The latest wave of AI is reshaping game development — but what actually works in practice? This talk is a hands-on tour through the stages 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 UI. We'll cover how to get the best from these tools when used together, and provide an honest comparison of AI tools that actually matter to game teams. We'll then dig into a structured methodology for AI-assisted development — demonstrated on a live project — that prevents common pitfalls such as hallucination and context drift.

Next, we look at AI in the game itself. A custom card game system — inspired by DeepMind's Agent57 — trains a neural network to master multiple card games using universal strategic features; NPCs with generated personas that affect how they respond to player actions; and a game that misuses AI as a core gameplay mechanic.

We also examine some shipped games that use AI in interesting ways, and the design issues they faced. 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 in their own studios.

Session Takeaway

• A practical decision framework for choosing the right AI tool and techniques at every stage of development — from prototyping with Lovable and Claude, to choosing between RL, LLMs, and heuristics for your runtime AI.
• How to use AI to radically accelerate game prototyping — with an honest comparison of tools (Lovable, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Gemini), real case studies showing what each is best at and how they can work together, and a reliable development framework that is transferable to any tool.
• How a single lightweight AI model can learn to play multiple games — a concrete architecture that's smaller and faster than brute-force approaches, including the evolution through different RL techniques and the practical lessons from training failures.
  
• Design principles for AIs that players actually enjoy — drawn from shipped games and the speaker's own prototypes with clear guidance on what's ready for production, what's experimental, and what's still hype.

Rob Davis
Wild Loop Games

Storytelling is at the heart of what we do and runs across all crafts and mediums. This session will explore how storytelling and narrative is developing in a creative landscape with increasing overlap between film, games and television.

The panel will discuss their creative approaches, how they get inspiration, how ideas are generated and how they shape narratives across channels.

Session Takeaway

• Why storytelling remains the connective tissue across film, television and games despite differences in format and audience behaviour.

• How audiences increasingly expect to engage with stories across multiple platforms and mediums.

• Why games are now influencing the broader entertainment industry creatively, not just commercially.

• Where ideas originate: character, world, mechanics, emotion or theme.

• How narrative development differs between linear and interactive storytelling.

Jane Millichip
BAFTA

Veronique Lallier
IO Interactive

Abubakar Salim
Surgent Studios

Eloise Singer
Singer Studios

UI 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

Agnes Kasilovska
Dead Nice Studio

Sam Thompson
Dead Nice Studio

Games 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.

Caroline Clark
Liney Games

Inspiration 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. 

Imre Jele
Atypical Types / Bossa Studios

TT Games celebrates the launch of LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight - the highest-rated LEGO game ever. A panel of Directors from the team share insights into the decisions made through development to deliver on TT's ambition to create "the definitive Batman game".

Session Takeaway

• High-level project planning and workflows for large projects in Unreal 5.

• Tips for cross-discipline collaboration.

• Best practices for working with licensors.

Jonathan Smith
TT Games

Mark Green
TT Games

Dave Woodman
TT Games

Rian Walters
TT Games

Ruthie Nielsen
TT Games

Join Criterion - the studio behind Burnout, Need for Speed, BLACK, Star Wars and Battlefield - for a session focused on 30 years of continuous evolution, its place as a modern British creative powerhouse, and how the studio has moved across genres, technologies and platforms while carrying forward the capabilities and behaviours that make it Criterion. Danny Isaac and Amy Pejic will explore how Criterion has survived change without losing who it is, and how the studio continues to help shape one of the world’s biggest franchises from the UK as part of Battlefield Studios.

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Session Takeaway

• How Criterion has adapted across those 30 years through genres, technologies, hardware generations, franchises and creative challenges while preserving the capabilities and behaviours that make it Criterion.
• How curiosity, collaboration, craft, delivery discipline and trust have helped Criterion create bold ideas, executional excellence and memorable player experiences.
• Practical tools for studios, teams and individuals looking to evolve without losing who they are, including capability audits, testable hypotheses, delivery confidence checks, trust-building behaviours and deliberate resets between phases.

Danny Isaac
Criterion

Amy Pejic
Criterion

This 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.

Ayobami Aderemi
ReAssure

It’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

Lydia Cockerham
Creative Assembly

This 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.

Shi-tao Fan (Maverick)
Cloud Imperium Games

The 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.

Jon Ingold
inkle

The 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.

Annie Grudeva
Radical Forge

We 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.

Christopher Morrison
Reality+, LLC

There 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

Tristan Jacobs
Glowmade