Your thinky guide to GDC 2024: events, talks, and nominees

Corey Hardt, 14 March 2024

The annual Game Developers Conference is happening from March 18-22 in San Francisco. There are lots of interesting talks scheduled, social gatherings planned, and on Wednesday, March 20th, the Independent Games Festival awards ceremony takes place. We thought we'd do a little round-up of all the information we could find about thinky-games-related happenings at this year's conference, and highlight some nominees.

Meetup

First off, Rachel Heleva of Astra Logical is hosting a Thinky Games Meetup in Yerba Buena Park at 10:00 am PDT on Friday, March 22nd:

"Do you love thinky games? ... This meetup is a space to discuss and meet other people who enjoy these kinds of games, whether you just like to play them or like making them yourself. Feel free to just show up and chat, or if you have a thinky game build you'd like folks to check out feel free to ask at the meetup."

(Note that this Eventbrite link may show that no more tickets are available, but this is just a casual gathering and you don't need one to show up.)

Unfortunately, we won't be there this year, but Joe was there last time and says he had a great time meeting so many awesome people. There will undoubtedly be lots of friendly faces!

Talks

Several game designers & developers from the puzzle game scene are giving talks at the conference:

• "'Bunburrows': How to Break Out of the Puzzle Niche" - Lenophie Leuliet (Paquerette Down the Bunburrows)
  3:00pm on Tuesday, March 19th in Room 2009, West Hall:

"Lots of young indie game devs daydream about making puzzle games despite it being one of the least popular genre among gamers. Let's make that puzzle game actually profitable! This talk covers ways to turn your puzzle game into a gem and reach audiences outside the puzzle niche from a joint design and marketing perspective."

"The designer of the IGF award-winning puzzle game Patrick's Parabox shares a collection of puzzle game design techniques used and learned during its development. These include: heuristics for iterating on mechanics, strategies for creating puzzle levels, and things to look out for when playtesting."

"While puzzles should often be confounding, talking about puzzles should NOT be. Have you ever thought "Wow, this puzzle is really fun and elegant!", but couldn't quite articulate why? What about "This puzzle I've made is beautiful, but play testers don't like it, and I don't know what to change." Or maybe you've just started out making puzzles and want to understand what the heck goes into the design process."

"Storyteller is a puzzle game about building stories. But it turns out people have a lot of expectations about how stories are supposed to work, so how do you design a game that accomodates a soft skill that is shaped differently across cultures, game literacy and even age?"

IGF nominees

In addition to scheduled talks, there are many thinky games nominated for the prestigious Independent Games Festival awards which take place during GDC, some of which are likely to be playable at the IGF Pavilion over the course of the week:

COCOON from Geometric Interactive is nominated for Excellence in Audio, Excellence in Design and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize.

Chants of Sennaar from Rundisc is nominated for Excellence in Design.

Isles of Sea and Sky from Cicada Games is nominated for Excellence in Design.

Cobalt Core from Rocket Rat Games is nominated for Excellence in Design.

Pile Up! from Remoob is nominated for Best Student Game.

Are you a thinky game dev hosting an event or talk at GDC this year? Do you have plans to get together and talk puzzle stuff with other fans of the genre? Let us know and we'll add it to our list!