Emilia is a Toronto-based game designer, conceptual artist, and software engineer.
As someone who spends a lot of time straddling the world of “professional” corporate open source software and digital artists making weird new tech, I encounter something regularly that makes me sad. Someone will release a cool art project they’ve made, or a creative tool, or some other awesome bit of creativity! They’re excited to put it out in the open so that others can use what they’ve made…
If you’re an event organizer right now, you’re in a tough spot. You’re desperate to get back to running an in-person event, but you know it isn’t quite safe yet. Maybe you’ve seen in-person events in your community lead to large-scale COVID outbreaks or even deaths, and that terrifies you. Maybe your planning team disagrees on what an acceptable level of COVID safety is, or you don’t have the…
Back over the summer, I began a series of experiments to play around with new forms of synchronous online social interaction while we’re all stuck at home. These ranged from a virtual conference hosted in a custom text-based MMORPG to using real-time mocap in the browser to make 2D animated avatars: I've been (slowly) prototyping new tools to foster online social interaction, and while it's too…
We’re in an exciting period of change where we’re still figuring out what online events should be. Most would agree that, whether you’re talking about a birthday party or a professional conference, a large grid of faces in a group video chat likely isn’t the ideal setup to foster meaningful online interaction. But we don’t really know yet what is the ideal setup! A lot of people are experimenting…
I help run an annual game design conference called Roguelike Celebration . Naturally, this year we were a virtual event instead of in-person for the first time. However, instead of just broadcasting a Twitch stream and setting up a Discord or Slack instance, we built our own custom browser-based text-based social space, inspired by online games and MMOs! I’ve written about the design underlying…
This is part of a series of posts about Roguelike Celebration 2020! If you like this, you may also like my post about the technical architecture of our social space , our streaming AV setup , or the open source codebase for the social space. A few months ago, I had a conundrum: I couldn’t stand virtual conferences. I personally go to in-person conferences to talk to people: to catch up with…
The Roguelike Celebration conference has been running for five years, but two weeks ago marks our first foray into an online-only event! The most notable thing about this iteration of the event was the custom MMO-like social space that hosted the event. I’m planning to write plenty about that both from a design and technical standpoint, but today I wanted to talk about something a bit more…
What if I told you there was a way to make your online conference or meetup more accessible to everyone, in a way that also improves the value of your video content in the long term, and is totally within your conference budget if you’re willing to fight for it? An (in-person) game design conference I run provided live captions — by an actual human, typing incredibly quickly on a special stenotype…
As the effects of COVID-19 have been going on for months, we’ve grown accustomed to new forms of socializing. “Tech conferences” now mean Twitch and YouTube streams, casual hangouts with friends mean mass Zoom calls. I don’t know about you, but I find all of this exhausting . I go to tech conferences primarily to have good conversations with people, but that’s difficult in Twitch chat or even a…
At WWDC 2020, Apple announced that iOS apps will soon be able to use motion data coming from your AirPods Pro to enable head-tracked spatial audio. They talked about this largely in context of playing movies with multi-channel surround sound, but that’s probably the least interesting application of spatial audio. As someone who’s been working in the field for a long time — my research at the MIT…