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Art
‘Just Houdini It’ - Using Houdini Effectively for Game Development
Houdini has quickly become the shiny new tool in game development with studios ranging from indie to AAA keen to benefit from the prospect of generating an immense amount of content in shorter time periods. The internet is filled with countless examples of exciting projects showing off the end results, but it can be hard for non-Houdini users to understand the possibilities and limitations of Houdini tools. Having a better overview of this will be helpful in understanding where Houdini can improve workflows for your team while avoiding common pitfalls which often result in painful and costly work farther down the development pipeline. In this talk you will learn where Houdini can be used in game projects, how to effectively communicate about potential tools and you’ll learn some helpful tips for building your own tools.
Takeaway:
- Insights on using Houdini for procedural generation and as a pipeline tool.
- How to communicate about tool requests, goals, and scope.
- Helpful tips for building your own Houdini tools.
12 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Making User Interfaces for Games
In this talk, Henry goes through twelve theories that help when designing the user interface of games. An insight into the psychology and principles that inform decisions behind the design of User Experience and User Interface.
Takeaway:
- Ideas that will help guide and inspire user experience and user interface design of games.
- An introduction to some psychological principles that are highly relevant to the design of UX/UI.
- Ways of thinking to help working with others, being humble and avoiding stress.
ADHD City - Weird Things That Help for the Creative (but noisy) Brain
In this session, I'll be going through hints, tips, and weird things that help to manage ADHD and distraction, especially in these pandemic-infused times. Through my journey with diagnosis, I'll go over how I have maximised my hyper-focusing tendencies for a career in Game Art and Art Direction, as well as giving you some tools to structure your approach to game development and art more successfully.
Takeaway:
- Dig into ADHD and how it can present within the games industry
- Learn strategies for coping with distraction and brain noise whilst working on video games
- Improve your artistic workflow through these processes
Art Direction: The New Challenges of 2022
A panel of Art Directors from across the industry will discuss:
- How to create distinctive styles that make your game stand out.
- How to keep the art team inspired and on track with the visuals.
- What the future looks like for artists, considering the visual advancements in UE5, PS5, Photogrammetry etc
- What has been the most inspiring game for them visually and why.
- What are the greatest skills required of an Art Director.
- How has being an Art Director changed over the past 10 - 20 years in games.
Takeaway:
- You will learn what it takes to be an Art Director in 2022
- What the challenges are
- What the future of games art could potentially look like
Art of As Dusk Falls: Painting Powerful Stories
Interior/Night’s debut game, As Dusk Falls, is a powerful story of betrayal, sacrifice and resilience across generations in small-town Arizona. Creating an art style which matched the epic scale and ambition of the narrative, while capturing all the subtleties and sensitivities of the characters’ emotions, presented the art team with complex challenges.
Join the Art Director and key members of the team as they lift the lid on the unique ‘every frame a painting’ art style. Hear how they made an impossibly bespoke artistic vision a reality.
Take a tour of the film studio where the team captured live-action actor performances.
Watch demonstrations of character painting techniques, and the custom tools which brought the scenes to life.
Discover the secrets of combining 2D characters with 3D sets.
And go behind the scenes to see how lighting and careful compositing built the game’s unique look.
As Dusk Falls has been selected for the Tribeca Film Festival.
Takeaway:
- An insight into the creation of an original and beautiful art style
- A sneak peek at a groundbreaking game
- Unique secrets of visual storytelling
Bringing Creatures to Life: How to Make Good, Emotionally Appealing Creature Designs
Creature design is becoming more important and ubiquitous within games, from titanic monsters and beasts, to collectible partners and friendly fantasy races & NPC’s.
But as creature design grows more specialized, the knowledge and skills to create not just technologically feasible creatures, but unique and visually appealing designs becomes harder to achieve.
In this talk Sam will talk about the essential principles of creature design and anatomy, what you should consider when making a creature for a game environment, and how to apply those skills to make creature designs that are both visually interesting and emotionally appealing.
- The application and requirements for various types of creature design within the entertainment industry
- The Foundations of comparative animal anatomy
- How to Apply art principles to create a visually appealing and functional design
Building AAA Environments at Scale
AAA Games are getting bigger and more detailed all the time and players are expecting more than ever before. It is quickly becoming a reality to design and create large-scale AAA worlds not only with a high amount of detail but also to a tight deadline.
In this talk, we will discuss a framework in which we can achieve highly detailed art whilst still maintaining high production standards and ultimately creating worlds that are attainable as much as they are detail-rich!
Although this discussion may be aimed more towards leads, managers, and those wishing to become leads, I believe everyone will be able to learn and pick up some information to aid them in their work going forward, from beginner to expert.
Takeaway:
· Insights into attaining AAA environment art standards and the challenges you might face.
· Light production ideas that artists can use to develop their workflows and pipelines.
· Creating detail-rich worlds in a short amount of time.
· Advice around team structure and culture.
Developing Technical Skills to Increase Your Creativity
Many creative individuals shudder at the thought of learning Python or other technical skills and block themselves from reaching their full potential. This session explores the relationship between technical and creative knowledge and how technical skills are beneficial to creatives. Ruthie explores how creative brains work and why creative individuals should develop technical skills. She provides practical advice on how you can evaluate your own skill base and provides tools to help you identify which technical skills you should learn. Sharing her own past challenges, in particular with learning Python, Ruthie highlights how perseverance can unlock your creative potential.
Takeaway:
- How creative brains work
- How to evaluate your current skillset and identify what skills to develop
- Why creative individuals can and should develop technical skills
- Resources and practical advice for learning technical skills
Get Immersed! Virtual Humans in Training and Collaboration in Virtual Reality
This talk will give insight into the exciting world of research on Virtual Humans and how they have been utilized for training and collaboration in Virtual Reality in areas such as the Health and the Games Industry. Touching on Embodiment, Avatar realism, Non-verbal communication, and Immersion techniques. Delegates will leave with a new perspective on how Virtual Humans and Virtual Reality can provide stress-provoking interactions and a unique method of immersed self-assessment that can not be offered by any other platform.
Takeaway:
- Delegates will leave with an understanding of how plausibility in VR can be moderated by the implementation of Virtual Humans
- Delegates will leave with an understanding of how embodied social interactions can create unique opportunities for self-reflection and learning
- Delegates will leave with an understanding of the limitations and challenges surrounding using Virtual Humans for Social Virtual Interaction.
Navmesh: The Technical Requirements & Solutions it Can Bring for the Future
In this talk, programmer Jonathan Maldonado discusses the technical approach Glowmade took on building a navmesh system from scratch, how it solved the needs of Glowmade's upcoming game and where it can go from here.
Takeaway:
- How to build your own navmesh
- How taking this approach can give you greater options
- What building your own navmesh can help you achieve
The Future of Fashion in Games
Despite being two industries focused on creativity, new technology and playfulness, fashion and games were two worlds that, for a long time, were totally separate. This changed rapidly as we moved our lives online in the pandemic, and created a surge of interest from the fashion world in what games could mean for their brands and collections. From Balenciaga's FW/21 runway show existing within Unreal Engine, to designers partnering with Animal Crossing creators to bring their collections to life in game, the fashion industry has never been more interested in games as a medium. Many game developers are stepping into this world, through partnerships, metaverse experience design or simply through more considered approaches to the fashion in their games.
Takeaway:
- Fashion and the games industry have incredible opportunities to collaborate, in ways that are both beneficial to your players and to your revenue!
- Players are incredibly engaged in avatar customisation, which is becoming even more relevant in our increasingly digital world. Virtual influencers, Vtubers and trends in social media imply we are moving to a blended reality of representation. This is all the more important for GenZ & Alpha.
- Digital fashion and the NFT industry are closely linked to digital representation, but their eventual use and popularity is still to be proven. The fashion and games industry have different attitudes to this- we can learn from each other!
- The fashion industry are ready and willing to collaborate with your game. This can be done on a large scale (international luxury brand partnerships) or smaller scale (working with individual designers to make representative, realistic (or fantastical!) clothing with your character designs). Think about what approach could work for your project.
Audio
An Exploration of Wise’s Impressive WAAPI/WAQL Features
Audiokinetic developer, Michael Cooper, discusses how sound designers can make good use of the recently introduced WAAPI and WAQL features to enhance their Wwise audio authoring experience.
Audio Track Welcome & Introduction
Sound designer and composer Kenny Young welcomes delegates and guests and introduces the day’s proceedings.
Field Recording Pokemon - The Search for Perfect Sounds
Right from the outset of her game audio career, Malin was never satisfied just using other people’s sounds and so began a lifelong quest for aural originality and authenticity built on the foundation of making her own field recordings. Drawing on many sonic adventures she will examine and explore the art and science of best of breed location sound capture sharing lessons learned about planning, scouting and site selection, working in harmony with nature, timing and when to record, equipment choices and options - and the peculiarities of videogame requirements, discussing what for her makes the perfect sound and how she goes about getting it.
Takeaway:
- Appreciation of the value and reward of finding and recording your own sound sources
- Insights into the research needed in planning your sound hunting expedition
- Tips and tricks on techniques and equipment to practically go about recording your own original sounds
Open Mic 2022
In keeping with Develop Conference tradition, our panel of game audio experts limber up for an inclusive town hall style discussion with conference delegates about the current state-of-the-art of music, sound and dialogue for games and what the future holds for game audio business, technology and creativity.
Post-Pandemic Directions for Game Audio Employment
Has the COVID Pandemic changed the working landscape forever? With the continuing boom in video games development and an unprecedented level of open roles for Game Audio, what are the challenges and possible solutions to both deliver and innovate? With many developers exploring hybrid and remote working, there are potentially more opportunities to hire experienced talent - but at what cost? Veteran Head of Audio and Audio Director, Alastair Lindsay discusses future directions and issues for game audio employment with a panel of special guest experts.
Takeaway:
- Gain insight into future strategies for sourcing and supplying audio production resources.
- Learn where you fit into the current and coming game audio economy.
- Benefit from expert viewpoints on post-pandemic challenges and opportunities for audio talent.
- Learn how best to utilize hybrid and remote working in-game audio employment.
Returnal - The Sound of an Alien World
An insightful presentation into the varied approaches taken by the PlayStation Studios Creative Arts Sound team when they crafted the next-gen sound of Returnal. This presentation will focus on 3D audio environments, haptics, creature and weapon sound design.
Seeing with Your Ears: The Unique Challenge of Audio and Interactive Storytelling in As Dusk Falls
As Dusk Falls cleverly straddles the line between linear and interactive experiences. Imagine enjoying your favourite primetime TV show whilst steering the story yourself! This complex branching narrative, combined with a unique art and animation style all serve to present fascinating and thought-provoking opportunities – and challenges - for both sound and music score. Hear how Soundcuts told the story through sound and music, bridging design techniques and mix approaches from game audio, television, and radio to provide a rich, cohesive aural experience.
Takeaway:
- Find out about audio in narrative-centric games.
- Bridge the divide between linear and interactive audio.
- Understand the pitfalls of complex project structures.
- Conquer your game audio mix.
Tom’s Clicks and Glitches: A Professional Confessional
Game dev conferences are full of tales of shiny things and glorious successes - but this talk is different! We are going to discuss failure. Listen gleefully as Tom Colvin (Audio Lead for Media Molecule, formerly Microsoft and Ninja Theory) recounts a catalogue of mishaps, mistakes, goofs and howlers. We will hear how they happened, what was learned, and some guiding principles for avoiding some of the pitfalls of working in game audio. Fear of failure is the enemy of creativity, so we will reflect on how to work creatively, stay inspired and serve other people’s vision without crushing your own artistic soul.
Takeaway:
- Understand some common pitfalls of creative working
- Feel more comfortable with failing, making mistakes, learning and trying again
- Gain confidence in your own creative voice
Vehicle Sound Design for Farming Simulator
Kris is showcasing the audio pipeline for recording and implementing vehicles into the Farming Simulator series.
He discusses his audio teams’ approach to recording tractors, detailing the equipment, techniques and conditions that are used to capture the sound of these complex machines.
Next, he demonstrates how audio recordings are edited and processed to make high quality audio assets. This includes effective processing, semi-automated editing using custom actions within Reaper and some tricks & tips on how to create perfect seamless loops.
After this, the real-time processing of Farming Simulator vehicle audio is explored in detail. He demonstrates methods for analyzing on/offload audio recordings to extract useable EQ profiles, which can be used as a basis for real-time processing to create a dynamic load sound.
Finally, he details the implementation process for vehicles, covering the use of in-game parameter changes and sound modifiers. This brings the recordings and audio assets to life, creating a sense of dynamism and interactivity in-line with real world tractors.
Takeaway:
- Approaches and techniques for effective vehicle recording.
- Sound processing techniques and approaches to creating seamless loop-able audio assets.
- Workflow improvements for repetitive asset creation.
- Methods of creating a dynamic ‘load’ sound for vehicles.
- Implementation ideas for increasing interactivity between vehicle sound layers
What Voice Actors Need from Game Developers
With special guests and live improv performance, this session gets under the skin of working with voice actors, exploring how voice versus screen actors is analogous to jazz vs orchestral musicians. Estdale and friends demonstrate how ‘jazz thinking’ can transform and liberate voice recording for optimum results. Find out what actors need from developers to release their full creative potential and maximise their contribution to your project.
Takeaway:
- Ideas for better casting of actors.
- Ideas for the dialogue performance toolbox.
- Ideas for how, when, and what to prepare for recording actors.
- Ideas for getting into the acting 'hell yes!' zone.
Business
20 Lessons from 20 Years
Marking the 20th anniversary of GamesIndustry.biz, we collate business advice and takeaways from industry luminaries and some of the most promising up-and-coming developers as we explore how the business of video games has evolved since 2002 - and where it is heading next. The lessons have been collected by the site's editor-in-chief James Batchelor, but will be delivered directly from the advice-givers themselves via a mix of video messages and some surprise appearances during the session.
Takeaway:
- Learn from industry luminaries
- The biggest changes of the past 20 years (and their impact today explored)
- Get an overview of the industry's recent evolution and prospects for its future
Ahead of Its Time: Why is PlayStation Home One of the Most Talked About Games of 2022?
The metaverse, or Web3, is being heralded as the next big thing in the digital world, with 70% of brands saying they need a significant presence in it and 50% of those have admitting they have no idea how to achieve it. And the world of crypto currencies, NFTs and blockchain requies virtual spaces to be built so they can sell land in this brave new world. This opens up a great opportunity for games developers, our services have never been in such high demand….
But who knows the most about these digital spaces? What works, what doesnt… what makes them sticky, what sells and what causes upset? The answer is the pioneers! and PlayStation Home was one of the first and most influencial. A virtual community space with social games, avatars, dancing, land & digital clothing for sale and all the technical gubbins behind it all. Sony, as ever, arrived at the party early and learned a lot. Consequently, everyone is looking at PS Home and it can help us now.
This panel discussion brings together some of the founders and key voices of PS Home to understand what they learned, how they have used that knowledge and how it applies to the future. With a mix of foundational questions, topical insight and some fun along the way, this will be a lively and informative conversation of best in class web3 development.
Takeaway:
- Cut through the hype to understand what it really takes to make a successful virtual community in a multiplayer world.
- Understand how to make a metaverse sticky: what works for retention and what doesn't.
- Hear from PS Home veterans how they have applied their expertise to current and future projects.
Blockchain’s Future in the Games Industry
The games industry has historically been quick to make use of emerging technologies and with billions of dollars of investment, there is no shortage of ideas but little detail on how it can positively impact game design. The panel will expertly navigate the hype, scams and get-rich-schemes to talk about what the technology can offer and why players should care.
Takeaway:
- New ideas for game design using blockchain
- An understanding of the challenges of building a token economy
- How to approach blockchain from a technical perspective
Building a Cloud based Scalable Mobile Lab for Automation
Testing mobile apps on a large number of devices, with different screen sizes and running different Operating Systems is becoming a challenge. While developing, teams can easily run their code and test their apps on simulators or emulators. However, this is not enough when you need to ensure your app will run smoothly in all the different types of mobile devices your users carry with them in their pockets. In that case, you would better go for real physical models. Creating a cloud-based Mobile Automation Lab where engineers can launch their automated tests on a daily basis, through their CI pipelines and use real devices from a Device Farm cloud provider (such as SauceLabs) has proven to be key to ensure how games are tested at King.
With this scalable, cloud-based middleware we’ve built, we can distribute load, handle queues and run the different automated tests in our pool of devices from different Device Farms. This service oriented software provides an API endpoints web based service where end-users can automate their testing processes or even launch them whenever they want. Reports are sent back when tests have been run and alerts and notifications can be easily configured.
Takeaway:
- Automated testing management in mobile games
- How different teams can make use of a shared pool of devices in a cloud device farm
- Scalability and concurrency, a CI/CD challenge
Building A Fair Playing Field
Women in Games has just published The Guide: Building A Fair Playing Field. Recurring revelations about working cultures in the games sector reveal that there is an urgent need to adopt the fair playing field approach in relation to gender. The most important ingredient in making real, systemic change, is leadership. Women in Games recommends leaders across the games and esports sectors commit to genuine change, by providing the driving force behind actions designed to bring about fairness. In practical terms, this means being publicly aligned to clear goals, and providing visible, high-level leadership in the ongoing process of successfully achieving those goals. Unless leaders actively plan and set out how they are to be achieved, progressive ideas, policies, objectives and required outcomes will gather more dust as papers in a drawer, or stay as box-ticking exercises. It is not enough to simply increase female representation numerically and call this ‘diversity’. A diverse workforce can only thrive if fairness is built into every aspect of the structure in which it operates. Employing more women is the first step, but it should be integrated into the creation of a culture of belonging. Marie-Claire Isaaman and Sharon Tolaini-Sage – the co-authors of The Guide – will discuss why this document is important, and offer some advice on how studios can Build A Fair Playing Field themselves.
Takeaway:
- What is the Women in Games Guide, and why is it important?
- Why is gender balance important in the games industry, and what are the benefits to studios?
- Practical advice on what studios of all sizes can do to engender a Fair Playing Field
Confident Pitching: The Cheat Codes
You have an amazing idea for a game. But speaking in public can be pretty scary. Pitching your idea can be terrifying. You need techniques for writing a short, zingy pitch that excites your audience, and then some tips for engaging them with a natural, confident delivery. Oh, and some brilliant slides. And ways to handle your nerves. Fortunately, Jon Torrens has some cracking bits of advice for you (from his experience as a stand-up comedian and level designer) that will cover all of that and may even be amusing along the way. No promises.
Takeaway:
- Show confidence and control your nerves
- Write rich, concise material with a story
- Engage the audience and keep their attention
- Communicate authentically
- Use visuals effectively
- Adapt to the unexpected
Edge Computing and the Video Games industry - A new option for Developers: Automation, Distribution, Reach
Edge computing is a new paradigm shift in the way infrastructures for game hosting will perform in the future. From automating DevOps time to providing unlimited scalability while reducing latency and costs. Join us to explore the benefits Edge Computing can bring to the gaming industry and how Developers and Publishers can harness this new tech trend.
Takeaway:
- Gain better understanding of Edge Computing
- How does it benefit the video games industry
- How to leverage Edge computing tomorrow for your games
Founding a Game Studio: The Highs and Lows
Founding a Game Studio: The Highs and Lows is a panel that features a number of experienced studio founders to discuss the challenges and highlights of founding and running your own game studio. The panel will cover topics such as: creating a studio vision, running a studio ethically, overcoming challenges and finding sustainable investment. The panel will feature candid questions that will shed light on some of the lesser-known aspects of managing a game development studio and audience members will have the opportunity to ask insightful questions to accomplished founders who have seen a lot! The panel will also inspire those wanting to create their own studio in the future, as well as providing additional knowledge to existing industry founders.
Takeaway:
- How and why studios are founded and how they are sustained over time
- Potential pitfalls, challenges, risks and mitigations to those issues
- The benefits and highlights of running your own studio vs working in an existing studio
From Concept to Launch: A Data-driven Approach to Success
Newzoo works with hundreds of developers and publishers to help guide them through various stages of game development using a combination of unique metrics and analytics. This can provide the foundation of minimizing risk and maximizing success when building and launching a game. In this presentation, we will explore the metrics that can help ensure success at every stage of a new game’s life cycle no matter the size of your project or company. Along with techniques being taught at each stage, we will present actual data across a wide variety of data sources that will provide a peek into the games market from a variety of lens including genre and macro trends, game level metrics, to player psychographics and demographics. The audience should walk away from this presentation with an idea on how to implement data throughout any stage of their game and directly gain insights into the recent trends and market data.
Takeaway:
- Attendees will learn the fundamentals of utilizing external data to improve each stage of development and publishing including concept and greenlighting, launching a game, and live ops
- Along with analysis techniques, attendees will also be able to gain insights into trends and unique data from macro-level market and genre insights to title and player-level data
Hiring Ethically and Empathetically
Moo spent months thinking obsessively about the right way to post a job listing and ethically hire some collaborators for his prototype. After posting two listings only on Twitter and receiving over 350 applications over two roles for an unannounced game prototype at a newly formed company, he'd like to spend some time to talk about what decisions he thinks contributed to having such a great and diverse applicant response as well as what he'd do differently next time.
Takeaway:
- What to put in a job listing and what not to (definitely put the pay)
- How to think about pay for a job role
- How to be empathetic throughout the hiring process
How Making Blockchain Games Has Changed the Way I Think About the Internet
Animoca Brands is one of the leaders in blockchain games as well as one of the most active investors in the space, and after talking to hundreds of companies and making a handful of games, a few things have become clear about how blockchain changes everything. Come join us to find out.
Takeaway:
- Understanding blockchain games
- Making quality games in blockchain
- Getting to grips with investing in blockchain games
I Don’t Want to Make Another Game - Crunch and Best Working Practices
After seriously considering whether we ever wanted to make another game, we set about radically changing the way we worked. No crunch and a positive work life balance were the foundation to our plans and it led to the companies' most successful period; culminating in our highest rated game ever and eventual acquisition by Private Division in 2021. This talk will detail, the how, what and why of how we achieved it.
Takeaway:
- Philosophical change to no crunch
- Operational change to no crunch
- Working Smarter as a result of committing to no crunch
Keynote: Building a Creative Culture, Together
Keynote: DEATHLOOP: Looking Inside a Design Loop
In this fireside chat, members of the Award-winning Arkane Lyon studio team, including this year’s Develop Star Award recipient Dinga Bakaba, discuss some of the development challenges and successes they had during production of DEATHLOOP.
Discussion topics will include:
- Creating a first-person action game in a brand new world, while preserving the Dishonored heritage.
- Analyzing the challenges of developing an immersive sim with the added complexity of multiplayer components.
- How the studio focused on the personal skills they had to develop during DEATHLOOP's development.
- The creative team will share their choices on the design of the characters, environments, and weapons design.
This panel will change how you look at making your next game.
Pulling Together a Business Case
How do you put together a business case? How should you evaluate a deal? How does a negotiation work? When should you do crowdfunding, and when should you go with a publisher? Or a grant? Rami Ismail talks about what indies get wrong about business, using real examples he has encountered during his many consultancies.
Takeaway:
- A clear and tested method of explaining the basics of entrepreneurship, such as risk and opportunity, with a few useful insights for advanced developers too.
- Setting budgets properly, and negotiating around them.
- Understanding pitching, tone, and communication.
Punching Above Your Weight
Mike Gamble, the former European head of Unreal Engine and now Head of Strategy at Talenthouse, will uncover what 10 years of working on Unreal Engine has taught him. Mike’s discussion aims to educate developers of all sizes, and how they should consider outsourcing as a vital part of a studio’s strategy when looking to maximise the quality and quantity of their output.
Takeaway:
- How to create a global network through outsourcing talent
- The benefits of outsourcing expertise vs. keeping within in-house silos
- The impact outsourcing can have on increasing your team’s diversity, and in turn, bring new and fresh ways of thinking to your team
- Freeing up time for in-house staff to be creative and focus on their expertise by outsourcing
- The benefits of using Media Foundry and where you should go to outsource talent for your next project
Scaling a Studio: Why Change and Innovation are Always Harder Than They Should Be
Coming soon.
Shaping the New Normal - Fostering a Positive Hybrid Workplace
As we look to the future, it is more important than ever that studios are attuned to the needs of their teams. As nDreams’ Chief People Officer, Tamsin O’Luanaigh has placed workplace culture at the strategic heart of everything that the studio does since its foundation in 2006. With the rise in remote working, it is more important than ever that team members feel connected to the wider studio and empowered to work in the most effective way for both the individual and company. Tamsin has led a progressive approach to this shift in working culture, quickly and effectively moving to a hybrid workplace whilst also founding two remote studios. Tamsin will candidly talk through the process, challenges and successes of putting team culture and values at the heart of studio strategy in a modern, flexible workplace.
Takeaway:
- What can people leaders do to ensure teams feel connected to the studio through hybrid and remote working?
- How can you help your teams adjust to the future work place?
- What should you avoid when pivoting to a hybrid way of working?
Social Mobility in the Games Industry
Data on the UK games industry shows an issue with social mobility within the sector. Respondents to the UK Games Industry Census reported an overrepresentation of people with parents from managerial / professional backgrounds versus those from more routine employment and a noticeable skew towards people who went to selective or fee-paying schools, with both measures increasing among more senior roles. This suggests that not only is social background an issue with entry into the industry, but is also a factor in career advancement.
BAFTA’s Head of Games will discuss these findings and their significance with four voices from across the sector. How do these factors impact individuals within the industry and what challenges do people face in both joining and their advancement in the sector? How does social mobility affect creative decision making and what are we losing from the voices that aren’t being heard? How does this intersect with other areas of underrepresentation and how does a focus on social mobility help reach people currently underserved by current interventions? How do we identify and overcome barriers and better target efforts to improve access to the industry?
Takeaway:
- Hear from key industry voices on how social mobility impacts both individuals and creative output within the games sector.
- Reflect on where barriers exists within both businesses and the wider industry and consider where interventions can be focused to improve access, inclusion and advancement for people from all backgrounds.
- Participate and ask questions, join the conversation and be inspired to think about ways you can help create a more welcoming and diverse games industry.
The 4 Day Week: Is It Time for Studios to Re-think?
There is much discussion about how working life is evolving. Remote working during lockdown restrictions was forced upon us – against a backdrop of fear and real suffering. As we move forward, everyone is thinking about ways of ‘building back better’. One way of doing that is creating a better world of work with an improved work/life balance.
Amiqus’ research has shown that individuals enjoyed a number of benefits from flexible working during lockdown, including saving money on commuting and spending more time with family. Of those who don’t think they have their ideal working conditions, 79 per cent said they are considering, or possibly considering, a career move.
So, do we need to think more radically about how we should respond? In a time of The Great Resignation, and particularly in a sector like games that is facing unprecedented demand for skills, employers must rethink how to attract and retain staff. Salary remains important, of course, but what individuals want more than anything now is flexibility and time.
The 4 Day Week Global pilot begins in June, with UK companies – including Hutch Games – taking part in a six-month trial to find out about this future way of working. Other studios globally have already shifted to a four-day week and are reporting great results in terms of employee wellbeing and job satisfaction, but also in increased productivity.
Is it time that the 4-day week became the norm in games?
Takeaway:
- What’s the latest thinking on flexible working and what could the ‘new era in working’ look like?
- What does our research tell us about what games professionals want in terms of their working conditions?
- What is the 4 Day Week Global pilot all about?
- How you can better attract top talent by offering flexible working and/or the four-day week.
- Why flexible working options will help your studio to attract a wider and more diverse pool of talent.
- Practical advice on how studios can provide working conditions that are attractive and beneficial to all individuals, and to the studios.
What it Took Double Eleven to Successfully Scale a Studio to 300 Employees
I'll be doing a talk on what it takes/took to go from ~70 employees to ~300 in 5 years. Whilst retaining a high retention rate.
Takeaway:
People will leave with a better understanding of what it takes to scale a studio and have a better idea how to look after their people.
Coding
A Beginners Guide to AI Character Design
Building smart, reactive and non-player characters for games is no easy task. They need to make smart decisions, move through the world smoothly, react to the player and systemic behaviour. Plus we bundle that with dialogue, animations and more to make them feel like they exist in these virtual spaces. On paper, it sounds pretty straightforward, but in practice, it can become very complicated, very quickly. In this session, we highlight the variety of tools and techniques you can use to make smart characters, how to design for a variety of situations and how best to ensure character art and animation helps reinforce all the smarts happening behind-the-scenes in your codebase.
Takeaway:
- Understand the functional and non-functional requirements of different non-player characters
- Gain a deeper understanding of common AI tools and techniques used for decision making in non-player characters
- Learn good practices for designing intelligent, sensible and realistic characters
- Understand how to achieve more intelligent characters through smart design and efficient tricks
Across the Board on Apple Arcade: Putting DOTS Through its Paces
We will present our experience co-developing "Detonation Racing" for Apple Arcade. We will review our experience using the DOTS architecture in Unity to develop a scalable system that played to the strengths of a wide range of device capabilities. We will share details of our vehicle handling implementation using the DOTS physics engine and discuss how we leveraged variable time-steps to support non-interactive sequences during gameplay. We will provide an overview of an internally developed offline visibility culling system for reducing vertex bandwidth, and give an overview of the performance reporting system that was utilised to ensure we could release a high-quality and high-performance title across the board of target devices on the Apple platform.
Takeaway:
- Specific lessons learned using DOTS on a real-world project
- Detailed description of rendering optimizations and performance reporting system
- Practical guidance for developing/testing/deploying to mobile, Apple TV, Mac
AI Supported Tools for Game Development
Procedural content generation and AI-assistive methods can do more than help us create content. If we allow ourselves to think of the machine as a colleague, then we can collaborate with it to improve our work as it assists us in becoming better and more skilled content creators.
Takeaway:
- The main takeaway is how by viewing the AI as a colleague, developers can get more ideas and become more creative
- Delegates will also get an overview of the current state of the art in AI-assisted methods for content creation
- Delegates will learn design patterns and challenges, that can be directly applied to their in-house tools development
Diving Deeper into Developer Iteration in Unreal Engine 5
Following Mark’s talk about developer iteration in Unreal 5 you’re invited to join this round table to dive deeper into issues that may be impacting your projects.
The rate of growth for modern games and the more recent world events that have forced many of us to work in a more globally distributed and isolated manner have only made developer iteration harder than ever.
Long sync times from source control, increasingly long data and code builds, valuable SSD space being eaten up and increasing larger product footprint are just some of the factors affecting our ability to work efficiently in this new world.
Come and join this interactive session and get a greater insight into how you can work more efficiently with UE5.
Extra Credit - Turning Internal Assets into a Valuable Side Hustle
The Unity Asset Store is a great resource for developers, but it can also be a surprisingly profitable secondary revenue stream for small Indies. John Campbell shares his experience of developing for the Store. During the development of a game, we all create tools, systems, and assets for our own needs, but often these are valuable to others and can enjoy a second life on the Asset Store providing not just additional income but also secondary benefits to your studio. Learn the publishing process end-to-end, starting with identifying potentially successful assets, creating and refining them for best success, release and store presentation, and post-release growth and curation. Also, practical advice on user experience, documentation, and how to efficiently manage your community and support requests. Triangular Pixels has been publishing to the Asset Store for four years. We started as an experiment but have steadily grown our store presence to where it’s an important part of our business. We include knowledge gained from our successful (and unsuccessful) assets, what we did right and what went wrong, and how we’ve integrated our learnings into our day-to-day development of our game projects. We also cover the risks (and perceived risks) with publishing on the Asset Store and how to evaluate their impact on you, how to mitigate those that are relevant, and which perceived risks you don’t need to worry about.
Takeaway:
- Learn how to evaluate your assets to identify potentials
- How to build a distinctive brand and stand out on the Asset store Learn about converting internal assets into successful store assets.
- Tips to improve your user experience to match the expectations of Unity users.
- Efficiently build your community and handle support and feature requests.
- Specific advice for programmers creating asset store tools.
Get Immersed! Virtual Humans in Training and Collaboration in Virtual Reality
This talk will give insight into the exciting world of research on Virtual Humans and how they have been utilized for training and collaboration in Virtual Reality in areas such as the Health and the Games Industry. Touching on Embodiment, Avatar realism, Non-verbal communication, and Immersion techniques. Delegates will leave with a new perspective on how Virtual Humans and Virtual Reality can provide stress-provoking interactions and a unique method of immersed self-assessment that can not be offered by any other platform.
Takeaway:
- Delegates will leave with an understanding of how plausibility in VR can be moderated by the implementation of Virtual Humans
- Delegates will leave with an understanding of how embodied social interactions can create unique opportunities for self-reflection and learning
- Delegates will leave with an understanding of the limitations and challenges surrounding using Virtual Humans for Social Virtual Interaction.
How to Get Things Done Without Ever Breaking Things
In this talk you will learn about the best practices, considerations and effort that goes into developing and maintaining a cross platform game engine with monthly releases without ever breaking things for the end-users.
- Technical challenges specific to game engines
- Important performance metrics to look out for when evaluating game engines
- How coding practices and design principles can help write efficient and maintainable code for game engines (and games)
How we Brought a Large C++ AI Codebase to C# and Unity
Integrating a big C++ project with the .NET framework and the C# programming language is a daunting task. The open-source project CppSharp provides some automated assistance with generating bindings and wrappers between the two languages, but differing semantics around memory management, templates, generics, and many other details make this far from simple when working with large codebases. In this talk, we explain in detail how CppSharp and its underlying .NET technology P/Invoke work, how the wrapper generation process can be customised for a specific project, and how we set up our projects for rapid iteration on our integration layer between C++ and C#. We will explore the challenges we encountered in building the C# and Unity integration for our C++-based game AI middleware Kythera AI, including getting the two languages’ memory management philosophies to work with each other, exposing C++ templates to C#, and mapping C++ value and reference semantics to their .NET equivalents. We will also discuss performance considerations such as the relative expense of different techniques for mapping C++ constructs into C#.
Takeaway:
- How programmers can use P/Invoke and CppSharp to make their C++ libraries available to C#/.Net - Caveats, problems and solutions around memory management when calling native code from the .NET runtime, which is garbage collected
- How to make common C++ features like templates, bitfields and value and reference semantics available in C# that do not have a direct equivalent
- Performance considerations and optimizations when using these technologies
Improving Developer Iteration in Unreal Engine 5
It is widely accepted that the more efficiently a developer can iterate, the more likely the result of their efforts will be much higher in quality.
The rate of growth for modern games and the more recent world events that have forced many of us to work in a more globally distributed and isolated manner have only made developer iteration harder than ever.
Long sync times from source control, increasingly long data and code builds, valuable SSD space being eaten up and increasing larger product footprint are just some of the factors affecting our ability to work efficiently in this new world.
During this talk we will take a walk through some of the upcoming features for Unreal Engine 5, which will soon be made available to licensees, that have already impacted developer iteration for both The Matrix Awakens Demo and Fortnite, and for our teams and partners at Epic Games.
Takeaway:
- Visibility on upcoming UE5 features that will improve developer iteration for licensees.
- Retrospectives on roll out of these features and the impact they have made on Epic products.
- Teams that may be considering or have implemented their own features can learn about Epic's experiences.
- Opportunity to give feedback to Epic about your experiences and solutions for Unreal Engine.
Injecting Innovative Ideas into Your Games Through Working with the IGGI Centre for Games Research
IGGI stands for Intelligent Games and Games Intelligence. It is the world’s largest centre for games research, with 120 doctoral researchers, based at Universities in London and York. IGGI has won £30 million pounds against fierce competition from other more traditional areas of science and engineering, to support games research. IGGI has worked closely with many games companies since 2013 to deliver on a mission of getting more innovative research ideas into commercial games.
In this session we will present the IGGI programme, and a key games industry partner will present the benefits which have been obtained by working with IGGI researchers, alongside one of the researchers whose ideas have benefitted the company.
We have found that placing IGGI researchers within games companies is key to injecting innovation to time-starved games company staff, who often lack the time to read research literature.
While we have strong links with many games companies, IGGI is a large programme and through this talk we hope to reach out and establish new games industry links, leading to research-inspired innovation in games, and ensuring that our research is relevant to the real needs of the games industry.
Takeaway:
- Working with the IGGI research centre can inject research innovation into your games company
- Researchers from IGGI want to understand the long-term innovation needs of the games industry, to direct their research programmes
- Working with researchers is a way to explore interesting and wacky ideas off the critical path (and even around the bend
"
Is Your Code Working For You?
Is your code working for you, or are you working for your code? Are you writing the same code you've always written, and are worried whether it's the best way to do things? Are you following "best practice" advice, but want to understand why those are the rules? Game development is its own ball game, and there are sometimes unwritten rules about which language best practices are applicable. Sometimes a language evolves, or we switch languages, and the best practices we used to swear by now don't make sense. Sometimes we're confident we know exactly what a code snippet will do, and when we run it - it doesn't quite do what we expect. This talk will present tips and tricks for games programming, from beginner to advanced, C++, C#, and beyond. It will present the good, the bad, and the sometimes hilarious of games programming, using real examples and code snippets, and provide tools and exercises to take you beyond this talk to explore deeper into the code you write every day.
Takeaway:
- "Gotchas" you may accidentally be writing (especially if you switch language!)
- Things you may have been told to do, but which you definitely should not in games development
- Things you have been told not to do, but which are probably ok!
- Tools to help you explore deeper into the language you are using every day
Navmesh: The Technical Requirements & Solutions it Can Bring for the Future
In this talk, programmer Jonathan Maldonado discusses the technical approach Glowmade took on building a navmesh system from scratch, how it solved the needs of Glowmade's upcoming game and where it can go from here.
Takeaway:
- How to build your own navmesh
- How taking this approach can give you greater options
- What building your own navmesh can help you achieve
Terminal Velocity: How Backend Game Services Power Our Titles
In this session, we'll be going over how the game services team is structured at Mediatonic and our role in the success of Fall Guys. We'll be walking through how we prepared for and managed the explosive launch of our game. We'll cover how we've scaled the game over the last few years to manage millions of players. We'll be providing a broad overview of our processes, designs, and workflows.
Takeaway:
- Learn how Mediatonic handled a very busy launch for Fall Guys
- Learn how we leverage cloud services to allow us to scale to millions of CCUs
- Find out more about game services as a discipline and how cloud services could help you scale your own projects
The Real-Time Volumetric Superstorms of Horizon Forbidden West
Real-time Volumetric Cloud systems in Games have seen increasing adoption by game developers in the past few years. Many systems use a coverage/type map based modeling method combined with an optimized ray-march and shading solution similar to or expanded upon what was described in detail in the SIGGRAPH 2015 Publication, The Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes of Horizon Zero Dawn. This session will focus on explaining how Guerrilla expanded its Nubis cloud system to include tornadic superstorms, internal lighting and lightning flashes, a solution to render faster moving clouds with temporal upscaling as well as visual enhancements - all without using expensive simulations or lighting calculations so that the system could scale between current and previous-gen Playstation consoles.
Takeaway:
- Attendees will first learn about the real-time volumetric cloud system, Nubis, and how it was expanded to support large tornadic storm systems, internal lighting, lightning effects and further visual enhancements - all while preforming within a reasonable budget on PS5 and PS4 hardware.
- Attendees will also be presented with a solution to dramatically increase the speed of fast moving temporally constructed volumetric imagery.
The Tech Journey Behind Love & Pies
We will discuss how we built several prototypes and tools to support rapid iteration of design and art while avoiding the production of heaps of tech debt. We’ll outline our modular code approach that’s saved us loads of time and allowed us to pivot many times before attaining success.
Takeaway:
- How to prepare for prototyping
- How to support your art and design teams
- What you’ll need to build to release a large F2P mobile game (edited)
Design
Accessible Accessibility and Designing for Dyslexic Players
Part 1 - Accessible Accessibility: Where do you start?
Presented by Cari Watterton, Rebellion
Accessibility can be intimidating if you don’t know where to start – but whatever stage of development you’re in, you’ll be able to get something out of this talk. We will cover why Accessibility is important, how to get started with designing and implementing features, user testing, and building a culture of accessibility across a whole studio. From her experience working in indie startups to large scale game development teams, Cari demonstrates an accessible process for getting started with Accessibility.
Part 2 - Designing for Dyslexic Players
Presented by Alastair Low, Lowtek Games
Ally will talk about his experiences while playing games as a dyslexic player and the troubles the disability can cause. Some are obvious but others area little less so. We will look at current trends towards game accessibility with examples of where its has been done well and where it hasn't. What might games accessibility ;look like in 5 years, will platform holders or middleware solutions make the change thats nessasery for wider adoption? Text to speech is one of the most usefull tools at a dyslexic persons disposal and its great seeing this show up in some of the blockbuster titles. The talk will touch on general good practices for game accessibility but with a strong emphasis on the dyslexic player.
Takeaway:
Part 1
- Quick-start process for designing accessibility features for your game, no matter your stage in development
- Practical advice for testing your game and features with gamers who experience disabilities
- Low-cost examples to build an accessibility-focused mindset at your studio
Part 2
- More empathy for the large amount of dyslexic players out there
- Informed ideas on what to do to be more inclusive
- Informed ideas on what not to do to be more inclusive
ADHD City - Weird Things That Help for the Creative (but noisy) Brain
In this session, I'll be going through hints, tips, and weird things that help to manage ADHD and distraction, especially in these pandemic-infused times. Through my journey with diagnosis, I'll go over how I have maximised my hyper-focusing tendencies for a career in Game Art and Art Direction, as well as giving you some tools to structure your approach to game development and art more successfully.
Takeaway:
- Dig into ADHD and how it can present within the games industry
- Learn strategies for coping with distraction and brain noise whilst working on video games
- Improve your artistic workflow through these processes
Betterverse
The world we live in, both physical and digital, is built on cultural and societal considerations. These considerations shape the meta verse and the possibility space of what it can become. In this talk, Brenda Romero asks who determines what those considerations are? What gets left out, and what gets brought in? Our metaverses are mirrors of their creators. This time time, let’s do it right.
Takeaway:
- Examine the history of the metaverse, what we’ve left out and what we brought in
- Consider how inclusivity has impacted both the design and the audience of our previous metaverse attempts
- Explore the ways in which we might do it differently to expand its audience.
Design Sensibilities for a Collaborative Culture
One of the main challenges that faces a designer is aligning the team towards a common goal. This talk will introduce numerous approaches to aid with this, in order to empower others and maximise collaboration. Supported by development anecdotes, it will account for a variety of disciplines and typical scenarios throughout various stages of development.
Takeaways:
- Propose methods of communicating effectively whilst empowering other members of the team
- How to apply suggested approaches to tackle typical collaborative challenges which face designers
- Supporting advice for dealing with a wide range of development scenarios in a constructive manner
- Illustrates a tangible cheat sheet and recommended additional references for fostering a creative culture
Designing `DEATHLOOP`s First Hours at the Eleventh Hour
This is the story of how user research led to the creation of the opening hours of “DEATHLOOP” during the last months of the game’s development, and how those hours, and eventually the entire game, were reshaped a piece at a time by continued research. It is told by Arkane Lyon’s Campaign Director, a developer who stands at the nexus between level design and narrative design, who had to level up her competency in user experience design overnight to meet the challenges the game faced. In this lecture she will walk you through this harrowing process, where dramatic changes to the game were equal parts overwhelming successes, and revelations of dreadful new issues.
Takeaway:
- User experience design is not a straight line. A smart fix to a big issue can reveal problems elsewhere. This is a good thing
- The obvious solution to a user experience issue can be the wrong one. User research specialists can uncover the problem hidden in the data. Treat the cause of the problem, not the symptoms
- Dana Nightingale’s design process, and how it’s similar to the type of user experience she tries to create
Evolving Storytelling in Returnal: How to Tell a Haunting Story
In this talk, Eevi Korhonen discusses the storytelling techniques used in Returnal and how they were utilized to craft its haunting story. The talk journeys through the challenges of telling a story in a game with fast-paced action gameplay and a roguelite structure all the way to how the team managed to combine elements from various genres to create the strange cocktail that makes up Returnal.
Takeaway:
- Learn how Returnal's story was put together
- Learn how you can fit together story and fast-paced action gameplay
- Learn techniques to craft mysterious and ambiguous stories
Keeping it Simple: Creating a Tutorial for a Grand Strategy Behemoth
Total War is a franchise with a 25-year-old history, with layers and layers of complexity and depth, accompanied with a complicated set of rules. This could be quite intimidating for someone to try for the first time. With Total War: WARHAMMER III we set out to create a campaign specifically for people to learn the game. This was the birth of the Prologue campaign. The challenge was to create something that would appeal to our hardcore audience but also provide a platform for those new to the franchise. This requires the team to understand the audience experience; a challenge for a team who knows the game in and out. In this talk we’ll go through the process and exploration in creating the Prologue campaign; bringing different people from different teams together to delve into the challenges and to try different approaches. It was important for us to hear from everyone, recognising that a good idea or approach could come from anywhere – that diversity of perspective was essential when looking at different audience experiences. We considered the different ways individuals learn, how we could teach to adapt to these learning styles and enhance the tutorial overall. We’ll look at how we worked with User Research experts to test the tutorial and gain invaluable feedback, focusing on clarity of information balanced with immersion in the experience. Overall, this talk will delve into the different iterations of the prologue that we explored, the different challenges and considerations, and how we finally landed on the end experience.
Takeaway:
- The importance of hearing/including everyone and gaining diverse perspectives
- How to teach something complicated by keeping it simple
- The importance and role of UX testing
Keynote: DEATHLOOP: Looking Inside a Design Loop
In this fireside chat, members of the Award-winning Arkane Lyon studio team, including this year’s Develop Star Award recipient Dinga Bakaba, discuss some of the development challenges and successes they had during production of DEATHLOOP.
Discussion topics will include:
- Creating a first-person action game in a brand new world, while preserving the Dishonored heritage.
- Analyzing the challenges of developing an immersive sim with the added complexity of multiplayer components.
- How the studio focused on the personal skills they had to develop during DEATHLOOP's development.
- The creative team will share their choices on the design of the characters, environments, and weapons design.
This panel will change how you look at making your next game.
Keynote: Wolfenstein 3D Postmortem
In early 1992, id Software had just shipped their latest 2D platform games and were ready for something different. Having released the first texture-mapped 3D shooter, Catacomb 3D, just a couple months earlier, they were planning what their next project would be. Wolfenstein 3D was an ambitious design for an MS-DOS PC in 1992. There were no GPUs, most games were 320x200 pixels, a lot of memory was 4GB, and mice were rarely used. Follow the journey that the four founders of id Software took to create a watershed moment in gaming history that showed the world that the PC could play a new kind of game that no other machine could replicate. Game designer, programmer, and id Software co-founder, John Romero, will take the audience through this short seven month timeline and show you just how much happened during Wolfenstein 3D's development rollercoaster ride.
Manifesto of a Sustainable Web 3 Game Economy Design
Machinations have worked with hundreds of game designers to stress test their game economy design. During this time Machinations have developed the Manifesto of a sustainable Web 3 Game Economy Design. This Manifesto includes the core pillars that any Web3 game must achieve to create a sustainable economy along with some best practices that you can put into practice to prepare your own game economy.
Takeaway:
- The Core Pillars of sustainable game economy design
- Best practices that every game economy should have
- Learn how to identify the basics of a Game Economy
Performance Art: Capturing the Best of Human Drama in South of the Circle
We're used to bad acting and dialogue in games; they're usually just cut scenes in between the action. But when believable human conversations are a central part of a game's experience, how do you make sure you get authentic performances? How do you create conversations that flow like real human interactions? And how do you make sure that translates in-engine? In this talk Director Luke Whittaker and Creative Producer John Lau discuss create immersive, human-feeling conversations at the heart of State of Play's interactive drama South of The Circle, and how they tried to avoid the pitfalls of modern video game performances. From casting, to rehearsal, performance capture, and the development of a unique conversation mechanic, Luke and John discuss the things their team had to learn in order to ensure that South of The Circle's animation and interactions did justice to its incredible cast, including actors from Bohemian Rhapsody, Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey.
Takeaway:
- Treat your actors as co-creators
- Experiment before it gets expensive
- Design in a way which is sympathetic to the performance
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Crafting Interactive Narrative Games
This lecture explores the processes that Supermassive Games employs to craft branching narrative adventures, and examines techniques for creating horror in the Dark Pictures Anthology. This talk contains some mature content.
Takeaway:
- Learn techniques for crafting branching narratives
- Learn best practices for creating choices in games
- Learn useful techniques for bringing horror into your game
The Future of Fashion in Games
Despite being two industries focused on creativity, new technology and playfulness, fashion and games were two worlds that, for a long time, were totally separate. This changed rapidly as we moved our lives online in the pandemic, and created a surge of interest from the fashion world in what games could mean for their brands and collections. From Balenciaga's FW/21 runway show existing within Unreal Engine, to designers partnering with Animal Crossing creators to bring their collections to life in game, the fashion industry has never been more interested in games as a medium. Many game developers are stepping into this world, through partnerships, metaverse experience design or simply through more considered approaches to the fashion in their games.
Takeaway:
- Fashion and the games industry have incredible opportunities to collaborate, in ways that are both beneficial to your players and to your revenue!
- Players are incredibly engaged in avatar customisation, which is becoming even more relevant in our increasingly digital world. Virtual influencers, Vtubers and trends in social media imply we are moving to a blended reality of representation. This is all the more important for GenZ & Alpha.
- Digital fashion and the NFT industry are closely linked to digital representation, but their eventual use and popularity is still to be proven. The fashion and games industry have different attitudes to this- we can learn from each other!
- The fashion industry are ready and willing to collaborate with your game. This can be done on a large scale (international luxury brand partnerships) or smaller scale (working with individual designers to make representative, realistic (or fantastical!) clothing with your character designs). Think about what approach could work for your project.
There’s Always Been a Metaverse
The term "Metaverse" seems to be a pretty common buzzword these days. But what does it really mean? And why are people so obsessed with metaverses, what makes them so good at whipping up frenzied fandoms? In this presentation, futurist and senior producer Sarah Brin demonstrates some of the historic lineages of expansive story worlds, and distills some key design principles for creative technology practice, world-building, and meaningful connections with audiences.
Takeaway:
- Historical precedents for metaverses. Why reinvent the wheel?
- Drawing distinctions between what's over-hyped nonsense and actual potential use cases for new technology
- Practical design tips for designing fun, social, and emergent player behaviors
Vehicle Sound Design for Farming Simulator
Kris is showcasing the audio pipeline for recording and implementing vehicles into the Farming Simulator series.
He discusses his audio teams’ approach to recording tractors, detailing the equipment, techniques and conditions that are used to capture the sound of these complex machines.
Next, he demonstrates how audio recordings are edited and processed to make high quality audio assets. This includes effective processing, semi-automated editing using custom actions within Reaper and some tricks & tips on how to create perfect seamless loops.
After this, the real-time processing of Farming Simulator vehicle audio is explored in detail. He demonstrates methods for analyzing on/offload audio recordings to extract useable EQ profiles, which can be used as a basis for real-time processing to create a dynamic load sound.
Finally, he details the implementation process for vehicles, covering the use of in-game parameter changes and sound modifiers. This brings the recordings and audio assets to life, creating a sense of dynamism and interactivity in-line with real world tractors.
Takeaway:
- Approaches and techniques for effective vehicle recording.
- Sound processing techniques and approaches to creating seamless loop-able audio assets.
- Workflow improvements for repetitive asset creation.
- Methods of creating a dynamic ‘load’ sound for vehicles.
- Implementation ideas for increasing interactivity between vehicle sound layers
Why Designing Inclusive Player Experiences Should Be Everyone’s Priority
The session will go over Electronic Art's approach to inclusive design through our Inclusive Design Playbook. Inclusive Design is about designing for as diverse a range of people and abilities as possible. It is a philosophy that encourages us to consider how gender, age, sexuality, ethnicity, socio-economic background, culture and customs, body shapes and sizes, religious beliefs and other characteristics shape the way we interact with the world. We believe that games have the power to transcend society as the characters we create and the stories we tell can positively impact the world around us. By involving diverse perspectives, amplifying the voices of all players, and ultimately helping to build muscle memory with game teams, we make sure everyone in our communities feels welcome. This talk will emphasize why we need to recognize that every action carries an impact on the wider community, and we’ll keep pushing ourselves to improve in this area for our players.
Takeaway:
- Attendees will be equipped with ideas and real-world examples of how we can portray characters with diverse backgrounds authentically and how we can avoid unconscious bias during the creative process
- Have a better overview of inclusion in video games and how they can reduce toxic behaviour within gaming communities
- Have a good overview through specific examples of how EA is applying inclusive design in their games
- Learn about lessons learned ad adjustments we have made since we first started with this work, based on product reception and employee feedback
Discoverability
Building a Contented Game Community
Bringing perspectives from across indie, AAA and everything inbetween, Hannah, Stevie and Abbie will discuss the strategies which have helped them form and grow successful, contented communities. We’ll look at the values behind communities, how to enact them in your rules, and how to maintain a welcoming atmosphere as your community reaches maturity.
Takeaway:
- How to structure a new community space to set it up for success
- How to maintain interest in a community between releases
- What do to when your community isn’t gelling well
Creative Alchemy - Transmuting your Game’s Vision into Marketing Gold
Take a practical deep dive into the marketing creative processes of Focus Entertainment, one of Europe’s leading video game publishers and developers. From determining the communication pillars of your game to creating key assets, learn how to take into account the competitive landscape to give your game the light it deserves. The presentation will include practical examples from released multi-million selling titles and upcoming titles such as Plague Tale: Requiem, World War Z, Evil West, Snowrunner and Vampyr.
Takeaway:
- How to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your game in a competitive landscape, and how to adapt your communication assets accordingly to make your game stand out
- How to inspire yourself and react to creative trends when choosing a name, logo and key art
- Heart and Mind - understanding the strategic purpose of your key assets
Downward Spiral or Mega Viral: 10 Lessons From a Year on TikTok
Let’s begin with a bold claim: TikTok is the most exciting discoverability platform available for games right now. Brief vine-like explosions of creativity blended with a user-centred approach have transformed TikTok from a dancing teen machine into the most downloaded app worldwide, with organic reach potential far beyond the likes of YouTube and Twitter. Anyone can go viral, doing anything. It’s no wonder that so many indie developers are joining the platform in the hopes that their game will be the next to go big. As the resident Gen-Z team member of indie publishing & promotion company Future Friends Games, Grace Curtis has had a front row seat in this promotional cambrian explosion. In this talk, she’ll share what she’s learned - both from the accounts that reached 9 million people organically in a single post, and the ones that struggle to break 100 views. Which games are a good suit for the platform? Do I really need to learn all these dances? How do I edit on a tiny screen? Using the classic internet formula of a numbered list, Grace will talk through the 10 lessons she’s learned during her first year as a creator and advisor for indie developers on TikTok.
Takeaway:
I’d like to leave the audience with three main impressions:
- Almost anything can go big on TikTok, so it’s worth a try no matter what kind of project you’re working on. That said, games with a strong aesthetic & adapt well to the aspect ratio have a significant advantage.
- TikTok audiences value authenticity and personal narrative. Use trending sounds and in-platform tools, and bring your own story to the table. Give your audience a narrative arc they can follow, both over the channel and over each video.
- Know what it’s for, and what it’s not. This isn’t the place to build community or form industry connections. It’s about grabbing the spotlight for twenty seconds and yelling about how awesome you are to an audience of millions. Make every second count.
Forging Meaningful Connections With Audiences Through Marketing
How do we build marketing campaigns that forge real connections with our audiences? The intersection of strong company foundations, a consistent strategy and an empathetic approach is when marketing truly makes magic. Knowing the core of who you are as a brand and what you stand for is more important than ever. As our industry and society evolves (sometimes more quickly than we can keep up!) there is a constant pressure to be "relevant", especially when the space can feel increasingly volatile. But through strong, honest bonds with audiences, businesses can future-proof themselves from disaster. In her role as Marketing Manager, Justine Colla spends her time growing the brand of Atomhawk beyond the artwork her supergroup team create working in partnership with top AAA clients. Being the keyholder of a brand can be a daunting responsibility, but it is also an opportunity to reach out to people's lives in a positive way. Justine will take you through a few key marketing campaigns at Atomhawk that were able to not only fulfil a business need, but grew trust with multiple key audiences. This talk is perfect for marketing professionals, community managers and studio directors who are looking to build authentic relationships with their business audiences.
Takeaway:
- How to build authentic, long-lasting relationships with audiences
- How consistent, high-quality marketing campaigns unlock new business opportunities
- How businesses can future-proof themselves with strong audience bonds
Getting Traction for Your Game Before Release (Indie Edition)
Without spending a marketing cent, The Wagadu Chronicle went viral and gathered a respectable following on social media which eventually led to a successful Kickstarter. Twin Drums' founder Allan will speak to provide tips and share stories on on how he got there.
Takeaway:
- Tips on "finding your voice"
- Tips on getting noticed
- Bootstrapped Marketing Do's and Don'ts
How To Give Your Game Maximum Exposure On Social Media
It’s no longer enough to simply send a few codes to journalists to have your new game seen by the public. Okay, arguably it never was. But now, more than ever before, making the most of all platforms available to you is essential for any game’s marketing - and when it comes to social media, and liaising with media outlets, channels and influencers who work across its nebulous landscape, knowing exactly what’s needed to help someone else make your game shine is a must.
This talk will open up the world of games and games-adjacent content on social media through the lens of GAMINGbible’s output, analysis and strategy, and beyond - into a wider conversation on how today’s social media landscape necessitates more consideration than simply having a new CGI trailer ready for distribution. It will dig into some dos and don’ts of how to approach creators and outlets who are publishing to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok with as much of a focus, if not more, as traditional websites. It will highlight the benefits of letting go of control and letting someone else make your game shine in front of the audience they know best.
At the end of the session, publishers, PRs and studio representatives alike should have a clearer picture of what works best on which platform; how to prepare assets for those platforms; and perhaps most crucially of all, why an outlet still might not pick up and package what you’ve provided them with.
Takeaway:
- You will know what assets work best on which social media channel, and how to deliver them
- You will learn the power of building trust with brands and letting them work their magic on your terrific creations
- You will better understand a wildly and fast-changing landscape where the goalposts shift every single week
Running Featured Cross-publisher Events on Steam
In 2020 and 2021 an online-only version of the Guildford Games Festival took place. The event was featured on the front page of Steam, bringing in several million visitors and resulting in greatly increased sales and wishlists for all participating games. What logistical challenges are there in creating a cross-publisher event? What impact did the featuring have? All of this will be uncovered in the talk, with stats galore to feast your discoverability-focused eyes on.
Takeaway:
- Learn the logistics of creating a cross-publisher event
- Discover the benefits of participating in such an event
- Ways you can help maximise your discoverability when participating in events
Ten Steps to Steam Success
An entertaining and informative talk for developers and publishers from someone with plenty of experience of releasing games on Steam. James will cover what he considers to be the ten most important things to consider when releasing a game, including: • Getting the coming soon page right • Convincing people to add you to their wishlist • Correct and relevant tagging • Post-launch support And plenty more – you’ll need to come to the talk to get the full list! James will cover the entire release process, from the early steps of getting your game a Steam page through to building hype, launching, and then maintaining momentum with strong post-launch support. As Director Of Digital Strategy at Curve Games, James Gourlay has helped launch many games over the years and learned invaluable lessons that are guaranteed to make your life easier and your game more successful!
Takeaway:
- Pre-launch: getting your game a Steam page through to building excitement and strong marketing materials
- Launch: creating noise and making the launch an event
- Post-launch: maintaining momentum with strong post-launch support
Indie BootCamp
Signing Your Game (and what to avoid!)
As an indie, one of the most stressful parts of development is finding funding. If you want to go down the publisher route, you must convince them to back your game, negotiate the deal, then actually make the game in a partnership. In this talk, Nina will talk through tips and advice Auroch Digital has learned over more than 10 years of signing and developing games with various publishers. Nina will use her experience of working on multiple projects (with some war stories!) and of taking Auroch Digital’s latest exciting announcement from pitching all the way through to partnership relations during development. Using this example, Nina will highlight areas you can improve your pitching and classic things to look for to avoid getting into a bad deal that could put your project, or even your studio, at risk.
Takeaway:
- Practical tips on what to add to your pitch deck to help your project stand out.
- Advice for during pitching meetings, and what to do after.
- Ways to protect your project and your company during contract negotiations.
The Indie Secret Weapon: TikTok (get discovered by doing very little)
Everyone keeps telling you to market your game early, build a community, make more hashtag content, blah blah blah. They’re not wrong, but you’re already pressed for time and resources, so what will get you the best return for least effort... TikTok. TikTok is an incredible marketing tool for games that very few are using effectively. This talk is a no-nonsense, practical guide, on how to create attention grabbing videos by just being yourself. I’ll show you how other studios are using this space for gameplay reveals, dev diaries, and generally winning over their audience one post at a time. Whether you’re a solo dev or a small team, if you’re up for some experimentation then the sky's the limit. TikTok is a fertile platform for growing a fan-base, extending your game’s narrative, and selling more copies.
Takeaway:
- Why TikTok is your best marketing bet as an indie devs and publishers
- Practical tips on WHAT to make and HOW to make it
- Leave with a huge list of FREE RESOURCES to use, from editing software to social media management tools
- Discover real-world examples of how other devs and publishers have found success
The Price Is Right: What to Charge for Your Indie Game
Figuring out what to charge for your indie game can be a daunting proposition, especially if you’ve never released a commercial game before. In this session, Lewis presents a data-driven methodology for perfecting your price point - using publicly available information to predict the sales and revenue potential of different price brackets, based on the genre and quality of your game.
Takeaway:
- Why setting the right price is so important
- How to use publicly available data to predict your game's revenue potential
- A working model for helping you to perfect your price point
The Realities of Starting an Indie Game Studio
You have a great game idea but does that necessarily mean you have what it takes to run a successful business? Most game developers wanting to start their own studio haven't been to business school or don't have a perfect business plan. But is passion enough to get a small company off the ground? In this talk, we will explore topics related to start-up formation and some tips and tricks to assist any aspiring game dev entrepreneurs.
Takeaway:
- Realities of starting up a business from scratch with no money, industry connections, or AAA experience
- How to mitigate risk when starting up a small business
- Responsibility and fiduciary duty in being a founder
Why Deep Community-driven Engagement is the Key to Turning Your Fans into Your Advocates.
For every successful game that has been able to draw in millions of users (and make them stay) there are literally hundreds that have failed to reach that critical sticking point where they can go the distance. There are plenty of examples in gaming history of titles that have continued to go from strength to strength for 5, 10 or even 20 years. Focusing on the importance of evergreen and evolving design, meaningful social interaction, player empowerment, and long-term commercial viability - these games should be held up as examples of exactly how to launch a new title, or even franchise, in a way that will keep it sustainable long past what chasing trends can accomplish. About Melvor Idle: The brainchild of Australian solo developer Brendan Malcolm, Melvor Idle was created to reimagine the core components of the RuneScape franchise in a way that they could be enjoyed casually, fitting around the busy schedule of adult life - distilling the core components down into an idle game in the same vein as games such as Clicker Heroes and Egg Inc. About JXP: Jagex first became aware of Melvor Idle in early 2020, and was hugely impressed with the game, realizing there was a significant opportunity to help support the game’s future development, and to reward a fan-made passion project and bring it to the attention of RuneScape players around the world.
Takeaway:
- How, where and when you should engage with your community in the development cycle.
- Balancing community demands with the vision of your game.
- The advantages of engaging with a publishing partner to boost reach and incorporate a new audience
Keynote
Keynote: Building a Creative Culture, Together
Keynote: DEATHLOOP: Looking Inside a Design Loop
In this fireside chat, members of the Award-winning Arkane Lyon studio team, including this year’s Develop Star Award recipient Dinga Bakaba, discuss some of the development challenges and successes they had during production of DEATHLOOP.
Discussion topics will include:
- Creating a first-person action game in a brand new world, while preserving the Dishonored heritage.
- Analyzing the challenges of developing an immersive sim with the added complexity of multiplayer components.
- How the studio focused on the personal skills they had to develop during DEATHLOOP's development.
- The creative team will share their choices on the design of the characters, environments, and weapons design.
This panel will change how you look at making your next game.
Keynote: Wolfenstein 3D Postmortem
In early 1992, id Software had just shipped their latest 2D platform games and were ready for something different. Having released the first texture-mapped 3D shooter, Catacomb 3D, just a couple months earlier, they were planning what their next project would be. Wolfenstein 3D was an ambitious design for an MS-DOS PC in 1992. There were no GPUs, most games were 320x200 pixels, a lot of memory was 4GB, and mice were rarely used. Follow the journey that the four founders of id Software took to create a watershed moment in gaming history that showed the world that the PC could play a new kind of game that no other machine could replicate. Game designer, programmer, and id Software co-founder, John Romero, will take the audience through this short seven month timeline and show you just how much happened during Wolfenstein 3D's development rollercoaster ride.
Mobile
Combining the Power of Free to Play with Play to Earn: Creating the Future of the Mobile Gaming Market
The current play-to-earn gaming market is dominated by crypto experts, meaning many of the experiences focus on earning with little to no depth in gameplay. In this session, we will discuss how to use the knowledge from the web2 and Free to Play era and apply it to create the next generation of Play to Earn games.
Takeaway:
- A summary of the current P2E gaming market
- An understanding of the key learnings from F2P that we believe need to be applied to bring the P2E to the next level
- An outlook on the future
Importance of Quality Immersive Social Integration When Bringing Games to Asia
Asia market has generally more hardcore mobile games, enabling gamers to enjoy a more immersive social experience is crucial to achieving healthy engagement and retention.
Takeaway:
- Cultural differences and needs of social mobile games
- How AAA experiences can be enjoyed on mobile
- Tencent’s innovation in this space
Launching a Sequel on Mobile Games
Innovation in game development is often seen as launching a new type of game. However, there are many ways to innovate without starting afresh. Creating a sequel that builds on your success – using existing characters, proven mechanics, or exciting storylines that your players love – could be a better way to go. We explore how these studios increased their success by innovating within genre to launch sequels and how they mitigated the risks involved. In particular, we look at:
- How to determine whether a sequel is the right approach
- Avoiding the risks of cannibalizing previous titles
- The impact of a sequel on the team structure and motivation
Takeaway:
- Leverage cross promotion
- Finding the right combination of veteran and new staff for the development teams
- Ensuring the sequel fulfills player desires and offers something new, you mitigate the risk of cannibalization
Planting Seeds: Designing Games for Organic Growth
Landmark's mission is to change how user acquisition is achieved on Mobile. We believe the answer lies within the design of the games themselves. Using viral mechanics deeply ingrained into the core of our gameplay loops allows our games to grow organically instead of through prohibitively expensive paid user acquisition. This talk will discuss the history of social/viral game design, which features have succeeded and failed in the past, current successful examples, and how this will evolve in the future. It will then move into how Landmark designs, implements, tests, iterates, and measure the success of our organic growth features.
Takeaway:
- A history of organic growth in games
- What viral mechanics are currently working on the market
- Viral and social features we'll start to see in the future
- How organic features can be designed and tested
The Biggest Mobile Game Feature Trends Coming Your Way in 2022
Understanding mobile game feature design is essential for getting customers to stick around in your game and keep spending money. In this talk, James Haslam takes a look into the crystal ball and uses real-world insight and data to examine the latest emerging trends that are set to shape the winning mobile games of tomorrow.
GameRefinerys analysts track over 200 mobile game features in 2,500+ top-performing games within their growing database of 100,000 games, mapping everything from a game's re-engagement mechanics to monetization, revenue and the amount of content. Some of the insights in this talk will include RPG elements, player progression, social interaction, player motivations and other key features.
This talk examines and explains key trends and features within mobile games that will be vital for companies and developers to implement. We will use real-world data to showcase how mobile games have changed throughout the years and how certain markets have influenced the genres evolution. Our analysts have compiled this data from over 7,000 participants from Western countries. This data will be integral for mobile games companies, and we have gathered our findings in a report that illustrates the figures simply and concisely.
Takeaway:
- Key features and trends in mobile games
- Understanding player motivations
- Hybrid elements
The Tech Journey Behind Love & Pies
We will discuss how we built several prototypes and tools to support rapid iteration of design and art while avoiding the production of heaps of tech debt. We’ll outline our modular code approach that’s saved us loads of time and allowed us to pivot many times before attaining success.
Takeaway:
- How to prepare for prototyping
- How to support your art and design teams
- What you’ll need to build to release a large F2P mobile game (edited)
Roundtables
Allyship and Mentoring for Underrepresented Ethnicities
One of the key pillars of any diversity & inclusion organisation or internal company initiative would be to make sure that the majority who are in positions to make a difference by simply providing allyship get the opportunity to do so. If we look at the latest industry census and see just 11% of the industry is underrepresented ethnicities then why exclude the 89%, out of which majority are allies, who also want to have a diverse and inclusive industry to foster diverse thinking leading to more innovative and inclusive products?
Mentoring is one easy way to empower the majority to be involved in inspiring the future diverse generations rather than feeling the need to help but not doing so by assuming getting involved would mean taking up the space from an underrepresented ethnicity. Join us on this roundtable where we want to discuss making diversity and inclusion something everyone who cares about can and should be empowered to be involved via allyship and mentorship. We will also discuss and share good practices on running internal diversity groups or if your company is large enough then how to help your company's diversity officer to foster a more inclusive work environment.
Takeaway:
- Practical tips on empowering all to be involved with improving diversity and inclusion of underrepresented ethnicities in our industry.
Can the Games Industry Save the Planet?
A hosted roundtable giving games businesses the chance to discuss how the sector can play its part in preventing global warming and addressing conservation issues. We'll be talking about how to measure your carbon emissions, what offsetting schemes are, what green coding is, how games can inspire change and more.
Takeaway:
- How your business can move towards being carbon net zero
- How the games you make can inspire change
- What the industry is doing in this space
- How climate change and conservation organisations are looking to work with the games sector
Develop: FTUE (First Time User Experience)
A relaxed and informal roundtable designed to help you get the most out of your time at the conference. A diverse panel of friendly and experienced devs from across the whole industry spectrum want to help anyone who feels shy, awkward, a little out of place, on the outside, or just unable to really squeeze all the goodness out of this amazing show. You'll feel positive, empowered and fully equipped to have an absolutely smashing time, with tips on how to be productive, tools to network, and commitments from volunteers to be your safety net should things get a little too much! Finally, should you feel like it would help, we'll match people up with Show Mentors to ensure however long you're in Brighton, you go back to your studio feeling invigorated and inspired!
- Shared experiences that will give you some ideas on best practise plus do's and dont's for networking at every event.
- Recommendations for talks to attend and delegates to meet, plus practical help to do so!
- Knowledge of safe and quiet spaces to help manage your experience at the show
- A mentor committed to helping you for the duration of the conference with introductions, meetings, advice, and someone to lean on!
Diving Deeper into Developer Iteration in Unreal Engine 5
Following Mark’s talk about developer iteration in Unreal 5 you’re invited to join this round table to dive deeper into issues that may be impacting your projects.
The rate of growth for modern games and the more recent world events that have forced many of us to work in a more globally distributed and isolated manner have only made developer iteration harder than ever.
Long sync times from source control, increasingly long data and code builds, valuable SSD space being eaten up and increasing larger product footprint are just some of the factors affecting our ability to work efficiently in this new world.
Come and join this interactive session and get a greater insight into how you can work more efficiently with UE5.
Exploring Ways to Create and Foster Positive Mental Health Awareness in Your Workplace
Safe In Our World discusses practical ways to support employees' mental health within the games industry, as well as how Levelling Up Mental Health can improve workplace culture. We talk about ways to eliminate stigma surrounding mental health, to make it a natural topic of discussion, and promote the dialogue around mental health so that employees are not afraid to reach out for support if they need it.
Takeaway:
- How to access relevant training for your games companies in mental health
- Easy structures to implement to support employee wellbeing
- Audience will leave knowing where accessible mental health information and resources can be found
How Can Higher Education and the Games Industry Work Better Together?
Further and Higher Education Games Development courses wish to produce high-quality graduates who go on to be employed in the industry, thereby improving their student outcomes, increasing student satisfaction and contributing to their marketing and growth. At the same time, the industry is sometimes struggling to find enough good-quality talent to maintain their own growth targets.
Everyone would benefit from clearer communication of the challenges of one sector to the other, and of collaborative solutions which benefit both parties. This roundtable aims to encourage discussions, collaboration and reflection to help forge new partnerships and move towards meeting the needs of both education and industry.
Note to industry: Indies and small companies needed just as much as large companies!
Takeaway:
- A wider knowledge of the issues facing a range of industry and education bodies
- A stronger knowledge of the priorities of industry and education at this time
- A set of solutions to begin solving these challenges in collaboration with industry/education partners. Potential for new partnerships in the future
How to Protect Your Players from Online Abuse
Evidence shows that women are more likely to be harassed online, and this is even worse for women of colour, disabled and LGBT+ women. It is not the responsibility of the victims of online abuse to protect themselves and deal with its lasting effects, and Glitch is doing everything it can do to hold decision-makers accountable and stop the problem at its core. In the meantime Glitch's workshops will equip participants to navigate the online landscape with confidence. Glitch wants to help women of all ages, backgrounds and political affiliations to overcome the barrier of online abuse, feel more confident to use online platforms in order to use their voices online.
This session hosted by Gwen Taylor (Glitch) will be a practical sessions, where developers can protect minoritised people in their communities, take practical action to prevent and deal with online abuse and to be role models of diverse, respectful and engaged digital communities. The session will explore who is most likely to face online abuse and the impacts of online abuse, ways developers can role model good digital citizenship and practical tools to help activiate your community to be part of the solution.
Takeaway:
- What is online abuse and who does it impact?
- How can developers be a part of ending online abuse and supporting minoritised communities?
- How to create positive digital communities
- Practical advice for managing social media accounts and communities
Inclusion as a Shared Responsibility - Affecting Change as an Individual
Diversity is NOT the same as Inclusion. Just because you have a diverse team, it doesn’t mean you have an inclusive work environment. Diversity is about recognising and celebrating our differences. Inclusion is about belonging and valuing our differences. Everyone must have the skills to create environments where their teams thrive and where people talent’s shine! This is no longer a nice to have but a must-have, especially in the hybrid virtual work environment where change is constant. During the session, we will go through the 3 key conditions needed to foster greater inclusion and more meaningful work in the workplace, all the while having fun! You will learn how to nurture psychological safety within teams, promote open feedback and use a coaching culture to create a shared responsibility to nurture inclusive environments. Walk away with practical actions you can start doing immediately in your workplace. This is your whistle-stop tour of powerful leadership and self-improvement skills.
Takeaway:
- Increase confidence to spot moments that matter to engage in productive conversation on inclusive behaviours, uplifting teams’ morale, and workplace culture
- Enhance skills and capabilities to have ‘in the moment’ open feedback and coaching situations, increasing employees' productivity and effectiveness
- Improve awareness and education on the principles of psychological safety and trust, allowing them to keep a constant pulse on teams’ morale and engagement to proactively manage your team
LGBTQ+ Roundtable
A roundtable discussion led by Ugonna Nwosu (he/him) from "Out Making Games" and Leon Killin (he/him) from "Sumo Group". Join us for a conversation about sexuality and gender issues in the content, creation and culture of video games. This is a welcoming space to share your stories and learn from the experience of others in a forum of LGBTQ+ games professionals and students having frank conversations about the challenges they face.
Takeaway:
We will be leveraging the experiences of the attendees to build takeaways such as
- An understanding of the concerns of LGBTQ+ individuals working in the games industry
- Techniques shared from first-hand experiences of celebrating diversity in workplaces
- Tips and tricks for pushing for better in-game representation from within the industry
- Building a sense of community and optimism for the future!
Raise Your Game: How to Make Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Central to Your Games Business
Businesses are more successful when they’re equal, diverse and inclusive places to work. But how can you make EDI essential to your games business, whether you’re working as a small team or in a major company?
In this session, we’ll bring together people who’ve sought to put EDI at the heart of the way their businesses work to give practical advice on driving diversity onwards. We’ll share tips on recruiting more diversely, on fostering an inclusive culture and broadening the content of games to foster a welcoming environment of all. We’ll also discuss how to make change stick, including how to set targets, change processes and turn incremental improvements into long term transformation.
Takeaway:
- Discover the value of equality, diversity and inclusion to games businesses
- Learn how companies have widened their recruitment pools, retained diverse talent and diversified the contents of their games to inspire change
- Understand how to make EDI a natural part of your company’s long term thinking to embed change for the long term
Show Me the Money – How to Make Your Studio Investable
A roundtable led by Victoria as chair discussing the pros and cons of raising equity investment for a small studio, and how studios can prepare and position themselves to be investment-ready and attractive.
Takeaway:
- An understanding of the materials and work needed to get investment ready
- An understanding of studios that investors are interested in
- An understanding about how to go about meeting investors
