Still Playing

Not even Queensland's most successful video game designers know just how much of a hotspot Brisbane is for producing games. Since the start of this year the State Library has been bringing indie game developers together with the public at its Garage Gamer program, full of workshops, films, talks, special events and hands-on gaming experiences. At one of the talks, a local game designer leant across to program coordinator Susan Kukucka and said he couldn't believe how many of the other local designers and studios he wasn't aware of. Kukucka's response: “Isn't that exciting? That means the scene is bigger than you'd imagined.”

The Library's program celebrates all the great work being done in Queensland's game design community, with input from Halfbrick Studios, the incredibly successful creators of Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride.

“It's significant that not only do Halfbrick come from Brisbane but they've chosen to stay in Brisbane,” Kukucka says. “I guess the interesting phenomenon in Brisbane now is the rise of the indies: there are a lot of companies springing up from the ashes of the big companies that were based here [such as Krome or Pandemic] that closed down during the GFC. A lot of people from those stayed here and decided to set up their own companies and their own IP. A lot are working on mobile games, which are not as expensive or time-consuming to create as AAA console games, so you have a lot of one-person, two-person, four-person studios working in Brisbane making games. And the thing that has come out of Garage Gamer is that there are studios popping up all the time in Brisbane that other studios don't know about! The community is growing.”

Kukucka says Halfbrick are not the only locals to make good. Defiant Development are doing well with games such as Ski Safari and Screwtape Studios just received funding through a $15 million program Federal Arts Minister Simon Crean announced at the end of last year.

With the successful program moving into its final days, besides the scope to just drop in and play there are still a few lynchpin events to come. Tonight, Halfbrick Studios CEO Shainiel Deo will give a talk as part of the Game Changers lecture series; Kukucka expects tickets to have sold out by now but the talk will be live-streamed on the SLQ website and available for download so interested punters can still catch it.

“On March 27 we have a Pecha Kucha night focused on game design,” Kukucka says, referring to the dynamic, concise Japanese presentation style for new ideas. “It's 20 slides in 20 seconds, really visual and fast, and we think it's a really exciting way to showcase some of the exciting work being done in game design. A powerful way to get your message across. So we have game designers coming along, and other people in the industry who might be involved in the theory side of things.

“And our last Up Late night is on April 12 – it's a bit of a meet-up, a night when people can come and socialise and play the games that are in the space, and we have someone from the games community host the night. It's looking like we might be doing something with QUT's Game On program's 48-hour gaming challenge, where teams develop a game within 48 hours, and they don't sleep and eat a lot of two-minute noodles. The end result of that is often a playable game so we're looking at the last eight years of that project, and bringing some of those games back to see where they've gotten to.”