Open Source and Games LCA Miniconf - a quick recap

As I am sure anyone on twitter is well aware I am at LCA 2017 and I co-ran the FOSS and Games miniconf. This is the second time the miniconf has been run at LCA and the first time in 10 years since it last appeared.

I personally consider the miniconf a MASSIVE success and was blown away by the quality and variety of the talks. I could speak more about it but I think because a miniconf is really about the people who speak at it and not the organisers so I will just present the speakers, their talks, and the different projects that were spoken about and pretty much leave it like that. I'll update this post as the different videos become available online.

Making Night in the Woods Better with Open Source- Jon Manning

Jon gave a talk about YarnSpinner, a system for dialogue trees in games and how using it has improved Night In The Woods.

ScummVM Retrospective - Lessons learnt, from games preserved - Ender

Ender spoke about his time developing ScummVM, an interpretor allowing you to play old adventure games on modern systems. Ender also uploaded his slides.

Every Game Should Have An API Like Destiny - Richard Deveraux

Richard spoke about the Destiny API and all the awesome things people have built upon it.

Multiplayer gaming and distributed state - Caskey

Caskey gave a non-stop talk about how we can handle distributed state in multiplayer games which often boils down to just lying to the user and getting them to believe it.

An open programming environment inspired by programming games - Josh Deprez

Josh spoke about his visual programming environment Shenzhen Go inspired by the SHENZHEN IO game.

John spoke about the fantasy 80s game console, the PICO-8 and all the awesome things people are doing with it.

The Openness of Closed Systems - Richard Jones

Richard spoke about his Minecraft mod that enables live Python code to be run inside Minecraft!

Building Escape Room Horror Experiences with Arduino and C++ - Paul Fenwick

Paul spoke about his part in building an escape room experience in Melbourne, he over filled the room... His slides are available as well.

Porting Games To Linux - Cheeseness

Cheeseness spoke about his experiences porting numerous games to Linux with the talk mostly focussing on porting Day of the Tentacle remastered edition. Cheeseness also has some blog posts and tweets that are related:

Not content with this Cheeseness also gave a lightning talk on his VR text adventure, Winters Wake powered by his new game engine Icicle.

Demo from Mice and Maps - Rhiana Heath

Rhiana gave us a demo of her map and story editor for a mouse guard campaign.

Lighting talks

We finished up the day with some lightning talks, some were already covered above as some people took a slot so they could talk even more but we also had:

Leon talked about his work on the CKAN mod manager for Kerbal Space Program
Mars spoke about her experiences as part of a Minecraft server building a recreation of Westeros
Paris talked about OpenRA, a Red Alert recreation, and how awesome it is!

That's all folks

So that is my super quick post about the LCA games miniconf, I super hope to bring it back again next year but only time and the program committee know the answer to that.