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11:00am
Rob Davis Creative Director11:00am - 11:45amRoom 1AI Wants to Play: A Game Designer’s Guide to AI in Every Stage of Development
Tuesday 14th July11:00am - 11:45amRoom 1AI is reshaping game development — but beyond the hype, what actually works in practice? This talk is a hands-on tour through every stage where AI can help, from initial prototyping to runtime gameplay, drawn from the speaker's recent work as a Studio Design Director owning the AI roadmap and a Creative Director using AI to prototype and ship games.
We start with AI as a design tool. Using platforms like Lovable, Claude, and Gemini, the speaker prototyped a suite of games in weeks rather than months — rapidly iterating on everything from mechanics to visual design. We'll cover audience modelling, gameplay videos and mockups, and provide an honest comparison of AI tools that actually matter to game teams today.
Next, we look at AI in the game itself. A custom card game system — inspired by DeepMind's Agent57 — trains a single 12,000-parameter neural network to master multiple card games using universal strategic features, evolving from PPO to Deep Monte Carlo with league training. Meanwhile, Rumour Mill and the Whispers show how LLMs can generate characters, dialogue, and even core mechanics at runtime.
We also examine shipped games pushing the frontier: Meaning Machine's Dead Meat, and Jam & Tea's Retail Mage, plus a look at DeepMind's Agent57 and SIMA 2 projects to contextualise where the research is heading.
Every example comes with honest results — what worked, what failed, and what's worth your time. Attendees leave with a practical framework for adopting AI across their own studios.
Session Takeaway
- A practical decision framework for choosing the right AI tool and technique at every stage of development — from prototyping with Lovable and Claude, to modelling audiences with TinyTroupe or Gems, to choosing between RL, LLMs, and heuristics for your runtime NPCs.
- How to use AI to radically accelerate game prototyping — with an honest comparison of tools (Lovable, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Gemini) and real case studies showing what each is best at, so you can adopt the right tools for your team immediately.
- How a single lightweight AI model can learn to play multiple games — a concrete architecture (27 universal features, 12K parameters) that's 196× smaller and 45× faster than brute-force approaches, including the evolution from PPO to DMC and the practical lessons from training failures.
- Design principles for LLM-powered NPCs that players actually enjoy — drawn from shipped games (Dead Meat, Retail Mage) and the speaker's own prototypes, including why AI dialogue needs a strong authorial foundation, how to handle latency and too-capable NPCs, and when AI imperfection becomes the mechanic.
- An AI tools landscape overview you can take back to your studio — covering prototyping, content generation, audience modelling, and runtime AI, with clear guidance on what's ready for production, what's experimental, and what's still hype.
3:00pm
Agnes Kasilovska Dead Nice StudioSam Thompson Dead Nice Studio3:00pm - 3:45pmRoom 1Interface as Identity: Designing UI That Complements the Brand
Tuesday 14th July3:00pm - 3:45pmRoom 1UI and branding are often treated like separate jobs. Branding frames the game from the outside and sets expectations. UI is what happens once you’re inside, where those expectations turn into experience.
UI isn’t only about clarity and function. It is a visual language players learn through repetition, and it carries tone, perspective, and intent through structure, typography, spacing, motion, and density. Long before a logo is refined or a trailer is cut, the UI is already shaping how the game feels.
This talk explores how interface decisions influence identity, how branding later reacts to what the UI has already made real, and how to design the two so they support each other instead of pulling apart.
We’ll look at familiar examples where UI choices become part of the game’s voice, and cases where the outside promise and inside experience don’t match. The goal isn’t to make UI look like marketing. It’s to build a shared voice: the same intention expressed clearly in two different contexts.
You’ll leave with a simple framework and checklist you can use early in development, even on small teams.
Session Takeaway
- A simple framework for aligning UI and branding from early development
- How to define a shared anchor and one consistent signal players recognize anywhere
- How to adapt style when direction shifts without rebuilding everything
4:00pm
Caroline Clark Liney Games4:00pm - 4:45pmRoom 4No, Puzzle Games Aren’t Dead, You Just Didn’t Realise They’re Emotional Experiences Too
Tuesday 14th July4:00pm - 4:45pmRoom 4Games are emotional experiences, this is very clear in genres like first person shooters or adventure games. However, puzzle games are about logic and deduction, and it’s not immediately clear that emotions are even present, let alone important. I will make the case that despite appearances, puzzle games are indeed emotional, and in articulating how different mechanics create different emotions, we can better understand why some puzzle games stick with us longer than others, and what to consider when building our own puzzle games.
Session Takeaway
- Why you should think of your game mechanics and the intended experience together.
- Examples of how the mechanics reinforce a particular experience.
- New appreciation of puzzle games and puzzle mechanics.
5:00pm
Imre Jele Atypical Types / Bossa Studios5:00pm - 5:45pmRoom 1Scheduled Serendipity: Manufacturing Creative Aha Moments
Tuesday 14th July5:00pm - 5:45pmRoom 1Inspiration is treated like lightning: an unpredictable and uncontrollable moment. In practice, the best studios do not wait for “Aha” moments to happen randomly, they create the conditions for them to occur reliably.
This talk is a pragmatic guide to elevating your work from waiting for inspiration to strike into a reliable creative powerhouse. How to go from being creative to creating a creative environment.
I will cover how artists and scientists alike have tried to explain the sources and process of creative insight, and how you can use those lessons to create an inspiration pipeline you and your team can run on purpose.
We will look at the two engines behind great ideas: taste (your ability to choose what matters) and process (how you generate, clash, and transform inputs into something new).
You will leave with repeatable practices: how to curate inputs beyond the industry echo chamber, how to use constraints to force originality, how to schedule incubation without wasting time, and how to turn the fuzzy feeling of “this is cool” into shippable creative decisions.
The goal is fewer blocked weeks, fewer derivative dead ends, and more deliberate, high-quality creative breakthroughs.
Session Takeaway
- A repeatable method to create conditions for “Aha” moments instead of waiting for them.
- Practical techniques for curating stronger inputs beyond games and trend loops.
- How to use constraints and transformation loops to avoid derivative design.
- How to schedule incubation and mode switching without losing production momentum.
- Tools to convert vague excitement into clear, shippable creative decisions.
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11:00am
Jon Ingold inkle11:00am - 11:45amRoom 1Deduction as Exploration in TR-49
Wednesday 15th July11:00am - 11:45amRoom 1The classic detective story starts with them exploring the scene and collecting evidence, and ends with the detective sitting in their chair, smoking a pipe and piecing it all together. This talk explains how inkle's breakout mystery game TR-49 takes a different approach that puts the deduction step first, by turning the puzzle process from a quiz about the evidence that can only end in a tick and a new puzzle into the way the player explores the "map" of the game, opening new "locations" by the deductions they make: which in turn allows us to make space for the deeper mysteries, with less clear-cut answers, that bring the game to life.
Session Takeaway
- A different model for deduction mechanics; moving from quizzes to exploration.
- Examples drawn from our recent release, TR-49, of how we did this in practice.
- Pros and cons for this design strategy.
2:00pm
Ayobami Aderemi ReAssure2:00pm - 2:45pmRoom 1Design for Change: Should Designers Be Letting AI Make Product Decisions?
Wednesday 15th July2:00pm - 2:45pmRoom 1This talk questions the growing assumption that Artificial Intelligence should guide key product or UX decisions in product teams. Rather than accepting AI recommendations at face value, I will explore where AI genuinely enhances research, prototyping, and design decisions, and where it subtly shifts responsibility away from human designers. Attendees will discover practical frameworks for using AI in ways that strengthen product quality, user insight, and ethical outcomes.
Session Takeaway
- How to evaluate when AI adds true value to UX and product decisions.
- A simple framework for balancing human judgement with AI support.
- Practical ways to keep ethical design and user needs at the centre of AI‑assisted workflows.
3:00pm
Lydia Cockerham Creative Assembly3:00pm - 3:45pmRoom 1Games as Dreams: Using Symbolic Archetypes to Craft Powerful, Flexible Narratives
Wednesday 15th July3:00pm - 3:45pmRoom 1It’s every Narrative Designer’s worst nightmare. A quest has been cut, an enemy descoped, or a character nixed. We know we should be calm, collected and above all flexible, but the panic sets in. The game narrative makes no sense anymore! This session will explain and explore a tool to help in this situation and many more: “Dream Mode”. By using symbolic archetypes, like the kind we encounter in dreams, we can turn overwhelming narrative complexity and confusion into functional building blocks that can quickly be moved around, adapted, or removed entirely. And in the process build stronger, more powerful and more flexible narratives.
Session Takeaway
- How to use “Dream Mode” to transform a narrative into its symbolic and functional core
- How to distil characters, locations, enemies, objects and gameplay/story beats into symbolic archetypes
- Some of the most useful and recurring symbolic archetypes
- How to work with these building blocks to adapt a narrative when change occurs, and test out new approaches quickly
- How to reduce complexity in a narrative and amp up the emotional power
4:00pm
Shi-tao Fan (Maverick) Cloud Imperium Games4:00pm - 4:45pmRoom 1Designing Immersive and Explorable Open Worlds with Narrative Encounters
Wednesday 15th July4:00pm - 4:45pmRoom 1This session examines the development of the Open World Encounter in Project Avatar, covering the design domains of systems, narrative, and gameplay. It highlights how the encounter framework enhances player exploration, improves immersion, and seamlessly blends gameplay with the project’s rich lore and strong IP identity. Through this overview, we explore the design principles, technical solutions, and development workflow that shape how players discover, interact with, and understand the world around them.
Session Takeaway
• Practical methods for designing open world encounters that balance systemic behavior with authored narrative intent.
• Techniques for integrating lore and worldbuilding into moment-to-moment gameplay without disrupting player agency.
• Actionable workflows and cross discipline practices that help teams build scalable encounter content for large open worlds.
• Practical solutions for preserving already produced content and resources during scope adjustments.
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11:15am
Peter Taylor Sports Interactive11:15am - 12:00pmRoom 1Positive Spaces: Creating Engaging Sandbox Games Through Narrative Design
Thursday 16th July11:15am - 12:00pmRoom 1Not many people know that the Football Manager series has people working in narrative design behind it, helping players create amazing stories of their own with every save. It’s not just a sports management simulation, but a true sandbox title. This session looks more broadly at sandbox games in the industry, what makes them engaging narratively, and how the developers know when to provide players with hooks and emergent stories, and when to let them do their own thing with the tools provided.
Session Takeaway
- A deeper understanding of narrative design.
- A deeper understanding of sandbox games.
- How to create the scaffolding for players to create their own narratives.
12:15pm
Annie Grudeva Radical Forge12:15pm - 1:00pmRoom 3S.T.E.A.L. like a Game Designer: Why “Just add Crafting” Never Works
Thursday 16th July12:15pm - 1:00pmRoom 3The S.T.E.A.L. game design model seeks to remove subjective game design terms, such as “fun” and “gameplay”, with objective terms, such as syntax, tension, and emotion, that designers are able to measure. Using objective terms over subjective terms will equip you with the tools to determine whether certain features of a game achieve the type of player experience that you are is aiming for in your game.
Session Takeaway
How to adapt features from other games to the needs of the game they are working on and preserving the impact on players.
remove subjective terms such as “fun” and replace them with with objective, measurable, implementable terms such as syntax, tension, intended emotion and alignment so that designers can determine what those features achieve the intended player experience.
break down games into understandable and meaningful elements, seeing how each part impacts the next. When a player isn’t having fun, the S.T.E.A.L. framework gives designers the tools to determine why.
3:00pm
Christopher Morrison Reality+, LLC3:00pm - 3:45pmRoom 1Telling Conflict-Less Stories
Thursday 16th July3:00pm - 3:45pmRoom 1We are taught that conflict drives story—to believe that conflict is the only way to tell a “good” story. That without opposition, escalation there is no movement, no meaning, no growth. But what if that assumption is not just limiting—but actively harmful?
Telling Conflict-Less Stories argues that adversarial narratives narrow our imagination, normalize violence, and reduce complex problems. Rooted in Aristotelian hero-centric themes, these stories offer violence without solutions. These structures insist on isolation, domination, and conquest—values that are the foundations of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. The result is not catharsis, but trauma; not resolution, but a narrow focus of ONE answer to all problems - violence.
This talk proposes a shift: from conflict to tension, from opposition to questions. What if stories were driven by curiosity instead of combat, by cooperation instead of conquest, by empathy, exploration, and collective transformation? Drawing from cozy games, Indigenous and
non-Western narrative traditions, and structures like kishōtenketsu, Conflict-Less storytelling decentralizes the hero and recenters the world—its systems, relationships, ecologies, into shared meaning-making.This talk is a mix of case studies, practical advice, and my signature entertaining delivery.
It demonstrates that the world is already full of conflict-less stories and IPs making hordes of money, along with the disturbing, mounting evidence that centering conflict in our stories limits our ability to solve problems in any other way than incorporating violence, or at best they only strive to preserve the status quo. In other words, proof that stories driven by conflict are putting restraints on our imaginative problem solving.
The solutions offered in the talk create/increase/allow for more:- Investigation
- Empathy
- Suspense
- Curiosity
- Multiple perspectives
And most importantly:
- CONTEXT for your narratives and experiences.
Session Takeaway
- Unlearn the 5 Conflicts and Learn the 5 Tensions.
- Case studies of how Conflict-Less Narratives are already making money.
- How to subvert the Win/Loss condition in your games.
4:00pm
Tristan Jacobs Glowmade4:00pm - 4:45pmRoom 1The Machete and the Broom: Two Roles of a Game Designer
Thursday 16th July4:00pm - 4:45pmRoom 1There are two types of game designers when it comes to daily practice, the Machete or the Broom. We are either acting as the “visionary” - cutting a swath through the jungle, leading the way to our fully-fleshed-out game; or we are the “collator” - sweeping up behind this, clarifying where the path is through each decision.
This talk unpacks the concept of these two roles by way of demonstrating how to contribute to, and amplify, core design principles on any new project.
Session Takeaway
Learn when a game designer is being a machete or a broom, and what the relationship between these roles is
Knowing when to push forward and when to take a short left on design decisions
Applying this lens helps designers at any level contribute to clear and concise designs
