Vienna Gamedev Meetup #89 - Game design cooking tips & games

In My Many Travels...
Game design cooking tips from a wildly eclectic pro (Ivan Hamarić)

Part talk, part improv, part group therapy
This session offers a handful of conceptual tools, useful metaphors, and practical advice, along with some reflections on how to navigate the strange waters of making games with other humans.

Post questions here: https://forms.gle/EmJBuRstpMj52LUB8

We’ll touch on things like:
• the M, the D, and the A of game design, and how they talk to each other
• the three clarities of game design • what video game design can learn from board games • playtesting, "playtesting", and the false comfort of "polish"
• understanding the "fear of the banal" and how to avoid feature creep
• the "please click here" problem of narrative games
• the "first bet, then measure" approach

There’ll be a bit of structure, a bit of drift, and plenty of room for questions. And whether you’re wrestling with your first prototype or staring down a mid-production fog, you should expect to come away with some useful ideas. Plus perhaps a trick or two you’re kindly invited to steal.

Ivan Hamarić is a video game and board game designer based in Zagreb, Croatia. Over the years he designed or consulted on everything from jigsaw puzzle concepts and pretty boxes to large economic and social systems for open world games, logic puzzles, combat systems, and digital toys.

Enfant terrible of the University of Zagreb, he taught game design in one form or another across schools at UniZG. His personal ratio of "study programmes dropped out of" vs "study programmes designed or envisioned" is currently at 0.666...

When left to his own devices, he indulges in highly experimental game design, mostly in the analog space. Currently working towards launching two exotic board game labels, but loves being interrupted to work on video games, especially in cases of conceptually unique or particularly challenging projects.

After that we will have at least 2, probably 3 games shown off.
* Beamster / Phil (8:25 - 8:45)
* HELLO//GOODBYE Ekphrastic Collage Zine / Trick the Giant (8:50 - 9:10)

FOLLOW THE CULT

The Gamedev Meetup is sponsored by the best Co-Working Space in Town Das Packhaus ( http://www.daspackhaus.at/ ).

If you want to show your game or prototype at one of the upcoming meetups submit it here: Google Form for game submission ( https://goo.gl/forms/mLln06YTvI0ejPFG2 )

cannot wait to see you there

Michael ( http://twitter.com/asebist )