Winter4ever 2023

Winter4ever is an online gathering that is focused on supporting marginalized voices, sharing knowledge, and bringing visibility to the game dev community around Vermont and beyond.

The 2023 event went online on Saturday, March 11. This edition was more casual and took place on Rad Magpie's Discord server. No recordings were made of the talks but the schedule is below. Feel free to reach out to those folks and/or check out the talks from the previous years linked above!

Schedule ~

Personal Vignette Games for Self Understanding, Journaling, and Expression

This is a game design centered talk which explores personal storytelling for the purposes of inner reflection, processing life events, and expressing yourself to others. Together we'll learn about best practices and core design questions to consider when creating personal games, and we'll look at vignette game examples and common tools.
(15 minutes)

Kinsey Erickson | @WaitWhatNoStop
Francesca Carletto-Leon | @ceschiii

Who put these spikes here?

An examination of the strange parallels between the purpose of stage hazards in platforming games and real-world hostile architecture.
(15 minutes)

Unfortunately cancelled :( But you should still follow Eric Merz!!! | @mokkograd

Game communities on Mastodon and decentralized social web

What is Mastodon? Why should you care about the decentralized social web? How to find gamers or game devs communities?
(10 minutes)

narF | @narF

Safe-Tea

Megan and Amila will define safety, discuss their personal experiences (both positive and negative), how they navigated harmful situations, and what helped or hurt them in those moments.
(30 minutes)

Amila Nuhodzic | @amilanuh
Megan McAvoy | @midmortem

How to Lose the Job

Steven will recount some his experiences in the games industry and share lessons about letting go and learning to leave.
(10 minutes)

Steven Margolin | email!

How to Make Achievement Hunters Hate You

Isobel will talk about the achievement design of Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, highlighting a mysterious vendor of ancient artifacts, how to get the hardest achievement in the game, and why it makes some players so, so upset.
(15 minutes)

isobel shasha | @toxicaliengf