Porting Board Games to Digital Platforms talk for CrafterCon & Madison Protospiel

I gave a talk at this year’s CrafterCon, (a single-day convention The Game Crafter puts on before the Madison Protospiel), and they recorded it and posted it to youtube. Unfortunately, I am not in the video, it’s just of the slides, although it does include my audio.

A PDF of the slides is also available below.

I had a pretty great time at Protospiel. The big thing I did to prepare (aside from creating my talk) was to make sell sheets for each of the games I brought, and while I did show them to several folks, they were other designers, not (as far as I know) any publishers.

I had a great time playing other folks prototypes and hanging out with friends both old and new.

Foss XR 2022

Around the beginning of October, I found out that there was going to be an open source XR conference (called FOSS XR) in my neighborhood. I attended, and took some notes. I posted some of my notes in the MSPGameDev slack, and Zach, who runs our local VR & HCI meeting, asked if I would give a short recap of my impressions. I put some slides together, which I’ll embed below the video. There were some technical difficulties getting started, so the beginning of the video is actually as I’m getting into my second or third slide.

A play date for Playdate owners, or Getting Started with Playdate development

I signed up to host what I’d hoped would be a kind of Playdate user group at this year’s MinneBar, but I also prepared what I imagined to be a ten-minute talk on the various ways to get started making games for the cute little device. My ten minutes easily stretched to 42. (Apologies about how hard it is to hear the Q portions of the Q&A.)

You can watch it on Youtube:

Thrive – IGDA Twin Cities talk

Last night I gave a talk (on twitch.tv/igdatc, as all of our IGDATC talks have been for the last 6 months) about Thrive. It was basically a retrospective on the design and development of Thrive as a physical board game as well as a bit of a preview of Thrive as a digital board game app. You can watch the talk on YouTube already, but I’m also embedding the slides here for posterity.

Incidentally, I am now distributing the Thrive app on TestFlight, so if you see this and want to play it on your iPhone, let me know, and I’ll send you a link!

Vive Hockey

I did a quick (~15 minute) presentation at the last MN VR & HCI meeting earlier this week about the hockey game I worked on with/for Visual and Hiway Credit Union. When I polled the audience before launching into it, almost nobody in the room was a developer (it was one of the sparser attended VR meetups in recent memory), so I rushed through most of the technical bits. (Which was the focus of the whole talk!)

Anyway, here are the slides, for posterity:

Chaos on the Green Line

I was immensely lucky to be able to work on a project this summer for Motion Poems and Northern Spark called Chaos on the Green Line. It’s a mobile application (for iOS and Android) built to playback some beautiful 360-degree video (created by Pixel Farm) while on the Minneapolis/St. Paul Green-Line train.

Last Wednesday, July 26th, I presented on this project (along with Jeff from Pixel Farm and Patrick Swinnea, my developer collaborator) at the MN VR & HCI meeting. The slides are embedded below. Mine are after Patrick’s, and start at Slide 48. Enjoy!