Funomena co-founder renowned for her advocacy of diversity, experimentation and independent development

Journey and The Sims dev Robin Hunicke leads Develop: Brighton Indie Dev Day speakers

Develop: Brighton has revealed the speaker schedule for this year’s Indie Dev Day event.

Robin Hunicke will serve as indie keynote speaker, discussing the combination of ‘feel engineering’ with art, sound and gameplay to reinforce theme and narrative in games.

Hunicke has worked at companies including EA, thatgamecompany and Tiny Speck on games such as Journey, MySims, The Sims 2, Glitch and Boom Blox.

She also co-founded indie studio Funomena, which is currently working on Luna and Wattam, and is professor of art, games and playable media at UC Santa Cruz in the US.

Hunicke will join other speakers this July 14th, including former PlayStation indie advocate-turned-indie developer Shahid Ahmad, Machine Studios’ Simon Roth and Ground Shatter’s James Parker.

Closing the day will be a 30-minute panel on achieving success as an indie, featuring Bulkhead Interactive’s Joe Brammer, ID@Xbox’s Agostino Simonetta, Square Enix Collective’s Phil Elliott, Raw Fury Games’ Gordon Van Dyke and Bulkhead Interactive’s Howard Philpott.

Develop is a media partner for the event, and will host its Develop Awards show on July 13th.

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