Sep 18–21, 2024

2022 Game Devs of Color Expo

We gathered online for the third year in a row with the most games and speakers yet!

2022 games list

5 Force Fighters
Seth S. Smith (He/Him)
5 Force Fighters is a fast-paced 2D fighting game whose story follows a diverse cast of characters. With its simplistic inputs, combat comes easy, but 5FF’s vast arsenal of universal mechanics causes the intensity of battle to rise!

Advent NEON
CryoGX
A frantic 2D action platformer, featuring time-stopping, fist flurries and super transformations! Break your limits!

CLAW Arena
Mocha Chili
CLAW Arena is an arena fighting game for mobile devices featuring unique one-finger controls. Select one of 8 animal warriors with distinct movesets and fight your way through the tournament to become the champion of the Combat League!

El Paso, Elsewhere
Strange Scaffold
Fight damned creatures in a reality-shifting motel. Dive through barricades to escape the grasp of evil puppets. Destroy the villain you loved. A new, third-person love letter to classic shooters. Neo-noir never looked so good.

Gedda Cake
Flannel Bear Games
A 2D metroidvania about Dragons and Cakes. Play as 6 characters with unique skills and play-styles and swap between them on the fly! Explore the vast sugar-coated lands of Sugria and get The Cake!

Grid Force - Mask Of The Goddess
Playtra Games
Conquer the grid in a bullet-hell RPG with a diverse roster of heroes to recruit and evolve, lightning-fast combat, and a deep story that adapts to your choices. Search for the perfect team who can defeat the goddesses and save t

Dawn of the Monsters
13AM Games
Dawn of the Monsters is a side-scrolling kaiju action game where you can destroy cities and take on hordes of giant monsters either solo or with a friend!

High Elo Girls
Split Fate Studios
Become an MMG starter by navigating fraught relationships with your new team members, or take a backseat to their ambitions.

Soulbaby: Remastered
Darion McCoy
An original roguelite experience combining bullet-hell and turn-based RPG elements. As a newfound hero, endure countless waves of enemies on a journey to uncover the mystery of a fading cosmos.

M.Duck
Protractor Games
M.Duck is a roguelite gallery shooter about a duck that knows magic.

Help Magic Duck fight his way up the mysterious tower that has been shining light on his pond each night and interrupting his sleep. Battle fearsome foes, discover new relics, uncover the secrets of the tower, and turn off that light once and for all!

Little Hellions
Schadenfreude
THROW AWAY YOUR FRIENDS in the four player fighting game where you can't fight!

Little Hellions is a four player platform fighter where you can’t attack directly. Use your trusty Trick Hook to grab opponents and swap your location with theirs. With all the Underworld’s infernal traps at your disposal, surely you can devise an inconvenient moment or two.

PIXELS: Digital Creatures
Anigram Studios
PIXELS combines strategic turn-based creature battles with the replayability of a roguelike. Pick a starter and journey through the Virtual World. Survive by building a team of powerful Pixels to fight through the arenas!

Love Shore
Perfect Garbage
Love Shore is a visual novel cyberpunk noir featuring an entirely LGBT+ cast with 8 routes and 24+ endings. Play as Sam or Farah as they navigate the neon thrills of their cyberpunk city, solve murders, fight gods and maybe fall in love.

Manafinder
Wolfsden LLC
Take the role of a manafinder in this pixelart turn-based RPG set in the beautiful but unforgiving world of Aevi. Fight your way against ferocious beasts in the quest for manastones as you define the fate of the exiled.

After School Afterlife
Mini Bunnies
Listen to the beat to navigate obstacles in this Peranakan-inspired platformer! Talk to strange and funny ghosts, and help them with their problems. Fill your journal as you explore the mansion. You may just uncover its secret past...

Cryptid Coffeehouse
nyewks
everyone's heard of mothman– the big, scary, feathery moth creature that haunts around the outskirts of point pleasant, west virginia– but no one's ever heard of it like this! in some random idyllic midwestern town, you meet artemis (aka mothman) at your favorite coffee shop and begin an agonizingly slow burn romance with them.

Hadean Tactics
Emberfish Games
Hadean Tactics is a roguelike deckbuilding game fused with autobattler elements to create a unique strategy experience. Use your cards to influence the actions of your units and help your Hero defeat the Six Wings of Hell!

Dot's Home
Rise-Home Stories Project & Weathered Sweater
DOT’S HOME is a single-player video game that follows a young Black woman in today's Detroit as she travels through time to relive key moments in her family’s history where race, place, and home collide in difficult choices.

Lucky Me
Artifact 5
Lucky Me is a puzzle shooter game where everyone copies your every move. Use your enemies’ stupidity against them to come out on top. Line up your shots, pull the trigger and let them shoot each other!

Keylocker | Turn Based Cyberpunk Action
Moonnana Games
In a silent world where music has been prohibited, BOBO, a singer, will band together with the Jukebot drummer, Rocket, to shatter the strings of fate and sing the melody of freedom in this unforgiving Rhythm Turn Based JRPG.

Kabaret
Persona Theory Games
Kabaret is a dark fantasy folklore adventure game. The story unfolds through the eyes of Jebat, a cursed boy who is uprooted from his small town to a mystical, violent, and unforgiving monster realm.

Sephonie
CryoGX
Analgesic Productions

2022 speaker list

Understanding Player Dynamics
Seth S. Smith (He/Him)
Player Dynamics can be difficult to understand but it is a critical part of designing games. Seth Smith, Senior Game Designer on VALORANT’s Social and Player Dynamics team will provide the audience with a baseline understanding to help the audience grasp the discipline of Player Dynamics and the role it plays not just in gaming but across industries. Player Dynamics aims to create environments that foster and encourage healthy play and inclusive gaming culture. If we continue to focus on this work, it can help drive change, and, as an industry, help create communities where players can thrive.

Crowdfunding Real Talk: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Dani Lalonders (She/They), Son M. (She/They), Alex (They/Them)
Despite more game funding options than ever, many marginalized devs find themselves relying on crowdfunding over and over again. In this talk, 3 developers with successful crowdfunding campaigns tell it all: why they chose that route, what it took to get funded and what happened AFTER the campaigns ended!

Everything's a Dating Sim: How Relationships Drive Player Engagement and Meaning
Michael Yichao (He/Him)
Harness the power of horny and come hear why every game either *is* a dating sim or *should be* a dating sim in this (surprisingly PG) talk. Yichao highlights the power of character and player relationships in games and takes a journey across past and present titles and IP's he's worked on, from Magic: the Gathering to League of Legends and beyond.

The State Of BIPOC VO In Gaming
Eli Harris (He/Him)
My talk will give attendees some insight on the grind of VO and what goes on behind the scenes of games and the work and preparation it takes to give a voice to match the visuals.

Punch Feel Good: How to Design Satisfying Action Games
Alex Rushdy (He/Him)
Action games are some of the most prevalent and popular video games of all time, but the design and creation of action games is highly technical and takes years to learn and understand. In this talk, Alex Rushdy discusses his experiences making action games (including the critically acclaimed Dawn of the Monsters) and offers some insights and tips that he learned throughout the process. From Space Invaders to Mario Bros to Bayonetta, this talk offers practical advice applicable to any and all action-based video games.

3C's of Inclusive Design that make me feel like the Hero of my Story
Haider CW (He/Him)
Learn about Character, Companions & Combos the 3C's of Inclusive Design. Learn how both form & function can work well together to design each C.
See examples from BioWare games like DragonAge & Mass Effect; that made the speaker feel like the Hero of their Story. We hope they make you feel like the Hero of yours...

Yip Yip! Building the Team for Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game!
Mark Diaz Truman (He/Him)
In late 2020, Magpie Games was awarded the license to make a tabletop roleplaying game for Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. While we were thrilled to jump into designing a game based on some of our favorite animated series, we knew we needed to bring more Asian and Indigenous voices to the process!  In this short talk, Magpie Games CEO Mark Diaz Truman will share how the team came together to make Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game the most successful tabletop roleplaying game of all time on Kickstarter, raising more than $10 million!

Playing With Touch and Intimacy
Claire Kwong (She/Her)
Claire Kwong makes physical games about touch and intimacy. She’ll talk about the process of developing and exhibiting 3 games: Chromapose, a mobile game that makes people dance together with their phones; Interpose, a mobile game where you dance face to face with a partner; and Light Touches Skin, a large scale installation that uses projection to move peoples’ bodies. These games let people explore and transgress social boundaries.

Mental Illness and Horror Games: Avoiding Stigma and Stereotype
Ren (They/He)
It’s no secret that horror media likes to use the stereotypes of mental illness to make something feel darker and scarier. Horror games are no exception. This talk will look at games that got it right, like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, games that got it horribly wrong, like Outlast, and answer the question: How do we avoid stereotypes, poor representation, and stigmatization when writing horror?

Lessons from a Million TikTok Views in Two Weeks
Jared Tan (He/Him)
You’ve heard that you should be using TikTok to market your games. Maybe you’ve even tried a few posts to varying degrees of success. Jared launched an indie game account to a million views in their first two weeks. Since then, he’s surveyed several other developers for the best tips to get the algorithm working in your favor. Which metrics drive the most views? How do you make viral videos? What should you know before running a campaign? Jared tries to answer these questions with a data-driven approach so your game can get seen on TikTok.

Put Yourself In A Box? (Categorizing Your Game)
Son M. (She/They)
A discussion on the use of categories and genres in pitching and marketing your game to potential publishers and audiences. Words have power, but what does that even mean when faced with options of similar but distinct classifications.  

It’s Not About You: Beyond the Hero’s Journey
Jen Coster (She/Her)
Stories influence how we view and engage with the world. Since video games necessarily center one person – the player – it’s all too easy to fall back on the hero’s journey as the default narrative structure. As we increasingly recognize the importance of collectivism and community over the actions of a lone hero, it’s time to explore a different narrative framework for the stories that we want to tell.

Developing Cooler PCG Systems based on Real-Time Player Input
M Charity (They/Them)
Procedural Content Generation (PCG) systems have become more and more prevalent in game design and development - especially in the indie game community - as seen in popular games such as No Man’s Sky, Minecraft, Hades, Spelunky, The Binding of Issac, and so many others. The Game and AI research community has also worked on exploring and developing more complex PCG systems that could be incorporated into these games and have a more influential impact on the player experience. But these systems are hidden behind preset algorithms and templates that the player has no impact on.

What if there could be a way the player’s decisions and gameplay would influence how the PCG system makes levels and other content that can adapt in real-time? This talk will demonstrate how to incorporate more engaging PCG systems that interact and learn from the player in real-time on various platforms - including social media, level editors, and games themselves.

Chillers, Thrillers, Killers: How a Horror Writer Brings Scene-Craft Into Games
Emmett Nahil (He/Him)
Games with enduring narratives aren’t tied together by lengthy cutscenes, dense monologues, or dramatic plot reveals: they’re all tied together by meaningfully crafted scenes. In this talk with horror writer and narrative director Emmett Nahil (Perfect Garbage Studios), dissect elements of games like Control, Blasphemous, Kentucky Route Zero, Resident Evil, Inscryption, and more, as we learn how to pull in players and craft genre-savvy scenes in order to develop game narratives that will last.

Massive Damage: Creative Storytelling through Numbers in RPG Combat Systems
Swarnava Banerjee (He/They)
Are you working on a digital RPG? Does it have a Combat System? You may have run into spots where Damage Numbers don't quite work out: regular battles feel too long to be engaging, boss battles feel too quick to be impactful. If Combat is where your player will spend much of their time: you'll want to make sure you are getting most mileage from it.

This talk is focused on improving your Damage Numbers for better player guidance and storytelling potential. We will cover tools to help you with this process and even a small workshop where we build a Combat encounter using these principles.

Adaptations: can marginalization/queerness translate?
Hannah Elbaggari (She/Her), Kawika Guillermo (He/They)
How can literary stories translate into games? How can the ideas from books about games be adapted into practices of game making? This talk will explore these questions in making Stamped: an anti-travel game, an adaptation of the 2018 award-winning novel Stamped: an anti-travel novel, as well as the 2020 book, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (all by the same author). The result is a visual novel story about marginalized North American youth traveling and living in Asia, who confront overlapping histories of colonization, war, genocide, and tourism.

Levels and Rhymes: Rap Mechanics in Video Games
Bryan Dilligard (He/Him), Juan Morales-Rocha (He/Him)
In this GDoCExpo 2022 talk, designers from No Static Games, Juan Morales-Rocha and Bryan Dilligard II, discuss their research for attempting to answer the question: “How do we bring rap into a playable system?”. There has been a emergence of rap inspired video games in the past few years, but the analysis of how they represent rap in a playable space is sparse. How have these games created mechanics inspired by rap? How can designers further advance rap mechanics in future games?

Post Play Story Dynamics
Shawn Pierre (He/Him)
Post Play Story Dynamics an exploration in design and dynamics of a game and its connection to the greater community, an exploration guided by the question: “What stories do I want players to tell each other when they're done?”

We normally cannot control the discourse our game creates, but there’s a lot that we can do to influence how a game lives on after us. This talk will discuss examples of games that have different levels of Post Play Story Dynamics and how one can achieve the level that might be best for the experience they are crafting.

The Bridge Between The World And A Game Developer
Ron Jones (He/Him)
In this talk, you'll hear a breakdown of how one man has tried to survive in the evolving indie game industry. Ron Jones is the founder and CEO of The Indie Cluster and has been pooling resources and promoting indies for a decade. He'll lay out tools and strategies on getting your game in front of customers. He'll also dissect the game market to isolate the direction it needs to grow in. With current trends and the lack of visibility, Ron has been able to bridge creators to opportunities in a way publishers don't. Check out the gems being dropped as we invite you to our network of success.

Know Your Music Copy Rights: Work-for-hire vs. Licenses
Saphya Council (She/Her)
An artist’s biggest asset is their work. Starting with an introduction to copyright law in the music context, this talk walks through sample clauses from real work-for-hire contracts and license agreements, and compares the copyright interests in each. This talk also discusses the case brought by Halo composers Marty O’Donnell and Mike Salvatori against Microsoft, for unclaimed royalties from their work on the Halo series soundtrack.

The Accidental Afrofuturist
Nate Tannis (He/Him)
In the throws of developing my studio VIVIDBLUE LTD's first game, Duskwitch, I learned how nothing exists in a contextless vacuum. And by reflecting on why I'm telling the stories I want to tell, I learned how how I was participating a continuity of Black speculative fiction storytelling and afrofuturism.  And with that, I learned more about my relationship with my own Black identity and what that means for developing strong values for my studio.

Black Narradevs: Exploring Relationships In A World of Our Own
Dani Dee (She/They), Geneva Heyward (Them/Them), Dani Lalonders (She/They), .owl (She/Her)
Hosted by Dani Dee, lead developer of High Elo Girls, and joined by Validate: Struggling Singles In Your Area lead developer Dani Lalonders, Belle Automata lead developer owl., and Skate & Date lead developer Geneva, we will discuss how each of our games explore themes of existentialism, self-actualization, and evolving identity through relationships formed in unique gameworlds built by us, for us.

Handheld Mobile AR Interaction Design and Future Considerations
Jasmine Roberts (She/Her)
Although augmented reality (AR) glasses are anticipated, mobile phones are still the most accessible hardware device. A major obstacle in han held AR is touch screen interaction; however, it is one of the common interaction and direct manipulation methods. Given the screen real estate, it is difficult to interact with virtual objects in handheld AR scene. These limitations impede content creation and affect usability. Since current data needed for AR is positional and location-based, one might look toward existing sources to provide more unobtrusive user interactions than what is currently offered and reimagine how the mobile phone fits within the larger interaction ecosystem.

Introducing Chaos: Let's Build Some Procedural Narrative Systems
Sherveen Uduwana (He/Him)
When we tell stories procedurally, meaning with elements of randomness, we get to surprise ourselves as storytellers. By stepping back and allowing the seams of our narratives to blur, our stories can take on wholly new hues and shades. But how do we introduce chaos to our narratives without building chaotic, unwieldy systems? Let's figure that out by building some!

In this talk, Sherveen Uduwana breaks down how to build procedural narrative systems to be as painless as possible, looking at both character-driven & event-driven approaches found in games like Hades and Wildermyth, respectively.

The Boss Monster Pipeline: Developing Fun F2P Encounters
Anthony Murray (He/Him)
Boss fights are often keystone experiences that mark important moments in a larger video game journey. In Dauntless, every fight is a boss fight and the only way to continuously deliver new encounters is to do it as a team.

Join Anthony as he walks through through the process of multi-disciplinary encounter design on a live-service game, sharing personal insights into leading a team and the ways teams can come together to create exciting multiplayer PvE encounters by Winning Together.

How to Catch a Falling Star
Adelle Lin (She/They)
Building a game in physical space can be complex and requires many considerations - interactions, scale, narrative, mechanics, environment, installation, accessibility and more. In this talk, Adelle breaks down their latest game - a multiplayer immersive XR installation called Star Catcher - from these various perspectives. Learn about the considerations of these various elements from the perspective of Star Catcher and apply them to balance your own games.

Semiotic NPC Design: Mapping Symbols Of Identity
Chantal Ryan (She/Her)
Spoken by a trained anthropologist who specialises in identity development, semiotic NPC Design: Mapping Symbols of Identity outlines how narrative designers and game developers can utilise the linguistic philosophical field of semiotics - that is, how meaning is communicated through symbolism  - in order to directly translate human experience into programmatic representation. Attendees will learn thought strategies for building NPC design frameworks, with a particular eye to procedurally generated NPC design.

Building meaningful professional relationships
Rucha Muley (She/Her)
This session explores ways to have successful in-person networking experiences. It also delves into the nuances of building a robust support system in one's professional world. Through this session, I hope to motivate the attendees to embark on a journey towards symbiotic, fulfilling professional relationships.

I Don’t Know What I’m Doing But I’m Doing a Lot
Marcela Huerta (Any pronouns)
Breaking into games is intimidating even when you’ve got years of training, but how do you make a path for yourself when you don’t come from a games background? More importantly, how do you figure out what you're doing once you're in?!

In this talk, Marcela Huerta (Community Director, KO_OP) will show you how embracing your unique history, skills, and special interests can help you find peace in the chaos of the internet and lead to a more rewarding, singular community and marketing strategy for your games, using Goodbye Volcano High as a case study.

Hunting with Hits: Tempo Slaying Monsters in Harmony
Chase Bethea (He/Him)
When it comes to rhythm games, pushing momentum is always the focus of progression. The challenge is defining a fresh, direct and correct approach to the composition while being cognizant of battle design limitations. This talk will demonstrate the creation and implementation of an interactive score for a Hunting RPG with rhythm combat mechanics.

Maximizing OST Revenue: Leads and Composers This is for You
Neha Patel (She/Her)
This talk aims to shed light on how to maximize revenue from OST sales, for both studio leads and composers. It will give tips and tricks on collecting passive revenue, marketing prior to release, common pitfalls and finally, discuss soundtrack sales via Steamworks. The speaker’s goal is to share knowledge so that both composers and non composers can gain an awareness on releasing an OST with maximized profitability.

New Game+: Directing People, Not Products
Shana T Bryant (She/Her)
Now that the pandemic is officially “endemic,” how do we brave a new path of development that centers people, not projects?

New Game+ continues the series of talks about #SustainableGameDevelopment. We will explore a new norm of game dev that puts people at the center of the process. We will learn how to build systems that don’t pit people outcomes against project outcomes.

This talk builds on the foundation laid by 2020’s No More Heroes: How Game Development Heroics are Killing Us and 2021’s Do a Barrel Roll!: A New Normal for Game Devs and Game Development.

Inclusive Character Creator: An Exploration of Inclusive Design Principles for Character Creators
Michelle Ma (She/Her)
Inclusive Character Creator is speculative design research that seeks to address some of the long standing issues of sexism, racism, sizeism, and ableism prevalent in most 3D character creators in interactive media. This project centers on the experience of players who engage with character creators and avatar makers in order to express their physical identity. This talk will cover prior work in this area as well as the design and production of an interactive demo. Finally, this talk shares a summative checklist of inclusive design principles for character creation.

Unionization and Diversity in the Game Industry
Various speakers from Game Workers of Southern California
In the past year, we've seen game developers band together in combating the crunch, harassment, discrimination, and job insecurity that have plagued the game industry for decades. They're organizing into labor unions and wielding collective worker power against injustices that have been left unchecked for too long!

Learn what labor unions are, their history, and what they mean for developers of color in their fight for inclusion and representation in games!

Let’s Build Awesome Studio Cultures
Derek Kwan (He/Him)
Studio culture will make or break teams; therefore, we all play a role in creating and sustaining healthy studio cultures.

As team members who lack the power and authority to enact systemic change, what can we do to make our workplaces better? What power might we exercise? What must we learn from the hardship and trauma of what has come before to make our futures better?

Crucially, studio leaders are critical enablers for how culture might influence an awesome vs. toxic environment. Given the recent controversy around indie studio leads who purported to—but ultimately failed in—creating safe harbours from the abuses endemic to the industry, there is a clear disconnect between the espoused values of leadership and subsequent reality.

The research is clear: toxic workplace cultures destroy teams, result in worse products, and harm the industry as a whole. It is clear that we need to level up our culture so that the next generation of game developers can be inducted into a healthy and happy industry.

Characters Not Clichés
Ruel Pascual (He/Him), Adam Hines (He/Him)
Whether facing an interdimensional threat or drinking with the demons of Hell, Night School Studio’s critically-acclaimed games build worlds that are rooted in characters facing both pivotal moments in their lives and within the larger world. Our studio co-founder and lead writer Adam Hines with art director Ruel Pascual will share insights from that process by focusing on the creation of characters from our games OXENFREE II: Lost Signals, Afterparty, and Next Stop Nowhere.

The 10 Commandments of Business Development
Donald Harris (He/Him)
Business development means different things to different sized studios, come learn about key rules in business development to help you better understand it and more importantly grow that skill!

How to Get Away With Murder: Subverting Genre Expectations
Camerin Wild (They/Them)
How to Get Away With Murder: Subverting Genre Expectations will give you the tools you need to tell gritty, genre stories without doing harm to your audience. The goal of this talk is to demonstrate how engaging openly and fearlessly with identity, power, and the specific language of genre can free up creative potential to pull off…the perfect murder.

Indie Realities: Being VERY honest about process, release & revenue
Francesca Carletto-Leon (She/They), Sherveen Uduwana (He/Him)
Making indie games is hard! Let's talk about it! With over 10,000 games released on Steam in 2021, indie developers need to be more intentional than ever about how we allocate our time and resources, and very honest about what our goals are for our games, or we risk taking on more risk than we are actually comfortable with.

Join Code Coven's Head of Curriculum Francesca and Program Instructor Sherveen as they share knowledge gained from years running game boot camps and their own indie teams and learn their strategies for navigating the challenges of the indie space!

Rendering Black Hair
Jeffrey Rousseau (He/Him), Lauren A Brown (She/Her), Danielle Udogaranya (She/Her)
Black hair isn’t just part of ourselves, it’s a living artform, and a major part of creative entertainment. How do games lack authentic Black hair when it’s so influential in other works? This panel will discuss the good, bad, and ugly when it comes to rendering coily hair in games. Attendees will learn how we can forge a better path forward with laid edges and clean hairlines.

2022 game dev grant winners

This year, we gave a total of $105,000 to five game creators of color.

Humble Bundle Game Creator of Color Award

Chantal Ryan

The Game Devs of Color Expo "Made in NY" Grant

Geneva Heyward

The Game Devs of Color Expo Grant

Split Fate Studios

Tristan Barona (Taco Pizza Cat Games)

Achimostawinan Games

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