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Coding
Tuesday 14th July
A Frame’s Life: Frame Timing, Synchronization, and Latency in UE
Every frame in Unreal Engine goes on a long journey before reaching the screen.
In this talk, we’ll walk through that journey from gameplay code through the game thread, render thread, RHI thread, DirectX, the GPU, and finally onto the display. We’ll explore how these stages synchronize, how frames are queued and presented, and how small decisions can add measurable latency.
By the end, you’ll have a clearer picture of frame pacing, vsync, VRR, swap chains, input delay, and Unreal’s game thread synchronization options, so you can make more informed decisions on the tradeoffs between performance and responsiveness.
Session Takeaway
The audience will learn about the many different factors that make up whether a frame makes or misses a vsync.
Moving from Engineering To Management
This talk will explore the different pathways that an engineer (or IC) can take in order to move into management. It will include personal experiences within management (both as an employee and as a manager) and a thorough dive into management itself, exploring the pathways to management, different types of managers, and how to properly balance opportunities. Additionally, it will discuss in detail the different steps an engineer must take and the responsibilities that come with each of those steps.
Session Takeaway
- The questions to ask and conversations that can be had to define a path into management
- How to balance engineering and management responsibilities
- The different options available within management
Vibe Coding: Build an App in 60 Minutes with GenAI
Curious about how AI is changing software development? Join us for a rapid-fire, hands-on workshop where we use "vibe coding"—intuitive, conversational instructions—to build a working application from scratch.
- For Newcomers: Discover how to turn plain English into functional code and build your first app.
- For Experienced Coders: Test the limits of GenAI for rapid prototyping, bypass standard boilerplate, or pair up to mentor a beginner.
Bring your laptop and an idea (or riff off of one of ours!). You will leave with a working project and the fundamental skills to guide AI in software generation.
Wednesday 15th July
Inside F1 Game Development: Dynamic Objectives
This session will explore how a small team from Formula 1 game series developed a lightweight yet dynamic objectives system that provides players with contextual goals and feedback during races, meaning to help players tangibly improve their racing performance while feeling fun and authentic to Formula 1.
The talk will include concrete implementation examples with gameplay footage and behind-the-scenes formulas as well as highlighting challenges, performance considerations, and insights into how the team integrated voice acting to create an immersive experience that feels natural within a racing game.
Session Takeaway
Attendees will learn practical approaches to:
- Designing adaptive gameplay systems that enhance player experience.
- Balancing realism with the arcade nature of gameplay systems.
- Accounting for time manipulation systems (rewinding) when inventing new features.
- Designing a modular system to account for the ever-shifting scope and tight schedule in annually released games.
- The importance of speech cues for creating natural-feeling objectives.
From Potatoes to Super-chips: Optimising Player Experiences Whatever the Mobile Device
Mobile players expect smooth, responsive gameplay regardless of whether they’re playing on an older phone/tablet or on a modern flagship device. For developers already targeting mobile, or considering extending PC and console experiences onto mobile, hardware fragmentation across many vendors and generations remains one of the biggest challenges to delivering great player experiences.
In this talk, Nordeus share practical lessons from developing and optimising Top Goal, a football title currently in soft launch aimed at supporting a wide range of devices and regions. Arm will complement this with insights into on-device profiling techniques that empowered the Nordeus team to make efficient and effective performance improvements where it counts.
The session will cover accessible, free profiling tools available to developers today, along with concrete examples of feature scaling and optimisation strategies that preserve gameplay feel across low-end and high-end devices alike. We’ll also discuss why mobile is increasingly important for player retention, enabling engagement between PC and console sessions in short, everyday moments.
Attendees will leave with a clear, practical approach to tackling device fragmentation, improving player experience, and making informed performance decisions that scale from “potatoes” to modern super-chips.
Session Takeaway
- Why to profile on real devices, early and often. (Emulators and desktop builds don’t reflect real-world CPU, GPU, or thermal behaviour)
- How to optimise for frame stability and responsiveness, not just FPS. (Consistent frame pacing and low input latency define player experience)
- How to scale features intelligently, not indiscriminately. (Preserve gameplay feel across “potatoes” and super-chips by targeting the biggest bottlenecks first)
Optimising Optimisation: Why it’s Still a Challenge and How Does the Industry Solve it?
Having problems with frame stutters? Are your servers unresponsive due to performance issues? You’re not alone...
All too often releases are plagued by commentary on poor technical optimisation, despite the time and passion the devs put into making these brilliant games.
So, why does optimisation become an issue and how do we solve it? This session will explore why optimisation remains a challenge that affects so many games; and how external pressures such as the rising cost of GPUs, hardware availability, player expectations and the increasing pressure of time and money on game development are only adding to the challenges.
Our panellists will then share how developers can use knowledge, tools and processes to better address it in their games.
Session Takeaway
Understanding the challenges around optimisation that the industry is currently facing.
Insights into the impact of poor optimisation across all departments of a business.
Sharing of expert knowledge, tools, and processes that can improve the optimisation processes on their games, and shift attitudes across their studios.
Thursday 16th July
Postmortem - Shipping Godot VR and Porting to PSVR2
We set up an indie studio because we wanted to build cool things in VR. Part of that is working directly with hardware so we chose Godot so we could build our own tech stack overtime. This talk dives into the technical challenges of using an unproven engine and shipping in a difficult technical space where almost everyone is on Unity/Unreal with multiple layers between them. The challenges of hitting framerate and the design and technical choices and mistakes we made.
Review rewriting the font engine, dealing with undocumented APIs from platform holders and variety of corner edge cases that taking control of your tech stack as a tiny indie studio bring. Then add on the decision to port to PSVR2, Apple and variety of other hardware.
Session Takeaway
- How to build an engine as an indie.
- Understanding of Godot, and the pros and cons of seeding your tech state with an existing engine.
- Some VR / Godot specific programming lessons.
Stealing from AAA for Fun and Profit: Lessons in Code Quality
Scaling a project from prototype to production is a time when a lot of technical debt comes due, as the small team at Failbetter Games working on our upcoming game, Mandrake, found when entering production. This is a talk about how (and why) we decided to tackle this problem head-on with a focus on code quality and architecture, the challenges we faced, and the benefits that came back to us as a result.
Session Takeaway
- Where the cheap wins are when adopting a focus on code quality.
- Tips on moving from prototype code to production code.
- The cost/benefit tradeoff of doing all this at indie scale.
Technical Debt: Keeping your House Clean and Tidy
Technical debt is a phenomenon both overpresent and understudied. No matter your role in a production team, you've certainly encountered it yourself, or heard someone complain about it.
But what, exactly, is technical debt? What causes it? How bad is it? Can we avoid it? How?
We'll shed some light on the scary monster that plagues so many projects, see how it came to be, why it's often here for good - or at least unavoidable - reasons, and how, if we learn how to handle it intelligently and without fear, it can become a familiar part of our daily job.
This talk is non-coders friendly !
Technical debt does not happen only in code, and managing it is not the prerogative of programmers.
General examples and daily-life metaphors will be used, and while there will be some anecdotes from my own experience as a developer, we won't be digging into technical details.
Session Takeaway
A better understanding of what technical debt is, how it can hinder your production and impact your team.
Learning to identify its root causes and understand that you often can't avoid it...and that sometimes you don't want to.
Practical tips on how to evaluate and manage the debt you will create so it doesn’t overwhelm you.
