This talk is about how to apply one of the basic principals of graphic design to user interfaces and structural design in your videogames.
- Read the Talk Here.
- Or watch it here.
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Let's get physical
This is a talk I gave at FullIndie Summit in 2016.
It's about lessons I've learned in the past few years working with traditional game components like cards, dice, and billiards balls.
Watch the Talk Here.
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The 30 Year Game
This year I was invited to be a part of the Game Design Challenge at GDC.
The theme this year was "Make AGame That Plays Out Over 30 Years".
In my talk I discussed my process in tackling the prompt and the three games I developed.
Read the Talk Here.
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A New Age of Art Literacy
This year I was invited to give the welcome talk at the school for poetic computation. This is the talk I gave on A New Age of Literacy.
The talk is about how since the advent of Modern Art art literacy has slowly diverged from mainstream cultural literacy and how the internet is changing that.
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PH and PRACTICE 2014 – Designing for Problem-Solvers
Here’s my talk from PRACTICE 2014, Designing for Problem-Solvers.
The first half of this is a video of the talk if you’d rather watch me say it really fast
The talk is about how to design games that better teach their mechanics to players, and how to use the language of Problem-Solving research to better talk about the concept of difficulty in videogames.
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G4C 2014 – State of the Indie
Games For Change invited me to give a 15 minute “state of the union” for indie games, to run back-to-back with their “state of the union” for AAA.
It was kind of an interesting talk request, because I have mixed feelings about the work G4C promotes, and also I have mixed feelings about the idea that there even IS a state of the union for indie games. But I decided to put those thoughts into a talk, and this is that talk.
Sorry the quality is so bad, I ripped it from the livestream video. Also, not my greatest delivery, but I was sick, so you know, thats how it goes 
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Talk: everything is gonna be great / bravery (GDC2014)
This is the video that was shown for my GDC2014 Indie Summit Soapbox Talk
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Talk: Fail Slowly, Safely, Often. Building a Career From the Bottom-Up.
This is a talk I gave in Argentina at #PersonalVideoJuegos in 2013.
It’s a long sprawling talk and I covered a number of topics that have been on my mind recently.
Amongst other topics, I cover:
– What it really means when successful artists claim they “don’t know what they’re doing”.
– How/why failure is important, but the need to make sure you have the means to fail, so that you don’t fail hard.
– How long it actually takes to be successful as an artist.
– Why you should strive to understand your core values.
– Some of the lessons I’ve learned from my failures, and how they helped me.
– Why iOS is a great place to be an artist.
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Project: Playing Out Loud
Playing Out Loud is a tumblr I started to collect game vid-casts explaining high level play in an accessible way within a variety of games
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Talk: Let’s Talk About Play
Here’s a talk I gave at 2013’s Resonate.io
It’s about play and the relevance of play to art.
I get a lot of questions about art in the gamespace, but recently i’ve gotten a lot of questions from artists about games as well. This is a talk for those artists.
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Talk: On Control Design… (GDC 2012)
Here’s the video (free courtesy of GDC!) for the talk that I gave at GDC2012 on designing controls for any unknown interface (although focusing on touch screens).
[ Controls You Can Feel – Putting Tactility Back Into Touch Controls ]
Here’s a clearer video of Bit Pilot which I show towards the end of the talk also:
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Text: Spelltower Development Postmortem
This is a post I guest wrote for The Creators Project looking back at the 13 days I spent creating my iOS word game SpellTower
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Talk: Form and Code (Indiecade 2012)
Here’s a recording of the Form and Code panel I was on at indiecade this past year.
I was lucky enough to be on it with Casey Reas, Robert Hogin, and Daniel Shiffman (moderated by Andy Nealen)
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