This session looks at how teams can build strong production foundations without losing the creative spark that drives great games. Through lessons learned in both small indie teams and larger studio environments, Michael will share insights into different workflows, team structures, and approaches to sustaining both people and creativity. 

Session Takeaway

• Practical strategies for balancing sustainable workloads with efficient production pipelines.
• Clear approaches to structuring teams and workflows that support both accountability and creative experimentation.
• Actionable methods for maintaining team well-being while delivering innovative, high-quality games.

Michael Meaden
Athena Worlds

Thinking beyond genres and descriptions early in development makes it more likely your game will succeed. You *can* do this without sacrificing creativity and artistry, but it requires a fresh perspective.

Drawing on my experience both signing games for major publishers, and pitching to them as an agent, I’ll be giving you a framework to interrogate your game designs, find their irreducible core and craft truly appealing games.

This goes deeper than picking a genre, a handful of Steam tags and guessing at an elusive “USP”. In today’s crowded marketplace, you can’t just describe what you are making. You can however greatly increase your chances of success by looking at your game through a different lens, and working hard to intrigue and convince your audience.

With a number of examples from both indie and AAA spheres, I’ll be showing the way to making make games that people don’t just play, but ones they cherish and evangelize.

Session Takeaway

Discover how to look beyond genres and descriptions to get at the true core of your game

Learn how to convince people about your game, not just describe it

Get the tools to reach a bigger audience without sacrificing creativity

Caspar Gray
Green Man Gaming

The most common company value is integrity while the second most common is collaboration. But how many truly live by those values when pay structures reward competition and the most important decisions are made behind closed doors? Values alone don’t shape studio culture.

This talk is a case study of what happened when an industry veteran and an outsider founded a co-dev studio where pay is transparent, power is shared and the company culture is built within the studio structure.

Leveraging her background as a Research Scientist, Daph frames this talk as an experiment. She walks you through the original hypothesis, what rethinking pay and power meant, and their observations as the studio grew from 2 to 18 people over two years, contributing to multiple AAA co-dev projects. She will also provide a practical evaluation of these structural decisions, including their difficulties, successes and impact.

This talk is for anyone from any discipline interested in learning about how studio structure can build resilience, improve retention and affect collaboration in a co-dev environment.

Session Takeaway

• An case study of how transparent and aligned pay structures influence collaboration, competition and retention
• An understanding of how studio culture can be shaped by structural decisions, and not just values
• A new perspective on industry norms related to pay, power and resilience

Daph Janssens
Day III Digital

In absence of any sort of studio backing, funding grants, publishers, or doing anything the industry tells him to do, Stanley Baxton has managed to develop several award-winning narrative games, and went on to be part of BAFTA Breakthrough 2025 with his game LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST. In this talk, he’s going to break down how he did it, making a case for abandoning the “normal” way to develop games, and how the industry is ignoring vital talent at the fringes.

Session Takeaway

• Why we need to look beyond “getting into” the industry as a means to make meaningful games, and how this makes the entire field stronger.
• Why making “hyper-local” game for very specific “audiences” should be pursued by more developers, and can be as culturally impactful as it is artistically fulfilling.
• How someone can start striking out into making “non-commercial” games in “not real” game tools, why they should, and why I believe this needs to become more common advice to newcomers and students.
• Why, despite the fact that I’ve been able to do this, that I am still in several positions of economic privilege, and that we need more systems to support artists on the fringes.

Stanley W. Baxton
Stanwixbuster

Arseniy Klishin from Party for Introverts shares the tips and tricks he wishes he knew while securing funding and a publishing deal for their recent narrative RPG Cabernet. In his talk he provides an array of developer-friendly insights and advice about the pitching process, developing prototypes, making adjustments to the pitch and demo based on publisher feedback, and more. With topics ranging from the common challenges indie developers experience in the publisher-oriented market to demo improvement suggestions to setting expectations for the meeting and beyond, he will provide easy alternatives to lessons usually learned the hard way.

Session Takeaway

In this presentation, attendees will gain an increased confidence in pitching abilities, a breakdown of what to expect from pitch meetings from the developer perspective, and strategies for a more successful pitching process.

Arseniy Klishin
Party for Introverts

The games industry is facing many challenges, but it is full of experienced, talented people who still want to make great games. Meanwhile, the traditional routes into development feel harder than ever. Funding is tighter, teams are smaller, projects are being cancelled and too many good people are being pushed out of the work they love.

This talk shares the early story of BIG DUMB GAMES, a new indie “collective” built around a simple question: what if experienced developers stopped waiting for permission and found a fairer way to build something together?

Using their first big dumb creation, STARSHIP BLOOPERS, as an example, Murray talks through the practical thinking behind BIG DUMB GAMES: collective ownership, contribution credits, transparent reward sharing, working with little or no upfront funding, building community early and trying to create a studio model that values collective contribution over corporate hierarchy.

It is definitely not a victory lap. And it’s probably not unique. But it is a work-in-progress story about risk, trust, structure, naivety, optimism and trying to make something big, dumb and fun in a very difficult market.

Session Takeaway

• How to think about a collective studio model where contributors can share in future success without pretending risk does not exist.

• Practical ways to structure contribution credits, reward pools and transparent working agreements at an early-stage indie studio where salaries are a distant dream.

• The real-world challenges of building with little or no upfront capital, including trust, founder alignment, developing in your spare-time whilst somehow keeping the ship afloat.

• How to use a clear studio philosophy to guide decisions around people, ownership, creativity and the kind of games you choose to make and how you want to make them.

Murray Pannell
BIG DUMB GAMES

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl - a first-person open-world shooter built on Unreal Engine 5 - was released under the extraordinary circumstances of full-scale war in the developers’ home country. In this session, Agostino Simonetta, Chief Commercial Officer at GSC Game World, shares the real story behind launching this unique Ukrainian title: self-publishing without a traditional publisher, the pivotal Microsoft partnership, integration with Game Pass and cloud services, and the immense challenges of shipping a major game during wartime.

Session Takeaway

- How to successfully self-publish a major title without a traditional publisher, including key decisions on control, risk management, and partner selection

- Real strategies for building and maintaining an authentic indie-style marketing voice that resonates with fans, even under tight resources and high pressure

- Practical ways to keep development and release on track during extreme external disruptions like war, blackouts, and team relocation, while still delivering post-launch support and maintaining player trust

Agostino Simonetta
GSC Game World

From having the rug pulled out from under my feet in the waves of layoffs, to funding and shipping my very first indie game, this session will look at how I started a company and we made The Quiet Things against a challenging backdrop. I’ll take you through my journey, from making the first prototype of the game for a University project, to raising £150k in funding through a mixture of grants, crowdfunding and bootstrapping. I’ll talk about the challenges and benefits of self publishing, and show a roadmap of what our budget and production really looked like, all the way to release.

While the talk doesn’t directly involve in depth discussion of the games’ content, it’s worth noting The Quiet Things deals with some challenging topics around childhood abuse.

Session Takeaway

• Funding options available to indie developers.
• Marketing a game with limited time and resources.
• A realistic picture of what it takes to ship an indie game.
• Managing self publishing as a small team.

Alyx Jones
Silver Script Games

They're old. They're tired. They're barely hanging on. Mike Rose (No More Robots) and Rami Ismail (previously of Vlambeer) have been knocking around the video game industry for 15 years now, Mike on the publishing side, and Rami on the developer side. Now they've finally fulfilled their dreams of starting a video game industry podcast (which is an entirely unique idea and has never been done before), through which they tell terrible stories, give terrible advice, and swan around like they own the place.

In this very special live episode of Mike & Rami Are Still Here, the duo will talk memories of past Develop:Brighton visits; what is on the horizon for our industry at a time of extreme worry, and maybe even take a question or two from the audience, if they can stomach it.

Session Takeaway

• A better understanding of publisher funding in 2026. What should you be asking for? How many units will you actually sell?
• What can we expect sales to look like going forward into 2027? Are things levelling out? Are they getting worse?
• What tips and tricks are there for surviving as a studio right now? How can you rise above?

Mike Rose
No More Robots

Rami Ismail
Rami Ismail

While big tech dominates AI headlines, especially where energy, technology and social responsibility are concerned, smaller agile indies are proving that ethical development has a competitive edge in the modern marketplace, consumers are becoming more aware of the economic and social responsibility that AI brings with it. Parable Studios founder Ambrose Robinson would present how Millennium Whisper, Steam’s first on-device AI game published by Parable Studios utilised real life actor-led data with royalty payment models to put more emphasis on Ethical AI practises in game creation, and additionally eliminates server costs through local inference, and the work going into the Parable Engine for other indie studios to utilise so that they too can build sustainable games without data scraping. Overall the talk would present a strong case on why small teams are best positioned to lead the responsible AI revolution through transparency, ownership, and technical innovation. 

Session Takeaway

• Indie Devs will leave confident in the knowledge that technical solutions where AI are concerned are closer than they perhaps realize being able to use creative-facing tools to facilitate non-technical design work in AI development and game integration.
• Ethical AI isn't just a buzzword, small indie teams can integrate AI by adapting to Psychologically-grounded character AI trained on live
  actor performances, supporting creative livelihoods and safeguarding their brand with consumers. Generative AI is NOT the way forward.
• That Indies need to innovate quickly, explore and test to lead the way forward while big tech struggles with implementation, costs and infrastructure.

Ambrose Robinson
Parable Studios

The Dungeon Masters Guide To Production takes the transferable skills of being a Dungeon Master and shows a practical throughline to how it can be applied during the day to day of being a games producer.

The presentation is aimed at those who want to either learn more about production or are looking to move into the role - however it has a lot of good lessons that can be useful across all disciplines and seniority levels, especially those who are interested in leadership.

The presentation takes the audience through the life of a Dungeon Master; setting up the campaign, recruiting the party, executing on the campaign, reacting to the party making decisions you didn’t expect and ending with the final boss!

Or… Prototyping, Pre-Production, Production and Release!

Session Takeaway

• Practical Advice & Guidance on how to start a project.
• Practical Advice & Guidance on how to effectively bring a project to a close.
• Understand how to manage a team and get the best from them.
• How to effectively resolve interpersonal conflicts

Steven Golding
Miami Avalon