Jake recently did a talk for an online conference called ProIndieDev. The talk was about why you are spending too long making your game with a bunch of fascinating charts of data collected over the past 13 years that reveal hourly earnings from working on our games.

Helen was fortunate enough to be invited to take part in Wordplay London in November at the British Library: a festival of interactive fiction and writerly games organised by the Hand Eye Society.

For those of you who missed it and would like to get some insight from a host of experts about writing in games, the Hand Eye Society has put together a video of some of the panels from the day.

Helen was part of the panel called “Worldbuilding with words,” along with a lovely panel with varied backgrounds ranging from dystopian Twitter fiction (Nate Crowley) to choose-your-own-adventure style game books (Jon Green) with a bit of dating Twine fiction (Hannah Powell-Smith) along the way. Helen spoke about facilitating different levels of depth that work for a range of play styles in both Regency Solitaire and Shadowhand. She also talks about connecting with as many of the player’s senses as possible to build a game world; and how a limited plot scope and richly researched lore can help with effective writing. You can catch this panel at 5:00:00 (5 hours) into the video.

I finally got to speak at GDC in the Indie Game Summit!

You can watch my presentation, called “The No Hit Wonder – 11 Years and Still Going. How?”, for free on the GDC vault!

I felt that the speech went very well because it was packed full of tips and data and was quite funny. All week long people kept coming up to me to tell me how much they enjoyed it and how they’d even altered their plans as a result of my speech! GDC sent me the evaluation report and I was ranked #6 in the Indie Game Summit and #10 out of 132 summit talks, with 82% rating excellent, 17% rating good, and 1% rating terrible, LOL!

In my talk I mentioned how an article by Steve Pavlina called “Cultivate Burning Desire” was a big factor in me going indie when I read it back in 2004, and so I was delighted when Steve posted a link to my speech on his website!

Anyway, I hope that you enjoy it. Let me know what you thought in the comments, thanks!