UPDATE 8

Kiwi Game Starter & the New Zealand Game Developer’s Conference (2016)

September 15, 2016

Seed of Life is a meditative game about sacred patterns.

Catch up on what the game is in this post.

Seed of Life was a finalist for the KGS scholarship award!

The winners - two wonderful colleagues of mine; Matthew and Cynthia - went on to win the scholarship award with their games Caves and Ten Thousand Coins.



The winners for the funding streams were two other colleagues of mine; the peeps behind Lost Goblin and Team Ninja Thumbs for their games Goblins of Elderstone and Grabity.

Also, props to one last finalist; the game Interdimensional Llama by Team Llama - a delightful little puzzle game by a lovely student team from Wellington.

It was a packed week in Auckland!

I spoke at #NZGDC16 about editor extensions, game design, and being a one-person indie game dev

The room was packed! (Yikes!)

The talk basically glossed over these blog posts (scroll down to “Additional Links”) I had already written while exploring why such decisions were not only helpful but necessary in exploring my game’s possibility space (and making it without taking forever!)

I just kind of riffed. It was a very open, self-centered talk about Seed of Life and what I went through to make it (making it, still). What I had hoped to get across was how I discovered something unique with my game concept and how I attempted to explore it - implying that you too should look for what’s special about your game and try to explore it by writing tools that help you do so.

I think it went well!

Seed of Life was live-streamed during NZGDC

Here’s a shot of Cynthia playing the game! (Ooh, that glare on the tv T__T)

All the while, the game was being streamed live to twitch (here’s my twitch page) with screenshots being posted to my twitter (several screens if you scroll down!) in real time - a large part of what my talk was about.

TODO: Archive the videos to YouTube!

Conclusion

After NZGDC, we celebrated into the night. It was here that many memorable and open conversations took place with several endearing people across the ANZ game development scene. I feel that it was here that I got to properly take in what just happened, and it solidified my enthusiasm and excitement for completing and releasing Seed of Life - which is hopefully not all too far away.



What a packed, heartwarming, eventful, fruitful, and wonderful week.