Waypoint Constellations

An evening to spotlight Sydney's most groundbreaking and culturally impactful games and creators.

Collectively Waypoint, Noble Steed and Serenade have been pioneers in Australia for the showcase of compelling and exceptional game makers. Waypoint Constellations is an event curated passionately by all of them for the love of Sydney game dev.

About this event ✨

Waypoint Constellations is an evening of talks, games, live music and networking proudly presented by Waypoint, Noble Steed and Serenade featuring the people behind the vital and crucial works that are pioneering game-making in Sydney.

Waypoint Constellations is a celebration of game development, featuring stories behind games made locally in Sydney by the important people behind them. Come along with us on a 1.5 hour journey as we listen to developers tell their stories and showcase their craft.

Alongside talks will be a game showcase curated by Noble Steed, Serenade and Waypoint featuring a selection of locally produced games with booths that show the behind scenes of the making of the games.

Live music and DJing will also be happening after the talks of the evening with drinks available from the bar.

The Hosts 🤝

Waypoint ✨

Created as a community organisation, Waypoint strives to create premium events and initiatives for professional video game developers locally within Sydney!
Operated by producer Ryan Penning and artists Eric Tahiri and Liezl Ronquillo, Waypoint provides opportunities for our guests to establish and strengthen connections with their community and discover new exciting games and interesting content being developed locally putting Sydney’s talent on a pedestal.

Serenade 🎵

Serenade puts on popup events showcasing personal and experimental interactive works and video games.
Serenade is inspired by other exhibitions, collectives and venues around Australia and internationally which highlight games that are deeply personal to their creators, games made without commercial intent and games engaging with topics rarely explored within the wider medium.

Noble Steed Games 🐴

Noble Steed Games is an indie game studio and consultancy based in Sydney. We pride ourselves in our technical excellence in game development, and attitude towards helping games succeed. We also run WIP Nights for Sydney game developers to share their upcoming games and behind-the-scenes processes, and the Games Exchange, where we trade Aussie games with international partners for showcase.

Speakers 🎤

Rick Salter

Rick is a seasoned, multi award-winning digital creative with over 20 years’ experience in digital design, product design, animation, sound & music production and game development. From beginnings in computer-based training and advertising, he expanded to the music and games industry, as well as leading product design for the NSW Department of Education.

He co-founded Hojo Studio in 2008 with Jola Szymanska which has self-published four games- Puffington, Nippy Cats, Inflatality and The Godfeather: A Mafia Pigeon Saga which has featured at multiple gaming events, including the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.

Rick has also been a popular guest speaker at a wide range of digital creative and gaming events, including GCAP, PAX, Waypoint and SXSW Sydney. He has also released two albums as The People Downstairs and The Whiskey Stone.

Jennyfer Ong

Game art and creative generalist, wrangler, and fixer.

Jennyfer is the Creative Lead at Chaos Theory Games, and has worked on the visuals, processes, writing and direction behind many of their mobile, PC and VR titles. Their most recent release, Crab God, is an award-winning underwater strategy game that aspires to make a real world difference.

Pat Naoum

Pat Naoum grew up and lives in Sydney, Australia. Moving through a Creative Arts Bachelor and Film School at AFTRS, Pat gravitated to game design, with a seed of a game set inside a human eye. After 7 years of learning to code, hand painting assets, and receiving a Screen Australia Games Grant, The Master’s Pupil released in 2023, winning Excellence in Art at the Australian Game Developer Awards, and official selection at SXSW Sydney.

Vee Hendro & Hayley Gordon

Game designers Hayley and Vee combined their powers to create Storybrewers Roleplaying, an indie tabletop roleplaying studio aimed at making games that are emotional, collaborative, and evocative. They are best known for their award-winning game Good Society: A Jane Austen RPG, in which you create a dramatic (or silly) regency drama with your friends

Reuben Moorhouse

As the founder and director of Noble Steed Games, Reuben has been responsible for leading a range of game development projects for clients to both critical and commercial success. These include smaller passion projects, large AAA Publisher-funded projects, marketing activation projects, not-for-profit initiatives and everything in between. He is passionate about making work more human, and fostering a healthy, sustainable games industry in Australia and beyond by building a diverse, inclusive studio with a strict, documented "no-crunch policy".

Kurt Tikoft

Kurt Tikoft (he/him) is an indie game developer known as 'i will bite raw coffee beans'. The currently in-development role-playing game Your Holy & Virtuous Heretic will be his first release, working with composer LORESPINNER, to be completed in late 2024. Kurt is based on Wallumattagal land, and studies Game Design and Development at Macquarie University, graduating at the end of 2024.

Siobhan Willoughby

Siobhan (Shib) has been professionally designing and building pretty websites and apps for around 15 years. She's recently made the jump into game development, solo developing a mobile game in Godot called Tea, Please!, a game about remote work during lockdown, which was funded this year by Screen Australia with their Emerging Gamemakers Grant. She lives in southern Sydney with her little rescue cat, Peanut.

Game Showcase 🎮

🎨 Pat Naoum Games - The Master's Pupil

The Master’s Pupil is a hand-drawn puzzle-adventure game where you explore the eyes and life of master artist Claude Monet. You’ll complete puzzles based upon physics, space, and color and assist one of the fathers of impressionism as he perseveres through personal hardship, loss, and health difficulties.

🙏 iWillBiteRawCoffeeBeans (iwbrcb) - Your Holy & Virtuous Heretic (YHVH)

Your Holy & Virtuous Heretic is an in-development occult-themed RPG set in the 19th century. When ritualist Aleister becomes embroiled in a quest to summon the daemon Ashmodai, who will stand by his side?

Journey with Aleister into a strange world of daemons. Surviving it will require cunning use of both Aleister's skills, and skills of his daemons. Spells and alchemy can used to apply devastating status effects which could spell victory and downfall in equal parts.

🍉 Cranky Watermelon - Boomerang Fu "Just Desserts DLC"

Cranky Watermelon have announced that Boomerang Fu has now sold over 1 million copies. To celebrate, the development team have added a tense and ridiculous new Hide & Seek game mode to Boomerang Fu and released the “Just Desserts DLC”, which adds 4x new characters and 21x new jungle maps to the game.

🪽 Hojo Studio - The Godfeather

The Godfeather is a mafia pigeon roguelike combining elements of stealth, open world exploration and poop… lots of poop.

Players take on the role of an associate in the pigeon underworld, tasked with taking back “the old neighborhood” - territory lost to their enemies, both human and bird alike.

As the player progresses further, their legend increases among the pigeon underworld - could they be the next Godfeather? 

🫖 Siobhan "Shib" Willoughby - Tea,Please!

Tea, Please! is a short 30-minute game that explores the contrast between the drudgery and noise of office life and the surprising happiness and peace gained through remote work during lockdown. This is expressed through handcrafted interactive life vignettes punctuated with the simple action of making tea.

More Games to Come ✨ 

Music & DJs 💽

Event Timetable ⏰

The event will start at 5 PM. The times for talks, music and closing will be updated closer to the day of the event along with a full-day schedule.

Pay it forward! Donate to Waypoint 💖

For this event, we have opened up a donate option for Waypoint Events. The reason Waypoint solely exists is to support the local community, and in turn, we keep our events free. Running events like Constellations doesn't come cheap, but we don't believe in charging for an event that might otherwise not allow inconvenienced people to come along and enjoy it. If you support what we do and want to pay it forward, consider donating when grabbing your ticket if you care about events like this ❤️.

Waypoint, Serenade and Noble Steed acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which our events are held.

We pay respect to their Elders past and present. Sovereignty was never ceded, and this always was and always will be Aboriginal land. 

🖤☀️❤️