Insomniac Senior Animator Lindsay Thompson discusses the process and inspiration for animating the cinematic cutscenes and gameplay animation for Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart.

MILEs (Massively Interactive Live Events) are zero friction, highly accessible forms of entertainment that can be experienced on any connected, screen equipped device. They combine the best aspects of lean-in gaming, lean-back TV and the thrill of live entertainment. In this presentation, Christopher, will give an introduction into MILEs and review two case studies: Pac-Man Community and Rival Peak.

Board games and video games might have more in common than you think. Victoria Caña started out as a university student whose first step in the industry was attempting to make a game with her friends using only paper, pencils, and printer ink. Little did she know, designing within the constraints of the tabletop medium would give her the foundational game development skills to have a successful career in both the indie board game and AAA video game scenes. In this talk, Victoria shares her incredible journey transitioning from being a player, to a hobbyist board game designer, to a seasoned video game producer at Riot Games.

SLOW BROS., the games studio we co-founded, has been working on its debut feature title Harold Halibut for almost a decade. The game consists entirely of physically made models that are 3D scanned and assembled in the Unity engine. The result is a wholly unique stop motion-like visual quality that is deeply immersive through its carefully crafted interactivity.

The lecture attempts to cover our bumpy, yet fortunate journey. Going from students working on a hobby project, over the development of a very unusual asset and development pipeline, as well as the founding of a company to the final steps of the game's launch preparation.

Many companies were using Flash as a primary UI framework for AAA games. After Flash was discontinued everyone were forced to re-engineered their UI's and start using new libraries. We have choosen Gameface and this talk is story about our path. How we managed to slowely transition from one framewrok to another on live product. What we learned and imporved throughout the years and where we are going now.

A talk on transforming my mindset, from "programmer mode" to "CEO mode". A change to help me become a more effective leader and help me avoid getting stuck in the "I can do it best" mindset.

Creative Europe is the European Commission‘s programme providing support to the culture and audiovisual sectors. This lecture will introduce the Support for video games and immersive content development in the frame of Creative Europe. Which types of projects are eligible? What are the conditions? How much is a grant worth? Come to learn more!

How far can we push realism in FPS games compared to a real combat experience? We will share our approach and problems we have encountered, the difference between an actual military firefight and its interpretation in video games, and how we want to evolve the FPS genre.

Rapid prototyping is a great tool to help your team think through and solve problems, through sketching, feedback and multiple design iterations. It's a crucial part not only of the early stages of game development, but also for developing and integrating new features into existing games. It is therefore an important skill for all kinds of teams to master — not just those in pre-production, but also those working on games in live service.

This talk will teach you tangible skills for how to break down effective UX design processes into 3 steps: Prototyping, Reviewing and Iterating — and why they're all uniquely important. It will also be a practical demonstration of how to work in Figma and develop functional prototypes for any device. After all, the quicker you create something functional that you can test with users, the quicker you can validate and iterate on your design decisions — and create better and more meaningful gaming experiences for your players.

A real living world in a tabletop manner? Realistic character building unplugged? Do the game mechanics even work similarly in the two such different environments? This is a story of difficulties, issues, revelations, and unexpected surprises we encountered during the process of transposing some of the mechanics from the original digital title Kingdom Come: Deliverance to the board game spin-off.

We will highlight details of the newest map for the Steel Hunter mode in World of Tanks.

The whole production will be explained from the depth of the artistic vision until the released version.

What are the specifics of creating larger maps? What kind of disciplines are involved and how to bring balance between art and design?

Crafting memorable characters is never easy. Even greater challenge is how to create a protagonist - player's avatar. They need to be unique, spectacular, yet familiar, connected to players. This lecture will go through the anatomy of a memorable character, with specifics on creating the Protagonist so that every player can identify with the character, own it, using the example of cyberpunk noir detective JC from the game "Let Bions be bygones" by Bohemian Pulp.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a game with 13 different stories in it, each with its own unique characters, art style and gameplay mechanic. The goal was for each story to feel distinct, but for players to still feel like the stories were part of a cohesive whole, exploring different but related themes. This talk will discuss our approach to prototyping a wide variety of gameplay mechanics while simultaneously adjusting the game's narrative to reflect what it felt like to play the game, based on a mix of playtesting and guesswork, and how we kept changing the game as we discovered more about what were making while we made it.

What is "GAAS"? What does it mean to design games as a service? How does the process differ from standard AAA game development and how do we adapt to the rapidly changing environment of GAAS?

As designers, we must identify moving and movable pieces of our games, and in GAAS, everything is a moving piece, or can become movable. GAAS design challenges core gameplay loops and expands on the core experience. It's a process of iteration relying primarily on the community of gamers engaged with our product, and naturally a product empowered by team synergy.

This talk will shed light on the design of game products that have a “GAAS” component to them. I will discuss what we must consider as designers and how GAAS changes our design-thinking process, drawing from my experience on Dying Light GAAS.

Teenagers from the favelas of Brazil present their insights and learnings from enrolling in a month of serious games development. Together with Dutch designers and Brazilian devs, these teenagers created games to improve their living conditions, learn a language or develop mathematical skills.

The results of this educational (and fun!) month will be presented by the teenagers themselves. The talk will give a unique insight into the Brazilian perspective on interactive edutainment.

Our psychological horror "Someday You'll Return" caught attention of both the press and the public while being one of the most disproportional games in terms of the game vs team size. The vast majority of the game was created by mere 2 (later 3) developers and this led to many revelations and/or horror stories throughout the development of our game.

In our talk you can follow us on what went well or horribly wrong and hopefully you can get some insights about pitfalls waiting for you if you develop large size game in a tiny team.

Combining some of the lessons he learned in game design, narrative design and writing over the course of a decade, the speaker will share the insights he'd wish others had told him when he was starting out. This light-hearted but sincere talk is aimed at beginning writers and designers, but hopefully other specializations might take something useful away from it, too!

In this presentation I want to share my point of view on adapting video games into board games with a lot of examples from Frostpunk: The Boardgame. What are the keys to make a good adaptation? How to respect the original work and at the same time create something that will work as a separate game, created using a different medium? What video games would I never adapt and I think other designers also shouldn’t? I will try to answer these and many others while sharing with you my thoughts about the challenges of working on adaptation.

There will be a very special panel discussion about narrative design in games featuring some of our speakers! Be sure to book your time for this one, it will be exceptional!

Nanite! Lumen! And there's so much more. Join Unreal Engine evangelist Ari Arnbjörnsson as he showcases many of Unreal Engine 5's new features.

Where to find a publisher and how to prepare for the pitch? What should be included in the pitch deck? Is there any difference between verbal and written pitching? Should you pitch your game differently to a publisher and to an investor? These and many more questions will be covered in the talk of Elena Lobova, co-founder and CBDO at GDBAY, an organizer of the biggest international online game pitching event Global Games Pitch.

The ceremony celebrates all of the dozens indie developers that has presented their games at Indie Showcase, rewarding the very best of them in three categories.