BABYCASTLES ACADEMY WORKSHOPS
Babycastles Academy events are workshops (and sometimes game jams or talks) on topics related to artist-focused game development, world-building, and the intersection of art and technology. These workshops can be experienced individually or as a series to learn a broad range of skills and techniques. Our audience is a broad community of creative practitioners including visual artists, musicians, sculptors, programmers, dancers, performers, poets, writers, and those who may not self-identity as having any particular relevant skills but are interested in learning.
Workshops will be archived here with lesson plans and video recordings.
Recent Workshops
Led by Sabrina Sims
In this hour long workshop, Sabrina Sims, a Afro Puerto Rican woman, artist and zinester, will guide participants in an exploration of color, textures and words using the Electric Zine Maker.
Led by Corey Bertelsen
This class is about Rhythm Games, and how to build them in Unity and Wwise. We'll be using the template project at this repo as a guide.
Led by Lia Coleman
In this hands-on workshop, you'll learn how to make AI-generated videos in RunwayML, and also how to bring them into TouchDesigner to make them audio-reactive.
Led by Eben Kling & Aude Jomini
Using our own experimental game, Doom-Haven, we will show you how to make a game using Slade and DoomBuilder, including scripting in Decorate and ACS.
Led by Gavin Gamboa
We will be diving into the Tiddlywiki framework (TW), which is an open-source tool great for compiling notes, research, bookmarking, and making non-linear and personalized knowledge maps.
Led by Hyacinth Nil
Learn to facilitate tabletop role playing games. This is a system-agnostic approach to building and running tabletop roleplaying sessions and longer term campaigns.
Led by Francisco Rojo
Using PICO-8, you will make a pixel art game like Undertale in less than an hour, that you can share with your friends and family and enemies and exes and former bosses that you've developed strangely paternal relationships with.
Led by Seamus Edson
Turn an idea into a world. This workshop is a rapid-fire introduction to making 3D environments from scratch with Blender.
Previous Workshops
Led by Allan Pichardo
In this workshop, we will cover the basic intuition behind the variational autoencoder–a basic generative model. We will use a variety of synth samples as training data and use the final trained decoder to output a range of random wav files of unique sounds that can be used in a sampler or DAW.
Led by Daniel Lichtman
Join Daniel Lichtman in this workshop that introduces a range of “DIY” techniques in Unity to quickly make exciting, rich and layered 3D environments, no coding or specialized game-dev skills required.
Led by Char Stiles
In this workshop we are going to talk about EMAIL! Yes, email! Not to complain about email (necessarily), but the good parts about email like the cool stuff that we can do with it: maintain a git repo, display html, run your own email server, use a CLI inbox, and make art.
Led by Tyler Etters
Software is hard and making art is already hard enough. Join Tyler Etters as he shares strategies and tactics for navigating this messy process from inception to release. Using his latest piece, arcologies, as a case-study, we'll learn how to get unstuck and persevere through those dark nights.
Led by Crezno
In this workshop, you'll learn how to get started with the "Lazy Newb Pack," a starter pack for jumping into the game and getting going. You'll learn how to build empires, forge weapons and curiousities, and slay some goblins. So get your ale, don't put two cats in a room, and remember above all else, "Losing is fun."
Led by Lee Tusman
This workshop is a broad and beginner-friendly introduction to writing grant proposals, exhibition proposals, artist-in-residency applications and other forms of professional proposals.
Led by Cicada Carpenter
This workshop will teach you basic techniques for how to design interesting and cohesive beasts, with a special look at creature design within a worldbuilding context.
Led by Stefan Pelikan
Given a few statements in HTML as a starting condition, we will explore the vast possibility space represented by introducing strategic combinations of CSS parameters into the mix.
Led by Hyacinth Nil
Starting with a few simple tools and working up to more sophisticated methods of processing audio and sound design to build out a small song.
Led by Crezno
This workshop is a special introduction to creating chiptune/chip2une music with Ableton Live and plugins to create your own 8bit or 16bit chiptune music.
Led by Dan Gorelick
The workshop will focus on TidalCycles, which is a free and open-source tool that allows you to create musical patterns with code. The workshop will cover different methods for creating music live with TidalCycles.
Led by Maxwell Neely-Cohen
Join Maxwell Neely-Cohen for a tutorial on using esoteric programming language ORCA to sequence and generate music. Almost reminiscent of John Conway's Game of Life or Dwarf Fortress, ORCA allows a unique approach to music making and programming, building rhythms and melodies out of shifting alphanumeric characters.
Led by Grey and David Huerta
This panel hopes to provide an introduction to thinking about your own security context and needs, by running through exercises around specific protest related scenarios, to give a model for the process which you can practice to asses your own security needs.
Led by Ana Valens, David Huerta, Matt Mitchell
In support of protestors and organizers, this workshop will be an overview of basic, intermediate and advanced digital security considerations.
Led by Charles H. Huang
A brief history, vocabulary, and proposal for game design by Asian Americans
Led by Francisco Rojo
Come get a taste of Godot, an open-source game engine. I'll walk through making a very simple game to get our feet wet, and I'll talk about how Godot differs from Unity in theory and in practice based on my experience.
Led by Hyacinth Nil
In this workshop, narrative designer and game developer Hyacinth Nil will show you how to think about (and write) a system that generates text using a pre-designed grammar in the p5.js javascript library.
Led by Drew Katsikas/Vampire Computer People
Building a Custom Film Finder with Python will be a fun and friendly workshop where anyone curious about technology can learn how to write and run some Python scripts to find cool movies to watch during quarantine!
Led by Lee Tusman
In this workshop I'll walk you through the process of creating a flatgame in Unity. No prior experience with Unity or coding is needed. We'll do this one mostly code-free.
Led by Lauren Gardner
Lauren leads a workshop on setting goals and how to give/get feedback on them.
Led by Phoenix Lion
Learn some shading, perspective, & low resolution computer drawing basics in aseprite with Phoenix & other anxious monster cuties.
Led by John Bruneau and Prashat Thapan
In the first session we cover creating a basic platformer in Unreal with Blueprint. After a short break we go into the same topics with Unity and C#.
Led by Zach Krall
This workshop will serve as an introduction to Hydra, a live-coding environment for creating visuals using JavaScript. Participants will learn how to write code to create visual art.
Led by Chris Rutledge
A Babycastles Academy workshop about Houdini for those curious about node-based tools for procedurally generated graphics and effects.
Led by Jessica Garson
Workshop attendees will learn to make music in SuperCollider through a wrapper, and will have a chance to perform with their new creations.
Led by Drew Katsikas and Karl Hohn
This workshop covers both creative and practical uses for Imagemagick. Examples includes native usage and some scripting with Python.
Led by Prashat Thapan
By learning how to create materials in Unreal Engine, we will understand node-based workflow, laying a foundation for working with Blueprints–Unreal's powerful out-of-the-box visual scripting language.
Led by Prashat Thapan
By learning how to render video in Unity & Unreal Engine, we will get a cursory understanding of how each engine works, and their respective pros and cons.
Led by Nick Fortugno
Nicolas Fortugno is a New York-based game designer and educator.