One of my guilty pleasures at GenCon is to attend a variety of interesting game design panels with digital recorder in hand. I was quite successful this year with 5 distinct seminar recordings. I have done some rudimentary audio clean-up on the recordings but I currently lack the skill to properly polish them. They are definitely worth a listen though, in my opinion I present the seminars in chronological order as I attended them. I will try to link to the presenters websites whenever possible.
Things You Think About Games
Event Number: SEM1122700
Presenters: Jeff Tidball and Will Hindmarch from Gameplaywright (http://gameplaywright.net)
The No-No’s of Game Design
Event Number: SEM1128758
Presenters:
Stan! (http://www.stannex.com/)
Jeff Neil Bellinger (http://killerbunnies.com)
Daniel Solis (http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com)
Matt Forbeck (http://www.forbeck.com)
Lessons from Indie Publishing
Event Number: SEM1122904
Presenters: David A Hill Jr. from Machine Age Productions (http://machineageproductions.com)
Design an RPG in an Hour
Event Number: SEM1122800
Presenters: David A Hill Jr. from Machine Age Productions (http://machineageproductions.com)
Game Design is Mind Control
Event Number: SEM1120297
Presenters:
Luke Crane (http://www.burningwheel.org)
Jared A Sorenson (http://memento-mori.com)
The Legal Rules of Gaming
Event Number: SEM1118576
Presenters: Neil A. Wehneman (http://boardgamegeek.com/blog/377)
In addition to those excellent seminars, I also had the pleasure of running 2-3 playtests of the Spark RPG with some excellent gamers and/or designers. I didn’t request permission to post those game sessions online from the participants, so I will not post those particular recordings. I was told a couple of things by all of the different groups of playtesters.
- I need to improve the presentation of the rules; teach them in a better fashion with more clear character sheets
- I should change the GM Fate tracking sheet into a variant of the normal player character sheet.
- It is counter-intuitive to have conditions which only help you or only impede you, regardless of circumstances. I will consider changing this around, though I am uncertain how exactly that would affect the economy.
I hope the seminar recordings and I wish to thank all of the fine participants of GenCon who supported my playtesting endeavours.
GenCon 2010 Seminar Recordings can be found Here.