Four industry guests were announced today for BIG Festival (Brazil’s Independent Games Festival). For those unaware, BIG Festival is the largest independent games festival in Latin America, and takes place in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro from June 23 to July 1. The four guests are scheduled to give lectures about their experience related to designing critically acclaimed video games and establishing a leading independent development studio.
Chris Remo, Firewatch designer and composer will discuss his involvement with building the narrative for Firewatch and how it relates to game design in general. His keynote is titled “Firewatch: Narrative Design is Game Design”, in which Remo will talk about creating a story-driven video game with the ability to keep players engaged in non-combat scenarios, mechanical challenge, or more traditional adventure game puzzles. Remo will also explain what Firewatch developer, Campo Santo, learned from other genres of gaming to maintain interactivity and offer a unique experience within the story game genre.
In addition, members of the Assassin’s Creed Origins dev team will take part in the XDS track, which explores content around external development. The AC Origins team will explain how Spearsoft, an external studio, contributed to the game. Ubisoft Montreal project manager for AC Origins, Isabelle Bismuth, and Alan Van Slyke, senior director of production at Spearsoft, will discuss the work invloved that allowed the two teams to work togethet closely in order to highlight the process established to overcome various challenges throughout development.
Finally, the co-founder of Jumpship, Dino Patti, will talk about the success of Limbo and Inside, which were both record-selling games. Jumpship is a newly-formed studio from Playdead, who developed Limbo and Inside. The panel will focus on Patti’s passion for content as well as discussing fundamentals that were adopted while building a studio driven by vision.
You can find a complete schedule of BIG Festival 2018, which includes panels, keynotes and fireside chats, can be found here. This is very much an international event, so all talks will be translated in real-time into English and Portuguese for the audience, with transcripts being available upon requests.
About BIG Festival
BIG Festival (Brazil’s Independent Games Festival) has been held since 2012 and is considered one the most influential and innovative independent gaming festival in Latin America. With the mission to strengthen the Brazilian video game ecosystem, the event produces a yearly international independent video game award competition offering significant cash prizes ($24,000 in 2018), a major exhibition showcasing hundreds of games including the awards nominees, a spectacular awards ceremony event, industry related lectures and business rounds. In 2017, BIG hosted more than 20,000 visitors, 3,500 of them having participated to lectures, and more than 1600 guests attending business meetings. This year BIG will expand its schedule of lectures and workshops by incorporating new topics and areas that are part of games development cycles, such as music, animation, virtual and augmented reality, a career center, among others segments already present at the event.
