I’m very pleased to announce that we have three distinguished speakers visiting this Thursday, May 26, in our introductory game design course, also known as 80k. The panel runs from 12-1:30pm in the UCSC Media Theater. We’ll talk about what’s happened in the three years since Braid brought the indie scene to mainstream attention, where things are going next, what passion drives the in-progress games they are creating, what lessons they would share with aspiring indie studio creators, and more — including topics the audience brings.
Our distinguished panel includes three of the most prominent indie game developers in the world:
Jonathan Blow (Braid)
Chris Hecker (SpyParty)
Alex Neuse (BIT.TRIP series)
Jonathan Blow is an indie game developer best known for his hugely successful game Braid, which wone the Game Design award at the Independent Games Festival in 2006, and his outspoken critiques of the game industry at large. He has also written the Inner Product column for Game Developer Magazine and has been a major contributor to GDC’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop. His current project, The Witness, is slated to come out later this year.
Chris Hecker is an indie game developer, graphics programmer, writer, and community builder. He worked for several years at Microsoft, where he was instrumental in the development of WinG, the precursor to DirectX. He was instrumental as an editor for Game Developer Magazine, and his countless contributions to GDC earned him a Community Contribution award there in 2006. He played a major role in the development of Spore for Maxis, where his procedural content generation has been lauded as advancing the state of the art by years. He is currently working on the indie game SpyParty.
Alex Neuse worked for many years at LucasArts and Santa Cruz Games before starting his own studio, Gaijin Games, to give himself more creative freedom. His love of Atari games let to the conception of the BIT.TRIP series of games, which have been hugely successful on WiiWare. The series has also nabbed several Independent Games Festival awards. Alex has also been a huge supporter of UC Santa Cruz’s game development community, giving a keynote address for GGJ 2010 and generously sponsoring GGJ 2011, as well as serving as a judge for 80k. Gaijin Games recently completed its BIT.TRIP series and is now looking forward to developing games for Nintendo’s 3DS.
