Over the last week I was in Wellington, New Zealand to attend the Play by Play games festival.
Play by Play runs over a week, with a series of events and workshops, many aimed at those looking to enter the games industry and school aged persons, culminating in a day long conference and awards night on the Saturday.
LVL2 was selected to be a part of a games exhibition in the Wellington Museum, and was also nominated for an award – the “That Game From Across the Ditch” Award which was open to games from Australia (all other categories were for New Zealand developed games only).
I had heard some great things about last year’s Play by Play from those who attended, so I was already keen to attend this year. And when LVL2 was nominated for the award, that sealed the deal for me.
I was in Wellington for five days, and met up with a bunch of people, both from the New Zealand game development community and from Australia who had travelled over for the festival. I spent a lot of time wandering around the city which is of such a size that it’s really easy to pretty much just walk everywhere in the central city. Someone described Wellington as a city made up of just the laneways of Melbourne, which was pretty apt I thought. Almost every bar had different beers on tap to try and everyone there was really friendly and welcoming. I had a great time.
The conference on Saturday was a single track series of talks of 15 to 30 minutes and covered a wide range of topics including text formats, consent in games, nostalgia and studio culture.
I heard a little bit of criticism that the talks were a bit ‘light on’ in terms of technical detail and evidence. But I think that the conference was more aimed at those beginning in the game development industry rather than those who had been working in the industry for a long time. And seeing as that describes me quite well, I quite enjoyed most of the talks. But I can understand that criticism as well.
And, because there were so many game devs there, a lot of the conversations that I had were about game development (surprise!). I noticed a change from the last conference I was at. Previously, when talking about LVL2 it was treated like a student project. But at Play by Play we talked like fellow developers, with people asking about development plans, what our release plans were, what we planned to do afterwards, and how our studio was run.
So that was a combination of “this is really cool!” and “Oh god I hope they don’t find out I have no idea what I’m doing!”. If anyone did they didn’t say anything though, so that was nice.
Then, at the awards ceremony on Saturday night LVL2 did not win an award. Instead we lost to Florence by Mountains Studio. Which is fair enough really. It’s an excellent game, developed by very talented people and thoroughly deserved the award.
Anyway, I had a great time at Play by Play and would definitely recommend attending in the future!