Last Friday, our team had the privilege of hosting 10 different upcoming games made in Sydney for our last event of the year: WIP Night! It’s a night for celebrating the game-making process, letting devs learn from each other. In our 7th iteration of the event, we had 3 devs talk about their work-in-progress games, before breaking off to playtest everyone’s incredible games.
This time around, we collaborated with the Arts & Cultural Exchange (ACE) to have the event in their wonderful space. Before the talks kicked off, we had Misty McPhail, the project coordinator from ACE share about Beyond The Script, an upcoming event they’re running with Serenade Games next year! Across three Game Jam weekends in March 2026, participants will learn narrative game design tools such as Ink, Twine and Bitsy, guided by professional game-makers from Serenade Games. It’s so lovely to see Sydney’s gamedevs support each other in becoming better gamedevs time and time again!
We then had Pat Naoum talk about making Dragon Valley, his new game after The Master’s Pupil. Dragon Valley is a co-op adventure sandbox, about exploring ancient mysteries and rebuilding your world one shape at a time. During the night, Pat broke down the genre of open-world survival craft games into two key aspects: an open world and creative freeform crafting. Through an understanding of the genre, Pat’s game design was then informed, being better able to identify what he might manipulate to push the genre. He went on to explain how procedural generation, the concept of emergence (“Complexity arising from the abundance of simple parts.”), and an underlying story, were what he was going to use or keep in mind to make the game work.
Next, we had Cameron Heydeman, making Nonolith, a game where you must copy and paste the world around you to discover the secrets of this ancient, enigmatic structure. For WIP Night, he spoke about Nonolith’s level design changes, from then to now. More specifically, how Nonolith’s puzzles were centered around identifying challenges, permitting infinite possibilities for a solution and an opportunity to escape. Awesome first talk Cameron!
Lastly, we had Andrew Capela, one half of Lab Lab Games, making Cow Chess. Cow Chess is a real-time artillery game, like if Super Smash Bros met Worms, but with a movement system all of its own. For his talk, Andre covered his journey in making Cow Chess, sharing both development progress alongside major life events involving his family. Heartfelt and personal, Andrew emphasised that he wouldn’t have been able to make games without the people behind him: It takes a village to make indie games!
After listening to some fantastic talks, the attendees broke off to play some games! In the past, only speakers’ games would be featured on the night. This time around, with the additional space and support, we managed to have 10 different games available to try! Several of these were past WIP Night speakers themselves, so it was lovely to have everyone be at WIP Night once more!
Here are all the games from WIP night:
- Cow Chess by Lab Lab Games
- Dragon Valley by Pat Naoum
- Nonolith by Cameron Heydeman
- Your Holy & Virtuous Heretic by Kurt Tikoft
- Anticitizen Red by Queebly Software
- Word Worm by Noble Steed Games
- Insignia by Uppon Hill
- Good Hands by Neema Iyer
- Odd Jobs: On The Lot by One Up Plus
- BraveCart by Hojo Studio
Thank you everyone for attending our events and supporting us! We hope you enjoyed a night out with Sydney’s gamedevs, crafting some incredible new titles for all of us to find joy in.
We’d also like to thank Screen NSW for supporting our WIP Nights through the Screen NSW’s Industry Development Program, a program to support organisations to deliver professional development and upskilling initiatives to NSW screen and digital games practitioners. We also wouldn’t have been able to run WIP Night without ACE, a cultural organisation working on Dharug Country in Western Sydney. Their Screen Cultures Program works with people from underrepresented communities to 1) support the development of new stories and storytellers, 2) upskill Below-the-Line crew to fill crucial shortages in the NSW screen industry, and 3) develop new audiences for community-driven screening events and festivals.
If you’re interested in being a part of future WIP Nights, sign up here! Have an awesome end of 2025, and Happy Holidays everyone!
We hope you enjoyed reading this! Have a question or want to chat more about game development? Reach out to us!
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- Our other game development resources
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