Meet up with likeminded folks to chat and chill before con day starts on Saturday!
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Godot & Gamemaker Meetup at Ground Kontrol
21+ $4 Cover Charge Starts at 7pm
Ask the bar for a $6 Free Play Card good for 12 hours
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Women & Femme in Games Meetup at TOTL Games
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Gamedevs of Color Meetup at Leikam Brewing
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Tabletop Games Meetup at NW Quimby Lucky Lab
9:00 am - 10:00 am
Badge Pickup (check-in table)
10:00 am
Show Floor Open with Games to Play! (main hall)
10:40 am - 11:10 am
Game Design for the Girls with Olivia Haines (upstairs)
Olivia Haines, creator of "Surf Club" shares her decade-long history of creating games about the many complexities of girlhood, through pink, ethereal graphics to complex coming-of-age stories.
10:40 am - 11:20 am
One Hundred Game Jams: Making the Same Game Over and Over with Andrew Goodenough (downstairs)
Your gamedev journey does not end with your first game. This is an odyssey of a hundred games. And if we're clever, and maybe a bit lucky, we can hone our craft with each and every project. Join me for a frenzied retrospective of 100 games.
11:10 am - 12:00 pm
Building Slay the Spire 2 with Ed Lu & Jose Pacio (upstairs)
Come learn about the development of Slay the Spire 2 from two programmers at Mega Crit! First, Jose will chat about the transition from Unity to Godot that occurred late into development. Then, Ed will share the emotional journey of taking the project from singleplayer to multiplayer.
11:20 am - 12:00 pm
Creating and Implementing Expressive Enemies in Slay the Spire 2 with Marlowe Dobbe & Chris Gortz (downstairs)
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Lunch Break
1:00 pm - 1:30 pm
What to do Before and After You Hire Your First Freelance Artist with June Aguirre (downstairs)
If you've ever been overwhelmed working with freelance artists, didn't know how to best communicate your creative vision and get the results that you are happy with, this talk is for you. We will cover setting your expectations, communicating them, creative briefs, feedback and other fun organizational things.
1:00 pm - 1:40 pm
Audacious Game Design: Making The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time with Lucas Immanuel (upstairs)
The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is a puzzle game, marketed as an RPG, so metafictional that this description is canon to the game. Hear how we combined interwoven puzzle design, 90s JRPG gameplay, guerilla filmmaking, and a lot of very ill advised ideas into a game that's like nothing you've ever seen before.
1:30 pm - 2:40 pm
Analytics vs. Your Gut: How to Not Go Insane While Balancing a Game with John Guerra (downstairs)
All data is biased! If you want to make a good game, you need to look at it from as many angles as possible. Join the designer of Cobalt Core as he shares some ups and downs of working with analytics, some ups and downs of trusting your gut, and plenty of real development stories to back them both up.
1:40 pm - 2:30 pm
Solo Devs & Remakes: What I learned from Bloodborne PSX with Lilith Walther (upstairs)
2:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Your Game is Hard to Read (but we can fix it) with Qristy Overton (upstairs)
"Players don't read." Could that be our fault? We'll dig into the neuroscience of reading, see where traditional game UI fails us, and come up with patterns that make our games more readable.
2:40 pm - 3:00 pm
How to Build a Community Around Your TTRPG with Goblin Archives (downstairs)
A look at how to approach game or adventure design (at any level), and the importance of fostering a community of play around a game.
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
The Big Gamedev Audio Panel with Sam Marshall, Ed Varga, Steve Green, Alex Schiff, and Michael Jones (downstairs)
3:00 pm - 4:10 pm
The Making of PIGSquad with Will Lewis (upstairs)
4:00 pm - 4:50 pm
Getting Started writing Custom Physics in Godot with M. Estee (downstairs)
Physics bring your game alive, but where to start? We'll show off some custom rope & water physics and then talk about how to approach writing your own solutions in Godot.
4:10 pm - 4:50 pm
Advanced Game Design - Concepts to Explore Off the Ground Floor with Christian Scandariato (upstairs)
Welcome to Game Design 201! Intermediate to advanced topics and terms to utilize, research, and apply to your game design process at all levels.
4:50 pm - 5:30 pm
Bolting Javascript onto Game Engines for Fun and No Profit with Amorphous (downstairs)
Learn some ways to (ir)responsibly use Javascript in decidedly non-web game engines (namely Unity and Godot), from using React.JS to make game UI, to using it for scripting, to prototyping mechanics on the web before bringing the whole thing in-engine later.
4:50 pm - 6:00 pm
So You Want to Start a Business - Biz & Legal Tips to Embrace From the Beginning with Jon Loiterman (upstairs)
5:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Famicom Bootlegs and Video Game Outsider Art with Sarah tvbride (downstairs)
An Art History presentation about the strange world of unlicensed Famicom games, with a focus on Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. What does an outsider video game look like?
6:00 pm Show floor closes. Evening activities begin.
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Game Jamboree: Experiments In Entertainment (downstairs)
Design really bad games based on titles suggested by the audience.
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Game Funeral (upstairs)
Developers say goodbye to games they will never finish. Learn, laugh, lament.
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Bloodsport Gambler Live with Livecoded Dungeon Soundtrack (downstairs)
Enter the pit and place your bets on fiendish fighters in a crowd game backed by a live coded soundtrack by Claro Fix.
8:30 pm - 11:00 pm
Live Music (main hall)
Beat Rush Big Band, Under the Deku Tree, iiimp
9:00 pm - 10:30 pm
One Hour Game Jam (upstairs)
Make a game in one hour. It doesn't have to be good :)
9:00 am - 10:00 am
Badge pickup (check-in table)
10:00 am
Show Floor Open with Games to Play Including BYO Indie! (main hall)
10:30 am - 11:20 am
PICO-8 Design Loops with zep (upstairs)
On chasing ideas through different types of terrain (across graphics, mechanics, level design, music...) and the value of getting lost in rabbit holes. Especially when they lead in a circle.
10:30 am - 12:00 pm
Youth Game Making Workshop (downstairs)
Registration and pass required.
11:20 am - 12:00 pm
Making Indie Games on the Side with Brian Cronin (upstairs)
How do you ship a commercial indie game with a full-time job, a family, and limited hours each week? This talk shares practical systems for staying consistent, managing energy, and making real progress over time.
11:30 am - 2:30 pm
Professional Consulting Workshop (offsite)
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Lunch Break
1:00 pm - 2:10 pm
The Plan Is Always the Same: How to Build a Games Career in Uncertain Times with Star Victoria Power (upstairs)
The game industry has always been hard, but lately it seems tougher than ever. Thankfully, things aren't as bleak as they seem. In "The Plan is Always the Same," I'll outline how I've built a successful career in spite of nearly impossible odds - and how you can do the same.
1:00 pm - 3:30 pm
PICO-8 Workshop (downstairs)
Learn game development with PICO-8, the original fantasy console that sparked an entire genre of game engines. Registration and pass required.
2:10 pm - 3:00 pm
It's Not About Averages: Market Research For Indies with Mason Remaley (upstairs)
Shipping sustainable indie games is tough. It often seems completely random which games succeed and which fail—but is it? For the past year or so, my fiancée and I have been looking at every game releasing on Steam tagged similarly to ours. We try to predict how well they'll do, and then compare our predictions to actual numbers. In this talk, I'm going to walk you through our process, and what we've learned in the process.
3:00 pm - 4:10 pm
The Big State of the Industry Panel with Lindsey Rostal, John Cooney, Kristi Anderson, and Will Lewis (upstairs)
3:30 pm - 4:20 pm
Black Box Sim: Gameplay as an API with Brian Cronin (downstairs)
What if your gameplay code behaved like a clean API with strict inputs and outputs? This talk explores a "Black Box" approach to gameplay architecture that separates simulation from presentation, enabling features like replays, undo, testing, and more reliable systems.
4:10 pm - 5:10 pm
The Forest of Forking Paths: A Comparative Survey of Modular Narrative Techniques with Matthew Cavener (upstairs)
A lightly opinionated overview of some proven and theoretical techniques for modular narrative design. Especially focused on fostering emergent narrative in systems-y games. Gonna cover storylets, "quality based narrative", story sifters, and more!
4:20 pm - 5:00 pm
Video Game Publishing: Anyone can do it! with Andrew Baillie (downstairs)
5:00 pm - 5:40 pm
How to make an Artist of a Gamer with Ivy Sly (downstairs)
5:10 pm - 5:40 pm
Making Autobiographical Games and Why You Should Try It with Jack Perse (upstairs)
This talk is part call to action, part personal-reflection, part cautionary tale on making (weird) videogames about yourself. After making personal videogames for 7 years and getting a PhD in the matter, I have a lot of thoughts. As the games industry, on a micro and macro scale, continues to fail the people who makes games I find pleasure and hope in the games that reject the industry spaces, scare publishers, make players uncomfortable, and are often rarely played.
5:40 pm - 6:10 pm
Lost Lessons of the Flash Game Era with John Cooney (upstairs)
Come for the joy of Neopets and Fancy Pants Adventures, stay for a wild collection of learnings from the Flash game era that remain untapped! This talk is geared towards lessons for game devs (or game dev curious folks!) from an incredible era of indie games.
5:40 pm - 6:10 pm
Cultivating Mushroom Musume with Team Mushroom Musume (downstairs)
The Mortally Moonstruck Games crew recaps development of our genre-bending text based adventure Mushroom Musume, as well as thoughts about amateur game creation, community, and fungi.
7:00 pm Show floor closes. (main hall)
From 10am - 7pm on Sunday, May 31st, we will have a large portion of the show floor open for anyone who wants to come and set up a game for others to play. Video games & tabletop games all welcome! If we run low on space, we'll rotate out each hour or so. If you have any games with non-typical controls, please reach out to participate! All games must follow the Code of Conduct. Participation is at the discretion of PIGCON organizers.
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