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Melbourne’s Freeplay Independent Games Festival will take place from April 10th to the 19th this year.
The event has traditionally featured lectures and panels from a wide array of speakers, both Australian and international. This year, events will be accessible via live-stream so the locationally-challenged can watch without physically attending.
The announcement was accompanied by details regarding a change to the awards structure for the festival, introducing Cherie Davidson as the chair of the Freeplay Awards, moving the format towards something better resembling how film festivals treat awards.
Cherie Davidson is a lecturer at RMIT and a gameplay engineer working on the collaborative, non-combat, non-competitive MMO Wander, due out later this year.
"We’ve been thinking about refining the way our awards functioned, and really giving it a bit of leadership, which is not necessarily something that a lot of other games awards do," said festival director Dan Golding.
"We immediately looked to Cherie as someone with the experience and the knowledge of the grassroots indie scene to help us through that."
Freeplay is the longest running independent games festival in Australia, and this year it celebrates its tenth anniversary.
The awards themselves will open for entry from March 2nd. For now, if you’re interested and are going to be in the area at the time you can pitch panel ideas via a form on the official website.
