2001 have been postponed or cancelled. In fact, this paragraph is now longer than my resume. Three years ago I started making side projects, and earlier this year I leapt into fulltime indie development. My game ROM CHECK FAIL was listed in Gamasutra’s top 10 indie games of 2008, and I plan to launch my first commercial solo title in around a month.

Jim Shomos

Jim is a writer/producer or producer on a range of feature films, TV and digital media projects. He created, forget the rules, which was the first comedy/drama series in the world to broadcast all episodes on TV, Broadband and mobiles – and won Best Interactive Format award at MIPCOM (Cannes) 2006. Two series of FTR have been produced – a total of 69 x 3min episodes. He is a co-winner of the Greg Tepper Award 2007 from Film Victoria and was nominated for a 2007 AWGIE for his writing on FTR2.

He is working with Clayton Jacobson (Kenny) on a film (Thunder), a digital media project (Mordy Koots) and a TV series (Tracks). He is also co-producing a TV series with Nick Murray/Jigsaw Entertainment (Middlemania). Jim studied writing & producing at AFTRS and was a storyliner on Neighbours in 2003.

Jim has been a regular speaker or mentor at digital media workshops & seminars across Australia and has been an official speaker at MIPCOM 2007, MIPTV 2008 & 2009 in Cannes. He is the Victorian Chapter Head of SPAA.

Joe Velikovsky

Joe Velikovsky (www.joeteevee.com) has been a professional Film, TV & Game Writer, Game Designer and Producer for over a decade. He worked as a game writer & game designer on the PS2, Wii and Xbox360 game “Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal”, which has sold over 1 million copies, and as a Writer, Game Designer and Producer on “Jumper: Griffin’s Story” on Xbox360 (based on the Fox movie, “Jumper”). His first feature film as a writer is `LOCKED IN’, due for release in 2009. Wikipedia: “Joe Velikovsky”

Joseph Tabor

Joe has over 10 years experience working as an Artist in the Games Industry. He has held various Lead positions – Art Manager at Torus Games and Lead Artist at IR Gurus (now Transmission Games). He served a tour of duty at EA Montreal working on Army of Two as a Lead Environment artist before coming back to Melbourne to start a family and teach the Advanced Diploma of Games Development (Art) at AIE Melbourne. Joe is currently working at Infinite Interactive as the Lead Technical Artist.

Kylie Robertson

Kylie Robertson is a multi award-winning practitioner, expert and sought-after speaker in the field of interactive and cross platform media.

Kylie originally trained as a scientific photographer and progressed to international recognition as an interactive filmmaker with her film ‘Silent Passages’ which won a spot at MILIA 2000 Cannes and festival screenings around the world.

Kylie worked as a senior interactive designer and studio manager at Digital Pictures where her work spanned both broadcast and interactive platforms. Alumni of the Victorian College of the Arts School of Film & TV, Kylie lectured at VCA in visual effects and screen design from 2002-2005, and Imaging Theory to Creative Media students at RMIT.

Kylie has held key roles as Concept Creator, Co-Writer and Project Director for pioneering interactive projects Jupiter Green and Girl Friday. Kylie has won numerous Australian and international awards for innovation and artistic achievements and has had her work exhibited around the world. Kylie is now a principal of Ish Media and holds the position of Creative Director.

Kynan Woodman

Kynan Woodman has been Development Director at Firemint since 2007 and oversees all game development in the studio, including self-published titles such as the recent critically acclaimed premium iPhone game, Firemint Real Racing. In his previous role as Firemint’s Technical Director, Kynan was responsible for engine development on titles such as Madden 07 3D (BREW) and The Fast and the Furious 3D (BREW/J2ME cross platform). Kynan has a background in Civil Engineering and CAD systems and founded his own 3D visualization company before joining the games industry in 2004.

Liam Routt

Over the last thirty-odd years Liam has written, edited, tested, and even published, a variety of tabletop roleplaying, card, and board games. An avid gamer from his childhood, he has tried to ensure that game creation part of his life regardless of his day-to-day employment. A few years ago he took the plunge and joined the ranks of the video game professionals and is insanely happy as a programmer at what is now Krome Studios in Melbourne.

Logan Booker

Logan Booker has been involved in the games industry and media since 2002, and currently works as a game designer for Tantalus Media in Melbourne, Australia. Before Tantalus, Booker was editor of the Australian Edition of Kotaku, a highly-respected gaming blog, and Atomic: Maximum Power Computing, a magazine for hardcore PC and technology enthusiasts. His personal projects include Playwrite (www.playwrite-blog.net), a blog on game design and pen-and-paper role-playing and Zafehouse (www.zafehouse.com), a free zombie survival horror simulator written in seven days.

Luc Le Quiniat

Mark Flanagan

Michael Shamgar

Michael Shamgar is the founder and CEO of Nocturnal Entertainment Australia, which began in 2002. Nocturnal has released ‘Ultimate Arcade Games’ for the GBA, Catapult (a GBA development studio for PCs) and more recently Flowerworks(r) for the PC (with WiiWare version launching soon).

Michael has more than 20 years of video game development experience, holds a Ba of Electrical Engineering and has worked for several studios on numerous projects.

Mike Cowap

Moran Paldi

Moran has been playing games since first getting her hands on a BBC Micro. After graduating with an art degree, the games industry has been good enough to employ her, variously as an animator, designer and producer. She has made a ton of games for web, mobile and consoles.

She currently works as a producer in Melbourne.

Nathan Thomas

With a background in Industrial Design, Nathan became involved in game development in 1998 after initially working in graphic & exhibition design in UK & Singapore. Currently Lead Artist at EA’s Visceral Games Australia, he previously worked as Lead Artist at Transmission Games specifically on Heatseeker & Heroes Over Europe, and as a Lead Artist at CreatureLabs (UK) on the ‘Creatures’ series of games & ‘Silent Hill 2 [PC]‘.

Neil Rennison

Neil Rennison is a co-founder of Tin Man Games, a new Melbourne based indie developer. Tin Man are currently developing a range of iPhone titles to be released this year, including “Frootrees 2 : Pluck Me!” and an as yet unannounced range of adventure games. Hailing from the UK scene, Neil also runs Fraction Studios, a games art outsourcing and contracting specialist probably best known for their artistic involvements on a number of handheld titles, such as the Need for Speed series, Tiger Woods, Nascar, Juiced, GRID and many others.

www.tinmangames.com.au
www.fractionstudios.com

Nicholas Blackmore

Nick Blackmore is a Senior Associate in the Intellectual Property and Technology practice group at Corrs Chambers Westgarth. He advises on legal issues associated with technology development and procurement, e-commerce, internet media and communications. His clients include Motorola, MCM Entertainment, DMG Radio and the Commonwealth Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. He is addicted to SI Games’ Football Manager series and always plays for the cultural victory in Civ 4.

Paul Motion

Started as a Sound Engineer at the beginning of the 90’s. Moved into recording voice and audio for games and then Localisation at Eidos in the UK in 1998.. just after the glory days of the crazy E3 Tomb Raider parties. Moved to Australia and joined Atari as Localisation and Outsourcing Producer in 2002. Now Senior Producer with IronMonkey Studios, Melbourne. Career highlights include providing the voice for a deranged Robinson Crusoe character in Commandos 2 and working with Tetsuya Mizaguchi.

Phil Wilkinson

Rory Hart

Rory works as the Head of Development on the virtual worlds project ExitReality. A self taught coder he studied maths and physics for fun at university before joining the ExitReality founder on his ground breaking project. Over the years his role evolved from coder to its present state as the leader of a team of highly talented programmers and artists.

In his own time he dabbles in business, marketing, art and writing as well as finding time to get some gaming done.

Shaun Heath

Shaun Heath is a game designer and writer with experience in games reviewing, studio and independent games development.

He keeps a weblog about gaming culture at logicfree.wordpress.com, is a recovering fanboy and spends the better part of his day buried in piles of post-its and playing Rock Band.

Stephan Schutze

Stephan Schutze is lamenting the demise of his favourite boots. These boots have carried him across several countries and performed admirably and quietly as he has recorded thousands of sounds to add to his personal library. In between walking and recording Stephan has produced the audio for over two dozen game titles on every available platform. His boots have accompanied him as he has presented lectures and talks at some of Australia’s leading educational institutions and industry events. He is currently compiling ten years worth of sound recordings into an online library which will be completely free for users to download and utilise. He is yet to destroy a microphone in the line of duty, but recently sacrificed a wind cover by underestimating how hot the exhaust on a 350Z gets. He talks loudly and very quickly and is passionate about creating audio for interesting projects. He does not own an iphone.

Steve Fawkner

Steven Mieszelewicz

Tarwin Stroh-Spijer

Studied Design (Multimedia)
Self taught programming
Worked at Madman Entertainment as a DVD author for 3 years, got bored
Been making websites for 12 years, decided I could do it as a real job
Got some work making adver-games for advertising firms for Disney movies
Tried Internet Entrepenurship from dating sites to world-wide scuba diving directory
Started a business with a uni mate doing everything from web sites and business systems to games
Been teaching at Monash for a few years; multimedia studio and GUI design
Like interactive art, had an interactive piece at the Taiwan Biennial in 2007 with some others

Travis Moorfield

Ted Hung
Ted Hung has worked for over six years as a Software Engineer in the games industry.

His past game companies include Electronic Arts, BlueTongue/THQ Australia, and Lucasarts Entertainment Company.

At Electronic Arts, he worked on The Sims franchise for the consoles where he shipped The Sims: Bustin’ Out and The Urbz: Sims in the City for PS2, Xbox, and GameCube. At BlueTongue/THQ Australia, Ted worked as a Senior Programmer on Nicktoons: Unite! and Nicktoons: Battle for Volcano Island for GameCube and PS2. Most recently, Ted was working at Lucasarts Entertainment Company on developing new IP before working on Thrillville for PSP and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for PS3 and Xbox 360.

Ted is currently the Senior Programming Lecturer at The Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE) while working on his own independent game project.

Thuyen Nguyen

Thuyen Nguyen is a Senior Game Designer from Melbourne, Australia. Having worked at Atari Melbourne House and Transmission Games, his credits include such licenses as Australian Rules Football, Transformers, and Men in Black. His next game will be Heroes Over Europe (PS3/360/PC), for which he is the Real-time Cinematics Designer.

Tom Johnstone

Tom Johnstone is a Senior Graphics Programmer at Rockstar Games and works in their core technology group (RAGE) to provide engine technology to all Rockstar studios, worldwide. He has been directly involved on titles such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Midnight Club: Los Angeles. He is currently involved on Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3 and Agent.

Previously he worked at Evolution Studios on the PS3 launch title Motorstorm, and at Criterion Games on Burnout Revenge and Black.

He started out his career right here in Melbourne working for a little startup called ThatGame (Transmission Games as it’s known today today) on Heroes of the Pacific.

Tom is currently based in Melbourne working from home for Rockstar and travelling to and from the USA every few months.