Physical and real-world games present unique design challenges, from managing large crowds to keeping track of players over large spaces to unpredictable weather and changing city architecture. Join us for Come Out & Say as veteran real-world game designers talk about a tricky design challenge they faced and tried to solve with one of their games. Gain valuable insight into making games from a wide variety of perspectives in this round of fast paced design talks.
Talks include:
Debra Everett-Lane: Come Out & Play Family Day — A Festival in Flux. Family Day is more than just a live festival — it’s also living, evolving from year to year as its designers adapt it to meet new needs. This evolution highlights special challenges that arise when designing for children and families, in terms of both games and the more general use of public space.
Catherine Herdlick: Catherine will share reflections on designing The Quest, a multiday pervasive experience for twelve teams of twelve adventurers, deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains. In particular, she will zoom in on how she introduced lightweight choice into the experience to transform a passive, captive audience into curious, engaged players and why it was so important to do so for the elite group for which the game was created.
Chloe Varelidi: The Low-Budget Outdoors: Title: The Low-Budget Outdoors or How To Not Suck In Designing Street Game Events or Why “DIY” Doesn’t Always Mean “Cardboard” or How To Run A Festival Without Loosing All Your Money
David Delaney & Dalton Gray: Crave an action packed adventure you won’t soon forget? Join us, as a State of Play discusses their game Adventures Society which leads players through a round-robin arcade style journey full of excitement and danger.
Pete Vigeant: My goal was to create an experience for a large group that was about resource balancing and upgrading (small economy), but also a successful and simple field experience that all ages could play and master. There was no single large challenge but, like most games, a tangled bundle of small issues.
Albert Kong: Sandbox Playtests is an ongoing project in the San Francisco games community. It serves as a space for designers of live games to share, iterate, and receive feedback for their work. Rather than following user research and playtesting models, Sandbox acts as an open mic for live games, actively welcoming novice and inexperienced designers to exhibit their ideas.
Nick Fortugno: Kill Him and You Will Be Famous: Making martial arts safe for the rest of us.
Nik Mikros & Josh Debonis: Many big games capitalize on very simple rulesets but our games for COAP have always skewed more towards complexity. We will be presenting our approach to making tangled rulesets accessible and concise to casual audiences.
Greg Manley