Thinky Games
Sign in

ThinkyCon 2024

April 4th-6th 2024        Virtual/online

That's a wrap! Thank you to all our amazing speakers and everyone who attended ThinkyCon 2024 — it was an amazing event, all thanks to you.

Featuring talks from many amazing minds in the thinky community, ThinkyCon 2024 was absolute treasure trove of insights that we're delighted to share. Puzzle design, art, development, production — learn about every aspect of crafting thinky games.

We hope you'll join us for future ThinkyCon events — the best way to find out when that happens is to join our newsletter.

Watch the talks

For those who missed the talks live, you can catch up with them all on our YouTube channel:

Watch the talks

Discuss talks with the community

Times shown for:

Day 1

April 4th

  1. UTC+00

    Kick-off

  2. UTC+00

    Playful Problem Solving - What Puzzle Game Research Teaches Us About Player Problem Solving

  3. UTC+00

    How We Make New Games at The New York Times

  4. UTC+00

    Editor tooling for A Monster's Expedition

  5. UTC+00

    Break

  6. UTC+00

    Bingo! The thrill of solving puzzle game localization challenges

  7. UTC+00

    Emotional Environmental Puzzle Design

  8. UTC+00

    Rewinding - moving time backwards in planning-based games

  9. UTC+00

    Break

  10. UTC+00

    Thinking Vibes in Thinky Games

  11. UTC+00

    How to break out of the Puzzle Niche

  12. UTC+00

    Playtesting for better puzzles - measuring challenge

Day 1 schedule

Day 2

April 5th

  1. UTC+00

    The Art and Craft of Puzzle Design

  2. UTC+00

    Making Messier Games, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying So Much About Possibility Spaces

  3. UTC+00

    Puzzle games and alternative controllers

  4. UTC+00

    Stop Developing Thinky Games for Other Thinky Developers

  5. UTC+00

    Break

  6. UTC+00

    Mathematics for Puzzles

  7. UTC+00

    How we put 10,000 handmade puzzles in Islands of Insight

  8. UTC+00

    The Case for Procedural Generation in Puzzle Games

  9. UTC+00

    Break

  10. UTC+00

    Tips to make programming your game less hellish

  11. UTC+00

    Baba is Cool: the journey of level design in the classroom

Day 2 schedule

Day 3

April 6th

  1. UTC+00

    Interaction charts: How to know and pace what your players know.

  2. UTC+00

    Beyond the Screen: Tracing the Interplay Between Video Games and Modern Escape Room Phenomenon

  3. UTC+00

    Puzzles Are For Supervillains

  4. UTC+00

    Starting a Thinky Studio With a Stranger

  5. UTC+00

    Break

  6. UTC+00

    Pitching Your Thinky Game

  7. UTC+00

    Art for tech people

  8. UTC+00

    The Beautiful State Graph of Microban 1

  9. UTC+00

    Artisanal Procedurality: Using Classic Literature for Procedural Puzzles in Dear Reader

  10. UTC+00

    Break

  11. UTC+00

    Introduction to Crossword Construction

  12. UTC+00

    Ways to Make Your Game Friendly to Let's Players

  13. UTC+00

    Say no to text based tutorials! - Textless Tutorialization in Isles of Sea and Sky

Day 3 schedule

Join our newsletter

Get a free thinky game to play and discuss, plus the latest thinky news and reviews, directly to your inbox every 2 weeks!