Conferences in 2025

The end of the year is approaching which means it’s time for annual re-cap and review posts! First up is conference talks. We attended 3 of them this year, which probably resulted in listening to around 50 talks. It was a lot of information to take in.

This blog post is going to be biased towards ThinkyCon as it was the most recent conference and likely the one that had the largest influence on Fatemender design decisions so far. The rest are going to be the few talks that were able to stick with me across multiple months.

Narrascope

NarraScope is an annual conference put on by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation. It’s been on my radar for years because of it’s focus on interactive narratives and story telling in games. It’s a hybrid event with talks being given in person and streamed online at the same time.

We attended online and watched the streams continuously during the live sessions. This however turned out to be very painful. The in-person setups weren’t great for the online audience. We had some talks we wanted to attend but due to the audio issues in the live streams we ended up jumping around between sessions and just watching whichever one had the best audio quality as some were near impossible to listen too.

But that doesn’t mean we didn’t get some good takeaways from the event. There were a few talks that definitely stuck with us.

Finding the Pixel: Information Seeking Behaviors Towards Holistic Narrative Design

This talk title peaked my interest due to my background in information studies. Information seeking behaviours is a big topic in the library studies world. My education and my passion hobby overlapping? What a find!

It was a treat to hear the language from my degree being used to talk about user behaviours in games. It was honestly a connection I never thought of making but it feels so obvious now. That the different ways people seek information influences how they would seek information in a game. The talk also featured some of my favourite graphs from library school, but didn’t include my absolute favourite, Brenda Dervin’s sense-making model:

(I made a lot of fun of this graphic while I was in library school and am now very fond of it.)

Crafting Kissable Characters (Whether Your Game has Romance in It or Not!)

With our first game being made for a romance themed game jam, romance in games was still a key concept to us back in May. It will probably be an evergreen topic but it’s not central to our current game.

The big thing I took away from this talk was the importance of having lovable characters and having a range of different characters to appeal to more people. All characters should have appeal.

Mathematically Proving Your Stories Have No Bugs

I’ve been following different dialog tools for a few years now and Yarn Spinner has always seemed cool to me. The idea of mathematically testing your branching stories also seems cool to me. Having just come off of making 2 narrative games it was really interesting to see a tool and approach for testing branching.

Given the size of the games we’ve made and the small size of our teams testing like this doesn’t seem as necessary as we had a low enough number of scenes that we could test them all ourselves and make sure things trigger or don’t trigger when needed. But it’s cool to have ideas like this floating around in my brain for more ambitious projects in the future.

The con talks are hosted on the IFTechFoundation YouTube channel. They have years of talks available there right now, going back to 2020.

QGCon

The Queerness in Games Conference was held at the BANQ in Montreal, a mere 20 minute walk from our apartment. We attended as Arcade Presenters, showing Love in the Time of Spellphage. I already blogged about our time there so I won’t go into what it was like to be there.

In the mornings before we went to our table we were able to catch a few talks and we’ve been told that the talks would be put online to watch later. However none of the talks for QGCon have made it online yet so I’ll try to remember to update this blog post when they do.

ThinkyCon

ThinkCon is a yearly conference put on by the folks behind Thinky Games. I only learned of the Thinky Games community this year while doing research for Fatemender and only heard of the conference about 3 weeks before it happened. It was both free and online so the last minute discovery wasn’t a downside as it made it easy to attend. However in the end my wife did describe the conference as “the most expensive conference we’ve attended” due to all the ideas it added to the Fatemender backlog that would require serious dev time.

There were excellent takeaways from the ThinkyCon talks that led to some major changes in our game.

Is a Puzzle Game Without An Undo Still A Puzzle Game? - JohnLee Cooper

We’ve been testing Fatemender with players for almost 2 months now. We’ve heard that people find the game difficult and that there were ways to make a very punishing mistakes. We put more time into onboarding, ramping of difficulty over time and also adding guardrails so folks would make fewer misplays. But the question remained, would an undo button ruin it? In comes a talk about undo.

Multiple talks at the conference did bring up the undo button but this was the first talk that really focused on it. We’d been debating it for a while already and the conference forced it into the spotlight. One of the big debate points was, is our game really a puzzle game? And do all puzzle games have undo? We already know that puzzle games aren’t big sellers so there's a hesitation to lean fully into puzzle genre expectations. And since most of our levels have an element of RNG generation we also don’t promise solvability. Which feels like it disqualifies us from being a puzzle game... So does that disqualify the expectation of undo?

But the talks went on and my wife started to look into the technical side of implementing undo. The Thinky Games crowd feels like the audience that would like our game so it made sense to try to at least hue to some puzzle genre expectations.

3 days after the conference we launched the undo button.

Using a puzzle solver to aid design, discovery, QA, and playtesting – Jagriff

We didn’t end up writing a solver but it was a conversation in the house for a few days thanks to this talk. It was also just really interesting hearing about Jagriff’s workflow with his solver for both level design and testing. Currently a solver feels like a huge lift for Fatemender and we already have some self given deadlines we want to hit but it will probably often be at the back of our minds.

Art of Nurikabe World - Wiebke Spieker

The unassuming last talk of day 1 about approaching visuals in a puzzle game ended up holding one of the most important suggestions for us. Solving one of our own problems; how to stop all your screenshots from looking the same when your game is a grid.

This came in just in the last few minutes of the talk, the suggestion of changing up the shape of your grid levels. So far all the levels in Fatemender were 3x4, while each new map is a new experience it’s hard to convey that with the screenshots alone. So what if you have a grid with a hole in the middle? Maybe an L shape? Stay tuned for future Fatemender updates to see how this influenced the game.

Composing Music for Chants Of Sennaar - Thomas Brunet

I wasn’t sure what to expect about a talk on music at a puzzle conference but this was a nice shakeup to the design and process talks. And it ended up being really interesting to hear about the role of music in puzzle games. So far we’ve been approaching Fatemender with the main idea of not wanting the music to be distracting from the problem solving. It’s not meant to steal the scene. Brunet does bring this up and showed how they even have plenty of space for silence in Chants of Sennaar. But one of the best lines, maybe from the whole conference was “the music knows more than you”. Meaning that you as the player don’t have all the information of the world or puzzle but the music does and it should be conveying that information in a way that might not yet be clear to the player.

Testing Blue Prince - Tonda Ros

I’ll admit, seeing Tonda Ros on the schedule before the conference started was a huge influence in wanting to attend the conference. Blue Prince is my top game of the year and it felt like such a treat to hear anything about it's creation. This is the first talk Ros has given since the release of the game. Blue Prince was the first game he made. How could he give a talk without spoiling the game? Well he does, he doesn’t spoil a single thing, there was maybe even just one screenshot. So if you’re interested in his process for finding playtesters but don’t want to have Blue Prince spoiled in anyway you can still watch this talk.

Ros’s approach to ask streamers to be playtesters feels genius and seems to have been really successful for him. He didn't want players to feel watched, he didn't want folks to be motivated by money, or fill our surveys. Just pure gameplay and reactions. This has definitely inspired us to try to take a similar approach to finding some early Fatemender playtesters as soon as we have our demo solidified.

All talks from this conference and previous ThinkyCons are available on YouTube.

Conclusion

This as been our first year as a studio. We hadn’t really planned on attending any of these events until a few weeks before (aside from QGCon) so it was cool to be able to fully devote multiple days to just watching talks and learning new things. But also boy it’s time consuming and mentally difficult. For Narrascope it was a heat wave weekend and we spent the whole time basically trapped in our bedroom, which we set up to be a temporary office space because it’s our only room with air conditioning. I found it hard to stay focused through hours of information while also not being super comfortable. The idea of attending in person seems cool but have no plans on going to the US any time soon.

Still very grateful that so many conferences are online these days as we probably wouldn't have attended them otherwise. Narrascope struggled with managing audio but we were still able to catch of lot of talks. ThinkyCon was almost flawless on it's tech side which felt like magic. I'm already excited to see what the programming for next years events looks like.

Blog activity is about to take off over the next few weeks. I’ve got a year of reviews for books and games to write up. Maybe a timeline of studio development. An art year in review as well. It was a big year so I expect some big posts.