Arcadia Night: Thursday 2nd feb 2023
Arcadia Night 2023, took place on the evening of Thursday 2nd February at Discovery Point Dundee, and featureed micro-talks from game developers, makers and thinkers from across the industry, an experimental games exhibition and a performance by the wonderful Tinderbox Orchestra!
Arcadia Night is an inclusive and safe space and all are welcome from professional game makers to students to people with an interest in games. To maximise accessibility we provided an online stream on Youtube and in the Biome Gallery to help people near and far join in too.
With the Global Game Jam taking place soon after, this was a great opportunity to connect to other game makers, network and learn from your peers.
Get inspired! Play exciting games! Enjoy live music!
PROGRAM
+ Speakers
Anzal Baig - Anzal is a lawyer working in dispute resolution. She designs, develops and studies games for social impact. She has worked on games for UNESCO and Lawyers Without Borders among others.
Zuraida Buter - Zuraida is a playful arts curator with close to 20 years of experience. She curates, initiates, consults and documents events focused on playful culture, games and collaboration with an eye for the mix between the digital and the physical. She has worked on projects such as Screenshake (BE), Incubate Arcade (NL), Patchlab festival (PL), IndieCade Europe (FR) and Playtime 20.22 (BE). In 2020 she was awarded the Game Changer Award by IndieCade in the US.
She is co-founder of Playful Arts Festival in the Netherlands, was executive director for the Global Game Jam and has been a lecturer on games and digital culture at different universities.
Zuraida is currently program curator for A MAZE. / Berlin (DE) as well as a collaborator on projects with Sickhouse / The Overkill Festival in the Netherlands.
Marie Foulston - Marie Foulston is a leading curator and creative director of exhibitions, installations and experiences that specialise in videogames, play and digital culture. Previously she was Curator of Videogames at the V&A where she lead the curation of the headline exhibition ‘Videogames’, was guest director of experimental games festival ‘Now Play This’ at Somerset House and co-founded the UK alternative videogame collective the Wild Rumpus. Across her career she has worked alongside a host of international organisations and leading cultural institutions including the Smithsonian, the Game Developers Conference, London Film Festival, Penguin Random House, the Design Museum, Channel 4, ACMI, the Art Gallery of Ontario and MoPOP.
David Hayward - David Hayward has spent fifteen years running festivals, conferences, game jams, hackspaces, and assorted developer events. Among other things they currently run Yorkshire-based game design festival Feral Vector, and curate several expo stands showing independent games and experimental games-related work to established audiences.
Julie D Kennedy - Julie is a Lead UI Technical Artist with just shy of 8 years in game development. She's passionate about building awesome UI and accessibility systems to allow games to be enjoyed by everyone. When she's not doing that she's creating polygonal illustrations and tackling her increasing LEGO backlog.
Ally Low - Ally Low is a game developer and maker who likes combining digital and physical media. In the past he has helped run the local makerspace and organise numerous game jams. He runs a small studio in Dundee creating dyslexia friendly games and tools, as well as a few new games for retro systems.
Graeme McKellan - Graeme is the Lead Designer at No Code Studio, a Glasgow based games development studio known for multiple BAFTA Award winning games Observation and Stories Untold, and now working on the recently announced Silent Hill : Townfall. He started his games development journey 10 years ago after taking part in a Global Game Jam while working as a secondary school physics teacher before moving into full time games development in 2017.
Eoghan Mulvenna - Eoghan is a game developer and programmer living in Dundee and working at Hyper Luminal Games. During his 4 and a half years in the games industry he has worked at several companies and on many projects and has always strived to be passionate and people focused when approaching game development.
Nick Murray - Nick Murray is a producer, composer and artist making interactive sonic and narrative work focusing on loss and digital cultures. This often takes the form of games, interactive poetry and performance. Nick is lead producer for Now Play This at Somerset House, Director of Playing Poetry and associate producer with Penned in the Margins.
Billie Purdie - Billie is the Women in Esports Manager at the British Esports Federation, working at the forefront of the award winning Women in Esports initiative. The initiative aims to promote and raise awareness of diversity and inclusion in esports. Coming from a sport and fitness background, Billie has spent the past year in esports roles such as event management and community management. She is passionate about making esports accessible to all, being able to provide equal opportunities and further promoting diversity in the esports industry. Billie is also the team captain of female VALORANT team NYX, who recently signed to Skelp Esports, competing in RIOT's official VCT Game Changers circuit.
Shelby Smith - Shelby Smith, developing games under the moniker Electra, is a multi-disciplinary artist and immersive systems designer creating indie video games with a focus on thoughtful and unconventional narratives. Her specialised interests include visual development, game cinematography and narratology, and audio-visual design.
Rachel Simpson - Rachel Simpson is a composer and sound designer living in Dundee with over 15 years experience in game development. She has worked across 3 console generations, PC and mobile, on titles like Guitar Hero, The Sims Social and LEGO VIDIYO. As a sound artist she's created installations for Dundee Design Festival and Festival Of The Future, with a strong focus on environmental sounds and field recording. Rachel is also a touring and recording musician with credits on several Scottish Album of the Year nominated albums. She has played venues and festivals across the UK including Glastonbury Festival and has performed live for BBC Radio 4, 6Music's Marc Riley show and the Quay Sessions.
Games Exhibition
CRT7 - Tom Methven
CRT7 is an experimental music-puzzle game. Place pentominoes, play music, generate power, repeat. The more you play, the more strange devices you unlock, allowing you to solve escape-room style puzzles to explore further. What secrets are hiding in the dark…
Part-time lecturer, part-time Scottish BAFTA winning game developer, Tom Methven (a.k.a. Amicable Animal) has been making experimental games for the last 10 years. With a passion for combining retro hardware, music, and vivid visuals with minimalist, modern game design, he is best know for creating SOLAS 128, a sprawling synthwave-infused puzzle game.
HEAVY, Part I & II - Shelby Smith
HEAVY is a point-and-click art adventure experience, inspired by poetry and PSX graphic limitations. The game explores themes of personal identity, disorder and acceptance, through the visual interpretation of literature - and leans into the aesthetic elements of horror and mystery, inspired by early generational 3D horror experiences such as Silent Hill and The Path.
Shelby Smith, developing games under the moniker Electra, is a multi-disciplinary artist and immersive systems designer creating indie video games with a focus on thoughtful and unconventional narratives. Her specialised interests include visual development, game cinematography and narratology, and audio-visual design.
Tray Racers! - Bit Loom Games
Tray Racers! is a free-to-play racing game set in a vibrant post-apocalyptic world. Armed with nothing but your trusty tray, you play as a ragtag kid speedster - race solo or with up to 16 players through a wacky playground of randomly-generated sand dunes, cute critters, bouncy cactus forests and more!
Surf the sizzling sands. Dazzle your pals with tray tricks. Hitch a ride on a giant worm. And outspeed your friends to become…the ultimate Tray Racer!
For gamers of all ages, due to release in 2023.
Bit Loom is a Dundee based studio making silly games to surprise and delight. Douglas, Henry and James came together to make PHOGS! back in 2017 and are now working on their second game Tray Racers! with help from their friends Caitlin and Susie.
Valley Peaks - Tub Club
The mountains are calling! Complete routes of varying difficulty to scale summits in this wholesome yet ribbiting first-person climbing sim. Overcome obstacles, unlock upgrades, explore a mountain paradise, and get chummy with Valley Peaks' froggy inhabitants as you climb to your heart's content.
Tub Club is an independent video games studio based in Glasgow. They are comprised of two award winning alumni from Abertay University and are currently working on their first commercial title, Valley Peaks which is due to release in 2023.
Biome Gallery - Biome Collective
Biome Gallery is an online gallery and playful space, built on top of the LIKELIKE Online Museum of Multiplayer Art open source codebase. It was originally built by members of Biome Collective during lockdown in 2020, as both a shared project and an online space for us to hang out in and host events. In the years since its initial creation it has continued to grow, and currently contains 49 somewhat chaotically connected rooms (including a cinema, 2 cities, 2 separate libraries, and a haunted house that can only be entered via secret ritual).
Core Developers: Matthew Cormack is an award-winning independent game developer and digital curator based in Scotland. His work on the Biome Gallery led to another virtual gallery project for The Guggenheim Museum!
Niall Moody is an artist and game developer. He spends part of his time lecturing at Abertay University, and the rest of it mapping out the strange geography of his dreams and posting games on the internet only to delete them one month later.
James Morwood is a game maker at Bit Loom, creators of PHOGS! and Tray Racers!. He loves imagining tiny playful worlds and occasionally runs zine jams.
Room Architects: Caitlin Smith, Claire Morwood, Tom De Majo, Caspar Starton, Douglas Flinders, Henry Pullan & Ally Low
Arcadia Night 2023 is brought to you by Biome Collective in partnership with Creative Scotland, InGame Dundee and UNESCO City of Design Dundee.