Brazil’s Independent Games Festival (BIG Festival) is the largest independent games festival in Latin America. This year it is taking place in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro from June 23 to July 1st and will have four big names headlining their lectures.

'Firewatch' composer and designer Chris Remo

"Firewatch" composer and designer, Chis Remo, will be discussing the narrative of "Firewatch" and how it relates to other areas of game design. This will be in a lecture called “Firewatch: Narrative Design is Game Design” and will include Remo talking about how to make a story-driven game that manages to keep players interested and engaged without traditional mechanics such as combat, puzzles, or other challenges.

Developed by Campo Santo, "Firewatch" originally released in February 2016 to high critical acclaim, it tells the story of a fire lookout in 1989 and the strange things that happen to him during his time at the Shoshone National Forest. The game and its team have won several awards.

Ubisoft Montreal project manager, Isabelle Bismuth, and Spearsoft senior director of production, Alan Van Slyke will also be attending BIG to discuss "Assassin’s Creed Origins." They will be exploring and explaining how an external studio, Spearsoft, contributed and helped create an AAA gaming experience. The talk will showcase their collaboration, the challenges they overcame and lessons that they have learnt from the process.

'Assassin's Creed Origins'

Assassin’s Creed Origins’ is the latest in the long-running "Assassin’s Creed" series. This time the game took players all the way back to Ancient Egypt. It was met with positive reviews and received praise for the changes it made to the standard "Assassin’s Creed" formula.

The final BIG Festival headliner is the Playdead co-founder, Dino Patti.

Playdead is famous for developing the much loved "Limbo" and "Inside", two horror puzzle platform games. Patti will be discussing his new studio, Jumpship, and will talk about the success of both games

You can find a complete schedule for the BIG Festival 2018 on their website. This will include all of the panels, keynotes and lectures.

All of the events will be translated in real-time to English and Portuguese for the audience and will have a transcript available upon request.

BIG Festival 2018 has been taking place since 2012 and hosts a yearly international game competition with a reward of $24,000 in 2018. Last year more 20,000 visitors attended the event and in 2018 BIG has an even larger schedule for guests to enjoy.