ThinkyCon 2024

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

B-DeshiDev

When making thinky games, how do you pace levels to provide a smooth difficulty and learning curve? How can you ensure proper tutorialization across a variety of concepts and mechanics? Keeping track of it all inside your head is hard.

Perhaps you don't need to. By breaking down each puzzle by which interactions it teaches/tests and charting it, we can get a better view of the player's knowledge at each stage of the game.

Using that data, we can build tools to help us manage that complexity. This talk is about the when, how, and why of doing that.

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

Mairi Nolan

This talk delves into the evolution and intersection of real life escape rooms and videogames, exploring their shared history and divergent paths. From The Crimson Room (2004), to mixed reality and beyond. This talk is aimed at game designers, folks interested in history and puzzle enthusiasts, the talk hopes to offer insights into gameplay dynamics, puzzle creation, and the ever evolving landscape of escape rooms.

Puzzles Are For Supervillains

Dom Camus

Concerning lies we tell ourselves about puzzle difficulty and how real heroes are bad at puzzles.

Starting a Thinky Studio With a Stranger

Kate Killick

What's even harder than starting an indie game studio? Finding the right person to do it with! This talk is about the challenges of finding a cofounder in the age of remote work. I'll share how and why I found the right internet stranger to start Glowfrog Games with, as well as how we've tackled the challenges of building a team from scratch while living 5000 miles apart.

Break

Pitching Your Thinky Game

Rachel Heleva

Pitching your thinky game starts as early as the prototype phase when you're honing in on a unique idea for mechanics and systems, continues into production as you're securing funding and support from publishers and first parties, and honestly never ends as every time you put your game in front of players you're pitching it to them.

Pitching thinky games in particular can be difficult, as often they have buried hooks or complex ideas that don't always come across in a GIF or one-liner. And because many thinky games are designed mechanics first, thinking about how they will appeal to specific players can sometimes come last.

I want to offer frameworks to developers to think about how they're pitching their projects at various phases throughout development, and tools to help them better identify and communicate succinctly what is unique about their game.

Art for tech people

Ferran Ruiz Sala

How did I become an artist by accident, and tips on how to approach and think about art from the side of tech, from shaders to pixelart to generally developing good visual taste.

The Beautiful State Graph of Microban 1

knexator

Let's analyze a single puzzle in more detail than anyone asked for! We will develop & use some tools to extract a puzzle's "plot", which can help us when designing new puzzles.

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

Alexander King

Join system designer Alexander King for a close-up view of the design of Dear Reader, a mobile game in Apple Arcade that uses the text of public domain literature as the raw material for procedural wordplay. The design of Dear Reader balances algorithmic elements and manually-defined components. Alexander will walk through the game’s development in finding this balance, and share some best practices and lessons learned from turning classic books into procedural puzzles.

Break

Introduction to Crossword Construction

Clara Fernandez-Vara

This is a brief introduction to the basics of crossword construction - from different types, to tools to construct them, to cultural considerations when it comes to writing clues. Although the focus will be on writing crosswords in English, many of the lessons apply to other languages as well.

Ways to Make Your Game Friendly to Let's Players

Alex Diener

A compilation of lessons learned over 12 years of recording let's play videos, showing things developers can do in order to make their games work better for video recording. Topics included touch on UI design, accessibility, pacing, video codecs, privacy, and other things of concern to let's players and streamers.

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

Jason Newman

Why textless tutorials are superior and how they are implemented in Isles of Sea and Sky, a textless puzzle adveture game.