Author: aucadmin

Paris Buttfield-Addison, Jon Manning, Tim Nugent Part of CW18

The wait for a high-quality, free, open-source game engine that can build games for iOS, macOS, and beyond, is over! Godot is here.

This workshop will walk you through building 2D games using the open source game engine Godot.

You’ll get a hands-on, rapid-fire introduction to using Godot’s IDE and its programming language, GodotScript, as well as VisualScript—a visual block-based environment—as you learn how to build games that run on almost any platform in a powerful, entirely open source environment.

By the time you’re through, you’ll have no excuse but to go forth and build games using Godot!

Topics include:

• How to install and set up Godot
• How to import assets, like sound and art, into Godot
• How to set up your scene in the Godot editor and create nodes and scene objects
• How to create input actions to receive input from keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, and the like
• How to add scripts to objects
• How to export and build your game

This is a relatively technical session, and attendees should be comfortable with code (or at the very least copy-pasting code, or following along with code). We won’t dive into the technical specifics too much, so if you’re comfortable with an advanced Adobe product, or something like Unity you’ll be fine here!

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Paris Buttfield-Addison is co-founder of Secret Lab, a game development studio based in beautiful Hobart, Australia. Secret Lab builds games and game development tools, including the multi-award-winning ABC Play School iPad games, Night in the Woods, the Qantas airlines Joey Playbox games, and the Yarn Spinner narrative game framework. Previously, Paris was mobile product manager for Meebo (acquired by Google). Paris particularly enjoys game design, statistics, machine learning, and human-centered technology research and writes technical books on mobile and game development (more than 20 so far) for O’Reilly Media. He holds a degree in medieval history and a PhD in computing. You can find him on Twitter @parisba.

Paris Buttfield-Addison, Jon Manning, Tim Nugent Part of CW18

While video games are the most glamorous of the electronic arts, splashy graphics and amazing sound isn’t the defining feature of games. Rather, games are games because they are the world’s only interactive medium. Good interaction needs to be designed, and the master creatives of engaging interaction design are game designers.

In this session, you’ll learn about game design: the art, science, and creativity of designing enjoyable, engaging games. This is entirely non-electronic; we’re not talking about programming, game engine development, or how to approach a publisher with your totally rad idea about how you can have, like Mario only there’s explosions. Instead, we’ll be taking a deep dive into game design theory.

Understanding games means understanding user engagement and interaction. In this session, you’ll learn a fresh perspective on user experience design by understanding how users engage with the fastest-growing form of entertainment in the world.

Topics covered in this session include:

• Why games work, and how to analyse and build engaging experiences
• The Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics framework: what it’s good for, and how to use it
• How to understand what a game’s doing, and how to build for fun

This session will be a paper-and-pens (and other bits and pieces) hands-on exercise in learning what makes a game a game. It’s not about video games. It’s not about board games. It’s about the creative processes involved in making something ‘fun’, and exploring exactly what ‘fun’ means. This session will be useful to anyone and everyone!

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Paris Buttfield-Addison is co-founder of Secret Lab, a game development studio based in beautiful Hobart, Australia. Secret Lab builds games and game development tools, including the multi-award-winning ABC Play School iPad games, Night in the Woods, the Qantas airlines Joey Playbox games, and the Yarn Spinner narrative game framework. Previously, Paris was mobile product manager for Meebo (acquired by Google). Paris particularly enjoys game design, statistics, machine learning, and human-centered technology research and writes technical books on mobile and game development (more than 20 so far) for O’Reilly Media. He holds a degree in medieval history and a PhD in computing. You can find him on Twitter @parisba

Mars Geldard, University of Tasmania Part of CW18

*…we think.

Westeroscraft is a project based on the block-based building game Minecraft, in which a few hundred unpaid strangers have spent the last 8+ years tirelessly recreating the world of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series block-by-block. Given that every piece of the world, even the terrain itself, was custom-made from scratch, several sources have suggested it to be the largest hand-crafted or contiguous virtual landmass ever made. It exists at the intersection of art and technology, and has been the topic of countless podcasts, articles, and Let’s Plays, was featured in TIME magazine in 2013 and is currently showing in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Videogames: Design, Play, Disrupt exhibition in London.

Creating and promoting an expansive virtual world with a cohesive brand and vision, especially on free labour and across global timezones, is no mean feat. Westeroscraft is an open project like any other: people who don’t know each other each want to see the realisation of an idea, so they come together and combine their segments of work to make a whole. This produces the same benefits we see in comparable software or collaborative projects, but suffers from the same issues: agreeing on the end goal or big picture doesn’t mean there aren’t disagreements on the best path to take or the implementation of specifics. It has many of the same needs as other projects: comprehensive documentation, conflict resolution, and finding the right balance of quality control versus creative freedom, in a structure with ambiguous or nonexistent hierarchy. Common issues are also exacerbated by our being entirely donation-funded, meaning poor community culture could make the difference between being able to keep the lights (or in this case, servers) on.

In this talk, a contributor from the project will reveal the administrative and community management practices employed by Westeroscraft to address issues including:

• planning and organisation strategies,
• decision-making and conflict resolution examples and techniques,
• review/quality control, and
• community engagement and non-contributor inclusion;

and discuss their applicability to other community or open source creative projects. Also, pretty medieval castle pics.

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Marina Rose Geldard, more commonly known as Mars, is a Computing Student from Tasmania. Entering the world of technology relatively late as a mature-aged student, she has found her place in the world: an industry where she can apply her lifelong love of mathematics and optimisation.

A compulsive volunteer at industry events, Mars also teaches artificial intelligence to first-year ICT students, hikes around in the Tasmanian wilderness, dabbles in research, and builds Game of Thrones in Minecraft.

Mars has been awarded the MJ Rees Prize (for excellence in Information Systems academia) at the University of Tasmania, and was an Apple WWDC Scholarship recipient for 2018. Mars is on the organising committee for /dev/world, after running the registration desk in 2016/17, and serves on the board for her state’s branch of the Australian Computer Society (ACS). She is currently authoring a book for O’Reilly Media on the topic of practical artificial intelligence, and working on computer vision projects for the betterment of public safety in her hometown of Hobart.

Mars can be found on Twitter (@TheMartianLife) and at https://www.themartianlife.com

Iain Anderson, Training Brisbane Part of CW18

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to travel to Blackall, to help the community with some digital art projects. I created a 360° photo trail that runs through the main street, and an iPad app as part of an exhibition in a local gallery.

This practical talk will show you how you it was all created:

• handling the 360° camera
• processing 360° HDR photos
• collecting and processing video interviews
• creating a user interface to link a real-world photo wall to the videos
• implementing the app in Tumult Hype
• packaging the HTML output in Xcode as an app

With the techniques discussed here, you could create similar projects to help preserve and showcase your own community’s work.

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Iain Anderson is a video editor, animator, designer, iOS and web developer and Apple Certified Trainer based in Brisbane, Australia. He has taught privately and in tertiary institutions, and has freelanced for Microsoft and the Queensland Government. Comfortable with anything from Quartz Composer to Second Life and Final Cut Pro to Adobe Creative Cloud, he has laid out books, booklets, brochures and business cards; retouched magazine covers and product packaging, shot and edited short films and corporate videos, and animated for HD broadcast shows, film festivals and for the web.

Today, Iain is a Lead Trainer (creating video training courses) for macProVideo.com, for whom he also regularly writes tutorial articles. An Apple Certified Trainer and Apple Consultant Network member, Iain is an active trainer and presenter, and runs the Brisbane InDesign User Group. Iain also maintains an active interest in the iOS App Store, where he has published several apps and eBooks, and a free complication for the Apple Watch, called “Roughly”. Contact Iain via trainingbrisbane.com or iain-anderson.com.

We’ve just announced a short additional round in the CFP for CreateWorld. If you missed round 1, there’s still time to submit a presentation, performance, or paper, but you’ll need to act fast. Round 2 closes September 28.

Learn more »