Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts (EA) and renowned video games pioneer, is speaking at the iFEST Indie Games Festival events being held in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney over the next two weekends.

Working with Steve Jobs and Apple from 1978-1982, Hawkins helped define and deliver products that came to define the industry. In 1982, he founded and spent 12 years building and leading Electronic Arts to become the largest independent game publisher. After Electronic Arts, Hawkins returned to the hardware platform business with 3DO, a pioneer in network content and delivery, digital video, graphics, and optical storage before founding Digital Chocolate in 2003. Digital Chocolate has made more than 100 award-winning social and casual games and is a high-volume publisher for Facebook, web and smartphones.

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The Canberra iFEST program for 1st July has been updated. Great sessions are running all day, in particular games legend Trip Hawkins (founder of EA), Developers of Epoch – Uppercut Games and Daniel Fisher, Game Designer at Halfbrick Studios.
Don’t forget to register!

Stealthjam is the world’s first global stealth game jam being held from 22nd – 24 June 2012. Show up by yourself, or with a group of friends, and spend the next 48 hours by torchlight creating new kinds of stealth gameplay.
Stealth is about so much more than sneaking through shadows, hiding behind boxes, or donning a disguise. We’re beginning to see indie developers take stealth to new and interesting places with games like Monaco, Mark of the Ninja and Gunpoint – but it’s time to dig even deeper.
http://stealthjam.com/

Jason gave a great talk about all the prototyping that went into the different games within spore and how valuable this was. You can download Jason’s spore prototypes from his wiki ~ http://www.jasonshankel.net/wiki/index.php?title=Spore_Prototypes