The games industry clearly remains the most exciting and varied sector for a programmer to go to work in. In the Coding Track our seriously knowledgeable and experienced technical speakers will show you exactly how to rise to the many challenges and opportunities facing game programmers today - including new and emerging platforms.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
Develop:Brighton offers you an inspiring mix of top-notch speakers, practical how-to sessions, insights into the latest trends and technologies, plus fantastic networking opportunities. Find out about the different conference pass options and prices here or...
Register NowThere really is a huge mix of people at Develop - loads of peers that you can learn from and the perfect blend of every element of game development as well.
Alex Moyet
Curve Digital
Develop is a very important place – it’s one of the few developer focussed conferences we have in Europe and that makes it very valuable.
Rami Ismail
Vlambeer
Develop is the must-attend event for the games industry in the UK. It’s where we all come together and learn from each other. It’s the best way into the industry and it’s the best place to learn from your colleagues.
Hannah Flynn
Failbetter Games
There’s really something for everyone at Develop and the experience of being around like-minded people is really useful.
Grace Carroll
Creative Assembly
I absolutely love coming to Develop, it’s a brilliant, brilliant conference – you just know you’re guaranteed to meet everyone.
Jo Twist, OBE
Ukie
One of the things I like about Develop is it brings people together from across Europe and the whole world. There is a very high level of professionals here, so you have company leaders having drinks with juniors from their community.
Dr Mata Haggis-Burridge
NHTV
It’s fantastic to have such an event that provides this opportunity for all the game devs, indie devs and other organisations to get together to showcase what they do, meet and interact.
Rebecca Sampson
Hangar 13
Develop is a really great way to network, it’s also great for going to talks and finding that little tip that you didn’t know before and thinking – oh I’ll bring that back to the team!
Leanne Loombe
Riot Games
Develop:Brighton’s a great conference. It’s got a spread of people from all parts of the games industry talking about such a wide range of topics.
David Amor
Mag Interactive
Develop is an excellent way of catching up with people – there’s a really nice community feel here.
Mike Bithell
Mike Bithell Games
There are many ways you can be part of Develop:Brighton - including taking a booth in the Expo or choosing one of the many sponsorship opporunities during the event or at the Star Awards.
Contact us now!