By	Casey Muratori (text and photo)

HandmadeCon 2016 is GO! The dates and venue have been finalized, so you can start ordering tickets as of right meow:

With a little bit of a luck and a lot of perseverance, I was able to get us everything we wanted on our wish list from last year's wrap-up. Two days? Check. Longer breaks? Check. Nicer seats? Check. Dedicated post-conference hang-out space? Check. Plus, we’ve got a great new location at Seattle Center, where there are plenty of options for getting food on the weekends (unlike last year’s venue), and a lovely, giant park right outside for when you want to stretch your legs.

Saturday, November 19th, from 9AM to 6PM, and Sunday, November 20th, from 9AM to 9PM. The conference proper will end at 6PM on Sunday, but we’ll have the venue and a dedicated hang-out space until 9PM.

It’s in the Nesholm Family Lecture Hall, a 380-person lecture hall in the Marion Oliver McCaw Hall performing arts venue at Seattle Center:

It’s a stone’s throw from the Space Needle, so it’s very easy to find, and also happens to be at the end of Seattle’s one and only monorail.

As per my Five Rules for Game Development Conferences, HandmadeCon is designed to be as affordable as possible. This year, the full two-day conference will cost only $60 to attend if you register before September 1st! After that, regular registration will be $80. This isn’t quite my goal rate of $25/day that I’d like to hit eventually, but it’s close, and I think by 2017 I can get to the point where we can sustainably run the conference at that rate and still keep all the perks.

It will be recorded and eventually posted for archival viewing, but as with HandmadeCon 2015, I can’t guarantee that it will be streamed. I’ll post a definitive answer sometime closer to the conference as to whether we’ll try to stream it or not.

Speaker selection is an ongoing process and likely won’t be finalized until September. The type of content will be similar to HandmadeCon 2015, but with a somewhat broader focus. If you’d like to keep up-to-date on HandmadeCon happenings such as speaker announcements, you can sign up for the Molly Rocket mailing list at the bottom of this page. All HandmadeCon announcements go out through there first.

Finally, in celebration of finding the conference a home for 2016, I’ll be posting new high-resolution videos of the 2015 conference, courtesy of Neil Blakey-Milner. Look for a new one each Monday right here on the Molly Rocket blog!