Indie Games Festival
February 6-8 / Het Bos, Antwerp

Tickets: sold-out!
Program

Friday Feb 6

14:00 - 17:00 Belgian Developer Showcase
(industry-only access)
19:00 - 22:00 Expo Opening Night (general audience access) feat. Cello Fortress
22:00 - 02:00 Algorave:
22.00 - 23.00 Halic
23:00 - 24:00 Alexandra Cardenas
24:00 - 01:00 Shelly Knotts
01:00 - 02:00 section_9

Saturday Feb 7

10:00 - 21:00 Game & Art expo
10:00 - 12:00 Workshops
10:00 - 12:00 4 games per hour (Jan Willem Nijman & Kitty Calis)
10:00 - 12:00 Pixels, Please: A graphics jam for everyone (Fernando Ramallo & Kevin Watters)
13:00 - 20:15 Talks:
13:00 - 13:45 Swen Vincke
13:45 - 14:30 Cara Ellison
break
15:00 - 15:45 Adriaan De Jongh
15:45 - 16:30 Agency For Games
break
17:00 - 17:45 Pippin Barr
18:00 - 18:45 Hypertalks
break
19:15 - 20:15 Ste Curran
12:00 - 18:00 Local Multiplayer Hall
21:00 - 02:00 screenshake Party:
21:00 - 22:00 TOUGH CODED
22:00 - 23:00 SADDEST BOT ALIVE
23:00 - 00:00 CHIPZEL
00:00 - 01:00 LOBST3R
01:00 - … DJ STORNO

Sunday Feb 8

10:00 - 20:00 Game & Art expo
10:00 - 13:00 Workshops:
10:00 - 13:00 Burn the Keyboard (Mads Johansen Lassen & Jonas Maaløe)
10:00 - 13:00 Tying Stories Together With Twine (George Buckenham)
14:00 - 18:45 Talks:
14:00 - 14:45 Brandon Sheffield
14:45 - 15:30 Rilla Khaled
break
16:00 - 16:45 William Pugh
16:45 - 17:30 Rhianna Pratchett
break
18:00 - 18:45 Cara Ellison & Karla Zimonja
12:00 - 15:00 Local Multiplayer Hall
20:00 - 23:00 Screenings:
20:00 - 20:45 JOURNEY LIVE PLAY
21:00 - 21:45 GAME LOADING SNEAK PEEK
22:00 - 23:00 SUPER GAME JAM PANEL
Talks

Saturday

Swen Vincke (BE)

13:00-13:45: Stuff that worked for us

Swen has been in the games industry since 1997, handling multiple roles as he founded Larian Studios. He was the lead software engineer/designer on all of Larian Studios projects up until 2005. His most important credits as a software engineer include the multiple award-winning Divine Divinity (2002), Beyond Divinity (2004), The Led Wars (1997) as well as a series of other games.

Cara Ellison (UK)

13:45-14:30: A Year On The Couch: Rock Journalism With Game Developers

Cara Ellison is a Scottish writer and game critic. She has written for The Guardian and the New Statesman, and writes regular opinion columns at Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun. She is currently paid by the internet to travel the world writing about people who make games.


Adriaan De Jongh (NL)

15:00-15:45: Skin In The Game

Adriaan de Jongh is game designer and business guy at Game Oven, a Dutch studio best known for their finger-rubbing-game Fingle, and the more recent Bounden, a game made in collaboration with the Dutch National Ballet to make two people dance, together, by holding the same phone.


Agency For Games
(Leigh Alexander & Ste Curran, US/UK)

15:45-16:30 The Importance of Perspective

Leigh Alexander is a critic, writer and consultant on the art, business and culture of video games. (Gamasutra, Edge, The Atlantic, The Guardian, the Columbia Journalism Review et al). She is the author of two ebooks, Breathing Machine and Clipping Through, on tech and identity, and is co-founder of Agency, a design consultancy that helps game developers gain perspective and achieve goals.
Ste Curran is a British video game journalist, presenter, author, and game designer.


Pippin Barr (NZ)

17:00-17:45: Less Gameplay

Pippin Barr is a videogame maker and critic who lives and works in Malta. His games address everything from airplane safety instructions to contemporary art and have included collaborations with performance artist Marina Abramovic and Twitter personality @seinfeld2000.

 

Hypertalks

18:00-18:45


Ste Curran (UK)

15:45-16:30: The Mountain

Ste Curran is a British video game journalist, presenter, author, and game designer.

Sunday

Brandon Sheffield (US)

14:00-14:45: Gunsport: An eSport for everyone!?

Brandon Sheffield is director of indie game studio Necrosoft Games, which makes small games, primarily for enthusiasts. He is former editor in chief of Game Developer magazine, and co-founder of the east bay game dev group, and multiple game jams. He occasionally still writes for Gamasutra.com as their senior contributing editor, and is an adviser to multiple game conferences and competitions, including GDC, Digital Dragons, Sense of Wonder Night, and CEGC. He likes connecting people, making weird things, living in Oakland, and speaking at game conferences in exotic places.

Rilla Khaled (NZ)

14:45-15:30: Reflektors

Rilla Khaled is an associate professor at the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta. She researches the interactions between games and culture, the practices involved in new forms of game design, and reflective game design, a new alternative design agenda that embraces ambiguous subject matter, player perspectives, and draws together learning and experimental games.


William Pugh (UK)

16:00-16:45: Do not come to this talk.

William Pugh is a video game designer and writer. He is best known for his work on The Stanley Parable, which was nominated in four categories at the British Academy Games Awards in 2014. Pugh was honoured as one of BAFTA's Breakthrough Brits in 2014.

Rhianna Pratchett (UK)

16:45-17:30: Writing for Games: Tales From the Narrative Trenches

Rhianna Pratchett is an award-winning scriptwriter, story designer and general narrative paramedic. Her aim is to help developers embrace story-telling in games and improve the ways in which interactive narrative is defined, integrated and received.


Cara Ellison (UK) & Karla Zimonja (US)

18:00-18:45: A Fireside Chat With Karla Zimonja and Cara Ellison

Cara Ellison is a Scottish writer and game critic. She has written for The Guardian and the New Statesman, and writes regular opinion columns at Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun. She is currently paid by the internet to travel the world writing about people who make games.
Karla Zimonja has done a lot of different things in the game industry. None of them made her as happy or proud as working on BioShock 2 and Minerva's Den, until she joined Steve Gaynor and Johnnemann Nordhagen in forming The Fullbright Company and made Gone Home.


Workshops

Saturday

Jan Willem Nijman & Kitty Calis

10:00-12:00 : 4 games per hour

Vlambeer's Jan Willem Nijman & indie marketing hero Kitty Calis will try to explain and demonstrate the fine, nearly useless art of making games in under 15 minutes. Embrace your restrictions, regret your decisions, bring computers or pen and paper, and get ready to slap some new games on your portfolio!
Duration: 2 hours
Material: Bring whatever you like. A4 paper and some pens would be perfect!
Max. participants: 15
sign up for this workshop

Fernando Ramallo & Kevin Watters

10:00-12:00: Pixels, Please: A graphics jam for everyone

Come play around with numbers to draw weird stuff on the screen, even if you’ve never done it before! Bring just your laptop and two graphics junkies will show you how 2 maek prrty sh*t.
Duration: 2 hours
Material: Bring a laptop
Max. participants: 15
sign up for this workshop

Sunday

Mads Johansen Lassen & Jonas Maaløe

10:00-13:00: Burn The Keyboard

Most digital game experiences are confined to keyboard, mouse and gamepad. In this workshop you will learn how easy it is to create make-shift, physical controllers to create entirely new interfaces for your digital games. No special hardware or knowledge required to participate, simply show up and jam.
Duration: 3 hours
Max. participants: 15
sign up for this workshop

George Buckenham

10:00-13:00: Tying Stories Together With Twine

Let's look at different ways games structure their stories, and then learn to make some of our own using Twine.
Duration: 3 hours
Material: Bring a computer (any OS), there's no previous knowledge required!
Max. participants: 15
sign up for this workshop

Parties

Algorave Friday

Halic (BE)

Not beat­tracking but data­tracking. Aiming for a real connection between the senses through a digital alliance between Bohrbug and Kaosbeat. Where rhythm and sound influences image generation and image manipulation influences the music. Exploring this challenge with Overtone and Quil.

Alexandra Cardenas (CO)

Like a open­source Che Guevara, Miss Cárdenas likes to embrace sharing and coding for a better future. Her music combines elegance and flair with guts, resulting in warm sonic adventures. Supercollider is the weapon of choice.

Shelly Knotts (UK)

Shelly Knotts is a Newcastle, UK, based composer, performer and improvisor of live electronic, live-coded and network music. She performs solo and with various collaborative groups internationally. She is studying for a PhD in Live Computer Music at Durham University with a focus on collaboration in Network Music.

section_9

Section_9 is Ash Sagar from the Leeds/York area, who has a hand in most artforms going. He generally live codes with IXI Lang, producing live progressive (and recursive) house.

Saturday Screenshake Party

TOUGH CODED

Little Nando is a game designer, digital filmmaker and manga comic book writer, animation producer and VJ living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His latest creation, Tough Coded: Live mixes VJ concepts and game design into an unseen audiovisual performance for everyone to enjoy at parties around the world.

Saddest Bot Alive (SE)

Shelter, Super Game Jam

Saddest Bot Alive is a project from Christoffer Hedborg, former Might & Delight developer. He makes games, art, visuals, noise, and weird stuff.

Chipzel (UK)

Super Hexagon EP

Chipzel is the alias of Niamh Houston, a London based independent chip-musician from Northern Ireland who indulges in the use of Gameboys to create energetic, melodic dance tracks.

LOBST3R (FI)

Nuclear Throne, Broforce

Straight from the skanky chiptune sewers of Finland, Lobst3r is ready to annihilate the dancefloor!

DJ STORNO (DE)

A-MAZE. Festival

He got the bleep! Since 2006, DJ Storno a.k.a. Thorsten S Wiedemann is travelling through the world of pixels. His legendary "storno 8bit sessions" have brought top chiptune artists and glitch punk musicians to Berlin. Associated with Bleepstreet Records, he is also founder and director of the A MAZE…

Expo

Game Expo

A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build

Crypt of the NecroDancer

Pixel Rift

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

Please Don't, Spacedog!

STAY TUNED MORE TBA!

Elegy for a dead world

Desert Golfing

Push Me Pull You

Gang Beasts

Practical

Location

Het Bos
Ankerrui 5-7
2000 Antwerp, Belgium

When

From February 6th to February 8th

THE HOUSE OF INDIE’S MISSION

The House of Indie aims to inspire, cultivate and curate the budding Belgian indie game community. Each event we organize is an invitation to new people to get involved. In this social space, diversity and inclusiveness are key. Every new voice and every new perspective enriches our community.

We actively strive to reach more diverse audiences and welcome anyone, regardless of gender identity, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion (or lack thereof). We think it’s super important all audiences feel safe. While we cannot guarantee a space free of discrimination and harassment, we unequivocally encourage everyone to work towards this goal together.

Please speak up if you experience any form of discrimination or harassment – whether this is targeted at yourself or someone else. Please join us in support of this safe space policy.

ATTENDEE AGREEMENT

Visitors, speakers, sponsors and volunteers’ attendance at screenshake 2015 implies that the attendees agree to, and will abide by, this safe space policy. Organisers will enforce this policy throughout the event. We expect cooperation from all attendeesto help ensure a safe environment for everyone.

The House of Indie is dedicated to fostering a safe-space environment at all our events. The safe space policy is here because we want to make sure that you know that if something or someone makes you feel uncomfortable at one of our events, no matter how minor it seems, you are encouraged to report it to us.

AM I HARASSING ANYONE?

Animated, respectful discussion is fine. Harassment is not tolerated. This includes offensive verbal comments or attitudes related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion; deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of the event, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual or suggestive remarks or imagery, be they at the bar, talks, parties or through Twitter or other online media.

If you act or speak in a way that someone thinks is inappropriate, it’s inappropriate to that time, place and person. If somebody tells you that you are making them uncomfortable, you must stop making them uncomfortable. Do not put your opinions or desires before the comfort of others; “It’s just a bit of fun”, “It’s just a joke”, “Where’s the harm in it?” (and so forth) are not excuses for behaviour that makes anyone else feel unwelcome or as if they are a target. If you feel compelled to tell someone who is uncomfortable that they are wrong to feel that way, you are most definitely putting yourself in the wrong.

Please know that the screenshake 2015 crew will view neither ignorance or intoxication as an excuse for unacceptable behaviour. If an attendee engages in harassment of other attendees, staff or volunteers at screenshake 2015, the organisers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the event with no refund. Attendees asked to stop any harassing behaviour are expected to comply immediately.

I AM BEING HARASSED

If you feel you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of the screenshake 2015 crew (visibly wearing light blue CREW t-shirts) or our safe space ambassador Charlie immediately.

Please note: we will notify local law enforcement WITHOUT EXCEPTION for every accusation of sexual or physical violation.

Crew members will be happy to help out in any way possible, e.g. contacting organisers and/or local law enforcement, providing escorts, taking you to a designated physical safe space at the venue, or otherwise assisting those experiencing harassment to feel safe for the duration of the festival.

We value your attendance. We also want people to always feel safe and welcome. In other words, we expect you all to be decent human beings to each other.