For all you Fruit Ninjas out there, Halfbrick, the Brisbane studio that developed the immensely popular app, will be hosting a games night as part of Garage Gamer.

Halfbrick Studios Chief Marketing Officer, Phil Larsen, says the event will give fans the opportunity to interact with and learn from a range of studio professionals.

“What we try to do is really engage with the fans and the community who want to know about games or what we do,” he says. “What we do have is several people, each in a different area of expertise at Halfbrick; we’ll have a talk and a Q&A, so someone who is an artist or a designer or whatever should have an expert to talk to and get some insight into what we do.”

With Fruit Ninja installed on over half the smartphones in the United States, Halfbrick Studios has become a Brisbane success story. Phil wants to share that success by encouraging and educating a new generation of local game developers. 

“We’ll be able to give some really great examples on how we engage with community and what you do when you do have a successful game. You need to be able to talk about the business side of it, because to reach that many people you need a lot of business support and you definitely need a lot of marketing behind it as well, so we’ll be covering that.”

It’s not all business though: avid Fruit Ninjas should sharpen their Katana fingers and be ready for a live fruit-slicing experience.

“We’ll also be running some competitions with prizes as well and it’s something that people can get involved with, so that’s really good to see,” Phil says. “Fruit Ninja Kinect is always a really big crowd favourite so we should definitely have that and prizes for people who come out and play games. Other than that, we really try to keep it casual; people will be drinking and having fun, talking — we’ll mingle and see what people have got.”

Halfbrick Studios hosts Level Up Games night at the State Library of Queensland Friday March 8 as part of Garage Gamer.