Feral Bulletins

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2016 Sponsors!

Feral Vector has sponsorship this year; enough that we can cover costs and bring some interesting people up without worrying so much. We’d like to give massive thanks to the following companies who are making FEral VEctor in Hebden Bridge possible once more.

First of all, festival production for Feral Vector is being funded by local studio Crows Crows Crows:

Crows Crows Crows

They’re a relatively new studio led by William Pugh, making experimental work. If you were around for Feral Vector last year you’ll remember William doing magnificent entertaining things with Kevin Patterson, and art director Dominik Johann making brilliant stuff out of cardboard. Their debut game Doctor Langeskov, The Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald; is free on Steam and itch.io.

Our tech sponsor for the second year running is Sheffield-based Boneloaf:
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First Speakers/Doers/Things for 2016

BOOOOM! Feral Vector is back. In case you didn’t see yet, tickets are available right this very second from ti.to. We have a whole heap of exciting things planned for Feral Vector this year.

Emily Short will be speaking about interactive narrative structures, and Humble Grove will be showing their new, beautiful point-and-click thing 29, of which here are some incredible gifs:

Humble Grove: 29; bedroom gif

Here’s a bathroom, and here’s a rather large gif showing an exterior, so we’re linking it instead (more of their work on tumblr and twitter).

Local multiplayer game Flat Heroes will be playable there (it’s being crafted in Manchester, which I guess makes it local local multiplayer?), as well as Team Lazer Beam‘s Wrestling With Emotions. Can you create a pro wrestler and find their perfect match?

Team Lazer Beam: Wrestling With Emotions

We also particularly want to focus on making stuff this year. TO THAT END:

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Showing Videogames In Public, Part One: Multiplayer

This post is part one of two. The second part will be much longer and deal with expo builds in general. I separated multiplayer out into its own post, because it’s a special case with many of its own unique pitfalls.

[I will put a link here when part two is published]

I’m David Hayward. I’ve been running events, hosting developers and showing other people’s games for around fourteen years now. I’ve run big stuff, small stuff, shown my own work, and shown a lot of other people’s work. At a quick estimate I’d say I’ve been responsible for showing around nine hundred games in public over the past decade alone. I tend to run things at a scale where I interact directly with developers, and often have to sort out problems myself rather than call upon a team or tech company. From massive showfloors and marquees, to cinema screens, art galleries and small corners of festivals, I’ve learned a lot about showing games in public.

Here are the best things I know about showing multiplayer stuff. Showing local mutiplayer games well is often more about people than code, and showing networked multiplayer games involves specific infrastructure problems that don’t affect expo builds in general.
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