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Levente Bodnár and Zsombor Fehér, EmptyMatter
Mathematics teachers have used discovery-based methods for decades, long before it became a design philosophy in puzzle games. Drawing on our experience with the Hungarian Pósa method, we'll explore how carefully designed problem sequences guide students to discover complex ideas and build understanding, and how this approach can be used to combine fun and challenge in thinky games. We hope this new perspective proves to be useful for other puzzle designers, and creates new approaches to how games teach.
Thomas Brunet
I will talk about the writing process behind the music of Chants Of Sennaar, what the constraints were, how we got to work together and how we tried to give another dimension to the puzzles, which are the main vectors of storytelling in the game. The first half of the talk will be general ideas about how to think about puzzle game music, the scoping and documentation required (with screenshot examples of documents). I'll then talk more specifically about Chants Of Sennaar, what the music needs were and how we implemented it, focusing on the 2nd level of the game. Other topics include camera work, level design, world building, environmental storytelling, etc.
Ethan Clark
It's hard enough making a puzzle that does one thing. How do you design a puzzle that does multiple things? We'll talk about puzzles with multiple solutions, puzzles with multiple emotional responses, and puzzles with multiple "bigger picture" purposes.
Daria Jerjomina
I've adopted the concepts of linguistic puzzles for my game The Land Forgotten. I would love to share the challenges that came with that and how we've overcome them.
Dennis Ramirez & Charlie Mackin, Videogame Workshop
We aren’t telling you to treat your players like children, but we ARE saying everyone has a hard time counting past 3, no matter how old they are. Let's talk about the design tricks we used while making PBS Kids games that will make your games faster to learn and easier to play.
Terry DuBois
Game developers love to playtest their own games, but thinky games pose a challenge to this process. How can one playtest their own puzzle when they already know exactly how to solve it? This talk will go over how random number generation can benefit puzzle designers and help developers see their game from a fresh point of view.
Charlotte Pang, Queensguard Games
Open to beginners and accessible to all, come check out animating in Google Slides! In this workshop, we'll be covering the basics of animation, basic character design and we'll have a hand's on section of creating characters and animating in Google Slides together with a provided template. This is a great workshop for anyone starting out in animating or art, looking for a quick way to get animations done or needing more guidance on animation processes.
Jackson Nagy, Starmaps
In this talk I will break down how players use heuristics when solving puzzles, when that's a bad thing, and how to use it to your advantage as a designer. I'll go over how I came to these conclusions the hard way, and in the process, dissect what it means to truly understand a mechanic.
Perttu "Borb" Tuovinen, borbware
As Celeste has proven, fantasy consoles like Pico-8 or TIC-80 are great for prototyping serious commercial video games. But what if you were to MAKE a serious commercial video game with a fantasy console alone? In this talk, I will showcase the unique hurdles I've had to jump over during EMUUROM development - right from inside the engine!
Tonda Ros, Dogubomb
How do you test a game that refuses to be predictable? This talk explores the unique hurdles of playtesting a title defined by extreme variance, and presents the unorthodox tools, and wildly impractical strategies that we devised to refine an experience built upon an ever-changing foundation.
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