GCAP 2025
2025-10-06..2025-10-08
Melbourne, Australia
GCAP ·
[GCAP 2016, GCAP 2017, GCAP 2019, GCAP 2020, GCAP 2021, GCAP 2022, GCAP 2022: Ambition, GCAP 2023: Empower, GCAP 2024, GCAP 2025]
who it's for
indie developers, producers, studio founders, contractors and freelancers, localisation specialists, marketing and community managers
topics
crowdfunding and Kickstarter strategy; cross-country team collaboration; GameMaker and Blender pipeline; Japanese market localisation; mod support and mod.io integration; post-launch monetisation strategies; managing up and stakeholder mapping; crunch and burnout mitigation; clustered spatial audio; worldbuilding for marketing; character design that players love
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| There and Back Again: One Weird Game Dev Trip | Josh Sawyer | 45m |
26 years of game dev experience maps to concrete shifts: teams that were 15–40 people then become multi‑studio behemoths (Rockstar cites 6,000 devs on GTA)… | ||
| Multinational Monster: Collaboration Across Countries | Jay Armstrong, Julian Wilton, James Pearmain, Meredith Hall | 47m |
Studio story of building Cult of the Lamb: an international team across Singapore, UK and Melbourne cobbles together work via Slack, monthly show-and-tell and… | ||
| We Don’t Know, Until We Know: Embracing Niche Passions and Specific Stories in Games | Jenny Windom | 46m |
Built a niche showcase and publisher that proves specificity sells: a first Wholesome Direct hits ~122K views, the program has showcased 375 titles and driven… | ||
| Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost: Why the Game Industry Forgot How to Make Games, and How to Fix It | Lis Moberly | 59m |
Argues the industry is failing because collective institutional memory erodes through restructures, layoffs, tool migrations and NDAs, producing bloated teams… | ||
| CONSCRIPT: 7 Years Solo in the Trenches | Jordan Mochi | 53m |
CONSCRIPT is a WWI survival horror developed over seven years solo using GameMaker + Blender + Photoshop with a pre-rendered sprite pipeline, raises AU$40,000… | ||
| Breaking into Japan, A Practical Playbook for Australian Game Creators | Masahiko Murakami | 46m |
Japan is a ~A$26bn market where players average ~A$400/year and short, streamable games (5–15 minute hits) priced under A$10–15 often break through; require… | ||
| The Long Haul: A Fireside Chat | John Passfield, Luke Muscat | 51m |
Two veterans share concrete career moments: a first game shipped on cassette tape Chili Willy via Honeysoft, a Game Boy Advance title squeezed into 4 MB with a… | ||
| What to do once you start making money? | Callum Underwood | 50m |
Post-launch options get ranked by concrete impact: add mod support (via Steam Workshop or Mod.io) and expect 23% uplift from modding on successful indies… | ||
| Is UGC the new DLC? | Joshua Astbury, Scott Reismanis | 51m |
Company ModDB evolved into mod.io that now hosts mods for 300 titles and reports 5 million monthly users and about 5 million hosted mods, with fewer than… | ||
| Managing Up | Elizabeth Blythe | 50m |
Managing up is framed as a set of concrete tools not vague advice: map critical stakeholders with who's who in the zoo, run a why analysis to link their KPIs… | ||
| The Rise and Fall of The Flame in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 | Donald Barrett | 49m |
A four‑mission optional arc is pitched as a 47‑slide pitch and takes three years to ship, adding a new cult enemy faction, an ally NPC Wraith with custom… | ||
| Dev psychology: your own brain is your worst enemy | Manea Castet | 54m |
Claim: tools don't finish games, people do, and developers' minds regularly derail projects. Cited specifics: a shipped title hits 1 million players in nine… | ||
| Stupid but Charming: Characters that Players Love | Anna Zou | 51m |
A clear rule of thumb: make characters alive, absurd, not annoying. Practical tools: give a real name, drop them into a specific painted scene, use art to… | ||
| Two sides of the same coin: Contracting the right way | Jay Fernandes | 44m |
16 years in development and roughly 100 games of experience ground practical rules for hiring and being hired: set up shared access, pick a single bug… | ||
| Colours on Time: stronger schemes, fewer headaches | Jennifer Reuter | 45m |
Shows a concrete pipeline that cuts concept and asset color time by “several hours” on a 28‑card flat‑shade project (Fox and Shadow): build palettes grouped by… | ||
| Lessons from two decades of writing bad code | James Mitchell | 40m |
Shows concrete fixes and experiments: reads docs and switches from naive exit to std::abort to get a crash dump; uses Compiler Explorer and assembly reading… | ||
| Worldbuilding: From Development to Marketing | Megan Webber | 49m |
Argues that worldbuilding must sit in brand strategy and gives concrete tactics: use the four V's (values, vision, voice, visuals), write a brand essence… | ||
| Every tree in the forest. Clustered spatial audio. | Kiera Lord | 50m |
Claims a runnable system that turns per-object sounds into dynamic clusters using FOD and middleware like fode or y's. Implements world space clustering for… | ||
| We Are All Wrong: Mythbusting Game 'Failures' | Emre Can Deniz | 46m |
Analyzes a coded dataset of 24 PvP shooters (2021–24), tracking every patch, review and forum post to link features to player trends; finds statistically… | ||
| nothing matches | ||