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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

    Kick-off

  2. UTC

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

    Dr. Craig G Anderson & Dr. David DeLiema

  3. UTC

    How We Make New Games at The New York Times

    Jeff Petriello

  4. UTC

    Editor tooling for A Monster's Expedition

    Alan Hazelden

  5. UTC

    BREAK

  6. UTC

    Bingo! The thrill of solving puzzle game localization challenges

    Diana Díaz Montón

  7. UTC

    Emotional Environmental Puzzle Design

    Tori Smith

  8. UTC

    Rewinding - moving time backwards in planning-based games

    Chris Knowles

  9. UTC

    BREAK

  10. UTC

    Thinking Vibes in Thinky Games

    Murray Somerwolff

  11. UTC

    How to break out of the Puzzle Niche

    Lenophie

  12. UTC

    Playtesting for better puzzles - measuring challenge

    Dr Meg Pusey

Day 1 schedule

Day 2

April 5th

  1. UTC

    The Art and Craft of Puzzle Design

    Samarth Hattangady

  2. UTC

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

    Tom Methven / Amicable Animal

  3. UTC

    Puzzle games and alternative controllers

    Kalinarm

  4. UTC

    Stop Developing Thinky Games for Other Thinky Developers

    Xalavier Nelson Jr.

  5. UTC

    BREAK

  6. UTC

    Mathematics for Puzzles

    chaotic_iak

  7. UTC

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

    Elyot Grant

  8. UTC

    The Case for Procedural Generation in Puzzle Games

    Jonah Segree

  9. UTC

    BREAK

  10. UTC

    Tips to make programming your game less hellish

    Caroline Clark

  11. UTC

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

    Isi Cano

Day 2 schedule

Day 3

April 6th

  1. UTC

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

    B-DeshiDev

  2. UTC

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

    Mairi Nolan

  3. UTC

    Puzzles Are For Supervillains

    Dom Camus

  4. UTC

    Starting a Thinky Studio With a Stranger

    Kate Killick

  5. UTC

    BREAK

  6. UTC

    Pitching Your Thinky Game

    Rachel Heleva

  7. UTC

    Art for tech people

    Ferran Ruiz Sala

  8. UTC

    The Beautiful State Graph of Microban 1

    knexator

  9. UTC

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

    Alexander King

  10. UTC

    BREAK

  11. UTC

    Introduction to Crossword Construction

    Clara Fernandez-Vara

  12. UTC

    Ways to Make Your Game Friendly to Let's Players

    Alex Diener

  13. UTC

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

    Jason Newman

Day 3 schedule

About us

We love thinky games — those that encourage players to carefully reason through puzzles and challenges, brimming with curiosity and discovery.

Our goal at Thinky Games is to help more people discover these amazing games. We do this by representing and supporting the community of thinky fans and developers.

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