Overview:

What Indies Can Learn from Wooden Toys (Andy Hull, Story Fort, LLC) Most indie games must find creative solutions to deal with the limitations imposed by having a small team, a limited budget, and short development times. In this talk, Spelunky XBLA programmer Andy Hull draws on 5 years of experience working as a wooden toy designer to examine how wooden toys seek to create immersive, engaging, and complete experiences using limited resources. Explore what design solutions game developers can borrow specifically from toy design, and see examples of games that already do. Genre and Creativity in Indie Development (James Lantz, Independent) James Lantz will discuss how to change the way you think about genre in order to make truly experimental games. His talk will incorporate interviews with creative indie developers, psychological science, and his own perspective. James will talk about how genre can hold us back from, or push us toward, being truly experimental, and how we can change this. Lessons in Creativity Learned from The Stanley Parable (Davey Wreden, Galactic Cafe) Creativity is elusive, hard to define, and harder to capture. Davey Wreden, creator of The Stanley Parable, offers a simple and concise set of rules that allow us to define creativity more precisely. Through historical examples and personal anecdotes from development of The Stanley Parable, he investigates how these rules serve as building blocks to more deeply elicit the creative spirit in any artistically-minded professional.