Welcome to the devcom 2017 schedule
including devcom developer conference, RESPAWN - Gathering of Game Developers, devcom Master Classes & Tutorials, devcom Summits and the gamescom Business & Public Keynotes!
Please find all speakers (including keynotes, master classes, summits and tutorial speakers) on the left hand tab "devcom: All Speakers"
How can you predict the future? Which platform might be the next big thing? Which business models will be successful? Why should you be an early adopter and be innovative?
In response to the growing popularity of streaming services - like Twitch, Facebook Live, YouTube Gaming, Microsoft Mixer - games developers are increasingly adopting new design philosophies to create games, not merely with players in mind, but with the influencers who are so essential in gaining traction today. Game Insight CEO, Anatoly Ropotov, will explain how his company changed the way it created its new game – Guns of Boom – and how these choices helped the game surpass 10 million players in just weeks. Ropotov will provide insights into the design challenges, player feedback during the development process, and the lessons their learned in this emerging area.
If you are a Game Designer, you know how hard it is to communicate your vision clearly to all members of your team. No matter how well (you think) you explain the overall concept or a specific gameplay mission, no matter how many pages of design documentation you write, there are always misunderstandings and important matters are getting lost, forgotten or ignored.
Game Design Drawings are a quick and simple tool to help designers and other team members work towards a shared vision. You don't have to be an artist or particularly good at drawing to do this - all you need is pen, paper, and clear idea. Game Design Drawings are not about art or graphics - they can help visualizing interactions, controls, UI, perspective, level overview and/or gameplay, depending on what you need.
Watch this talk to learn about how and why the concept was developed, to see examples of its application in 7 different games from explorative to educational to personal games, and learn how to make your own.
The talk will entail an breakdown of the Indian market in multiple slices including consumer base, demographics, devices used, consumption patterns & monetization potential and techniques.
With the success in the Hidden Objects genre, MyTona will share their experience on their journey climbing the top grossing chart, attaining Top 10 Grossing for US iPad. The audience will gain insights while we look back at how the game Seekers Notes: Hidden Mystery has progressed from launch till today. This talk will help new gaming companies to define their own formula for success.
The game development scene continues to evolve every year; with new tech; disruptive designs; and the occasional curveball. What innovations are inspiring creativity and which seem like they will become money pits?
VR is the gaming tech everyone’s talking about. Yet not every developer out there can venture into VR development for various reasons - nor should they since probably not every gamer would want to play solely VR titles anyway. But what if you could incorporate a little of VR’s halo, the high immersion, into your flat 2D game… Well, use audio! I’ll let you know how.
ATTENTION: while there will be standard headphones provided on site, we advise you to bring your own headphones if you plan on visiting Sound & SFX talks to guarantee the best possible experience!
Small Studios can Leverage Technology to Achieve Triple-I Content on Production Values, including Animation, Cutscene and Graphics
This talk is about the "technology concept pipeline” and explains how Phantom 8 Studio achieves tripple I (III) content on the production values side by collaborating with competent technology partners and without spending an insane amount of money. The pipeline focuses on characters, animation and cutscenes, which are a major part of 3D realistic games, especially 3rd person games like Past Cure will be.
The talk is supported by Philip Weiss from metricminds. He will zoom in on the capabilities of motion capturing.
Diversity is getting an increasingly large part of our industry’s mindshare when we talk about workplace improvements we can make, but there are aspects to improving and creating a more diverse work environment that are still not getting a lot of attention. These hidden aspects include differences and diversity in our thinking process, and how we work with mental illness and mental disability. For example, physical-labor intensive industries take proactive steps to prevent physical injuries. What are we as an intellectual-capital intensive industry dong to prevent mental illness? Also, while we are just starting to address diversity in externally identifiable aspects (race, gender, age, physical disability), we are not having many meaningful discussions about hidden diversity (mindset, life experiences, outlook). If every person we hire thinks the same way that we do, are we really getting the full benefit of diversity?
This panel will look at how we identify and recognize some of these more hidden aspects of our work environments, what advantages we miss and what the risks are if we don’t address these issues, and what we can do about them now as individuals, as leaders, and as an industry.
Over the past decade the nature of game development teams has evolved from a near internal affair into a global exercise as teams from around the world come together to create the next great game. This evolution has changed not only the development process, but also the nature of business relationships between teams into co-developers. Establishing a successful co-development can be a daunting process and this talk goes into the details on how to do it best through practical straightforward advice.
How (not) to design, plan and develop a game when you are a megalomaniac. Open world RPG is the most complicated and feature rich genre a developer can choose. When you choose to develop an RPG with features that no one has tried before, such us first person physics based sword fighting, thousands of autonomous NPCs or non-linear quests and mix them with traditional storytelling with hours of cutscenes and dialogues, you can bet that the development will not be boring. The talk is about many challenges, pitfalls and horrors during the development of such game.
So why does a game need a publisher? Is it really worth it? Some developers work with publishers; some decide to self-publish; some benefit and some fail. In this session, we’ll talk about how Wargaming became a huge publisher that capitalized on big opportunities across nearly 20 years. You’ll also discover how developers can benefit from partnering with publishers like Wargaming and what it brings to the table.
Takeaway
You’ll get a better understanding of the services big publishers provide and how it can help your game be a hit.
Audience addressed: developers, publishers
Target Audience:
Those who is interested in developing sports mobile game.
Those who is interested in Chinese mobile game market.
Outtake:
A brand new way of thinking in sports game design.
There is a traditional disconnect between the video games industry's high revenue figures ($100B in 20016, NewZoo) and the average returns for VCs involved in the video game industry (Pitchbook Data, 2016). Altered Ventures is a new Venture Capital seed fund based in Silicon Valley for Independent Games that invests in a different way, trying to capture the huge opportunity that the independent games industry is for developers and for investors. If you add the fact that new enablers like VR and AR will increase the global pie very soon, we might have one of the best moments in history to develop (and invest in) games.
An overview of influencer marketing vis-a-vis other marketing functions and how, in the video game industry, it is being effectively deployed in new and clever ways.
David and Brad will have a discussion as it relates to the evolution of game development. Brad will talk about the journey from building a game engine to leveraging one; the value you can get out of today’s game engine’s and why hard core gamers want to earn their way through games vs paying or playing with gamers that are paying their way through the game.
Voice as a means of an interface is growing more than ever, and it’s here to stay. Both users and game developers need to learn to adapt for voice. This talk will explore the pillars of game design applied to voice, cover best practices using examples and answer questions like: what makes a game fun, what makes users come back? If you want to learn hands-on how to build voice-enabled games with Alexa or how to add a voice experience to your existing game, join our workshop on developing games for Amazon Alexa on Tuesday, August 22 from 13:30 - 15:00: http://sched.co/Bgg3
Got trolls? In 2017, it seems like everyone is talking about the impact that trolling and toxicity have on online communities — but not even the big players know what to do about it.
In this fun and engaging talk, Two Hat Security CEO & founder Chris Priebe asks and answers the questions that are on everyone’s minds: Is there a link between toxic behavior and increased user churn? Do harassment and abuse actually affect your bottom line? And can you really moderate content without limiting user’s freedom of expression?
Finally, he provides real, actionable moderation strategies that game developers can use to shape healthy communities and decrease churn.
Takeaway
Practical moderation strategies that designers and managers can use to increase user engagement and retention.
The objective of this session is to provide practical advice based on real world success cases on how to move from “having a great meeting”, providing pages of documentation, and reworking financials multiple times to actually receiving funding. Michael and Alex have been directly responsible for greenlighting and closing hundreds of millions of Euros in funding for Western Developers and will be providing an overview of best practices to secure funding from the East.
A group of indie publishers sit to discuss the state of publishing indie titles. Listen to their experience on signing titles, focusing on genres, marketing, PR, discovery, and managing influencers in this competitive indie space. Leaders from Raw Fury, Gambitious and Versus Evil will represent this panel with the goal that indie devs can get some great takeaways on how to approach their development path to be successful come launch.
Take-away of Session
Audience Addressed: New and current Independent game developers
Find out why indie developers love Defold, King's cross platform game engine for lightweight game production. In this session you will learn about the new integration with Amazon Gamelift, that allows developers to easily integrate their games with Gamelift on multiple platforms at once.
Audience: Developers
The communication between game developers and music composers is often challenging, as two very different worlds collide. From my experience of over 12 years and over 100 game projects, I will provide work examples and advice to optimise the communication and get the best and quickest results. These are some of the questions I will strive to answer: Do I need a musical education to talk to the composer? What instructions does the composer need to work efficiently? How much artistic liberty should I give? What is realistic and what is unrealistic to ask? How should I present negative feedback constructively? The conference will be useful for game developers, art directors, audio directors and music composers alike.
Audience Adressed: Developers, publisher, service providersToo cumbersome, too granular, too ineffective: How to deal with a new media class of micro influencers in Live Streaming? This lecture by Marc Fuehnen, CEO of loots, explores the shift from traditional influencer marketing to data- and performance-driven approaches in Live Streaming.
This covers:
This talk covers the width of marketing approaches in Live Streaming today, gives hands-on best practice examples and offers surprising insights into the inner workings of Twitch,YouTube Gaming, Mixer and Facebook Live.
Long story short, Pixel Federation tripled DAU and monthly revenues after launching Diggy’s Adventure for iOS and Android. We spent one million EUR a month on paid user acquisition during the global launch, and made over five million EUR in less than three months. Cool, right? But why should you care? Because not every game in the App Store is a hit. Diggy is our mobile “hit”, but in terms of numbers, we’re far from games like Pokémon Go or Clash Royale. So your game doesn’t have to be a “hit” to be profitable.
Description
Learn how major titles like Halo, Hitman, and Walking Dead are using Azure to build great experiences for their players. Building game servers, storing data and managing game analytics may be easier than you think. You could be building a Mobile, PC or Console games, regardless of your team size, Azure has a lot of services to offer to build amazing game experiences, save money and monetize your player base. If you have an existing backend infrastructure or are planning to create a new solution from scratch, Azure provides you the flexibility and security to get your game running quickly at global hyper scale. Learn about sample codes, reference architectures and partner solutions on Azure to quickly build your next game on cloud.
Audience: devs, architects
Audience addressed: Indies
An open discussion on keeping the video game medium relevant and significant today. While we were growing up the games haven't been keeping up in terms of development and maturity, and have hit a plateau of mediocrity and countless rehashes. Let's get back to the how and why earlier games were genre defining masterpieces and how we can learn from them. Right now it's mostly just entertainment for the sake of entertainment without almost any cultural aspiration. Let's change that.
Description
While we as game developers tend to create all kinds of roadmaps while producing a new kick-ass game, we often seem to be completely lost when it gets to a clear and mature business plan for our own company. A vision statement for the next AAA blockbuster? Sure thing – here you go! A vision statement for my studio? Wait a minute…
My main goal for this class is to sharpen the awareness of especially studio leads, directors and senior managers on the importance of having a clear strategy for your team – no matter if you run a small indie studio or if you are in charge for a mid- to large-sized multi-project company.
This Master Class will include a wide variety of best practices and learnings, starting from handling studio growth, fostering company culture or thinking about exit strategies – but also dealing with publishers, investors and other partners in all sorts of situations or growing your business network.
Never forget: Coming to the realisation that your organisation needs one is easy – but actually creating a strategy is a little harder.
Inspired by the innovation in virtual and augmented reality, Masaru “Nogi” Ohnogi will share how gumi is thoroughly invested in establishing and encouraging progress in the AR/VR market. After visiting more than 20 countries, Nogi will share his experiences and cover significant points required to develop AR/VR content and games. He will also shed light on his insights regarding the future trends of AR/VR on a global scale.
Alexa is the speech and personal assistant technology behind Amazon Echo. Alexa offers a full-featured set of APIs and SDKs, like the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), that you can use to teach Alexa new skills, of any type, including games. This hands-on workshop will provide a walkthrough of the latest Alexa Skills Kit specifically applied to gaming and interactive storytelling. A great voice experience stems from great voice design. In the first part of this workshop you will learn voice design best practices as well as get hands-on experience through short group activities. You will then apply those concepts and learn how to build games for Alexa enabled devices running on serverless AWS services Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda.
Preperation requirements:
1. Sign up for an Amazon developer account.
2. Sign up for an AWS account. In the AWS account, select EU (Ireland) as your location. Credit card details are needed, no fee applied.
3. Read our documentation on creating an AWS Lambda function for a custom skill.
4. Read our tutorial on building a fact skill.
5. Come prepared with the following tools: Node.js and a text editor.
Audience: devs, designers
With 800M people playing at least Facebook connected game every month, we continue to invest in expanding the ways that people engaged with games across multiple platform experiences. Bob will share the latest developments on these platforms including Instant Games on Messenger, Gameroom and Gaming Video as well as ways to leverage our suite of solutions to help engage and grow your communities of gamers regardless of the platform you are building on.
Audience addressed: relevant for all audiences but more focused on product, community and business
Many teams set out to build a great Indie game… and then discover that going Indie also means you have to build a business. From production methods to people management to legal regulations, the process of company-building presents us with unique challenges. In this extended Devcom Master Class, veteran game developer Don Daglow will provide team leaders with a foundation for managing their teams and their businesses. The session will be personal and interactive, with discussion of specific problems affecting the managers in the room.
Audience Addressed:
Anyone interested in founding or managing small, growing game companies.
Experience Level Addressed:
As game developers: Intermediate
As business managers: Beginning
Takeaways:
From crowdfunding to global publishing, the journey of 2 Texan “indie” studios on how to live up to backers’ expectations after an extraordinary kickstarter success; keep focus in the project and move to global publishing with the collaboration of a Bavarian publisher.
J. Todd Coleman, Gordon Walton, Richard “Lord British” Garriott and Lars Janssen will hold an open discussion with the audience and share their experience in designing, producing and publishing Multi-Player RPGs.VR/AR is poised for a breakout year in 2018 and strong momentum is building with developers, investors and stakeholders even while the industry is still in its early days.
Our panel of global VR experts discuss current and future trends and opportunities VR/AR game developers - including upcoming developments in hardware, software and distribution & marketing channels - and risks that you will want to avoid in the near future. We also take a look on how quickly the industry has evolved to where it is currently.
Description
One of the main reasons that game projects fail is a lack of clarity around the game's creative goals. In this master class, veteran designer and studio leader Dave Rohrl will walk participants through a series of exercises intended to help clarify and structure a game's goals. These goals statements can then be used to align and motivate teammates, structure and prioritize design and development, onboard executives, and help marketing express the essence of the game. This is a workshop-style class where a high degree of participation is expected. Attendees should come prepared to do in-class exercises, present their work, and give feedback to others. Expect to leave the class with a clearer creative vision and a stronger pitch than you arrived with.
Takeaways
Participants will walk through a series of practical exercises designed to clarify creative goals for game projects. They will apply these tools to a current project, and will walk away with a clearer vision of their current game and a set of tools to apply to future projects.
Audience addressed: This is an intermediate level class primarily intended for game designers, but it may also be useful to product managers, producers, and executives.
(Part 1/2)
Description
One of the main reasons that game projects fail is a lack of clarity around the game's creative goals. In this master class, veteran designer and studio leader Dave Rohrl will walk participants through a series of exercises intended to help clarify and structure a game's goals. These goals statements can then be used to align and motivate teammates, structure and prioritize design and development, onboard executives, and help marketing express the essence of the game. This is a workshop-style class where a high degree of participation is expected. Attendees should come prepared to do in-class exercises, present their work, and give feedback to others. Expect to leave the class with a clearer creative vision and a stronger pitch than you arrived with.
Takeaways
Participants will walk through a series of practical exercises designed to clarify creative goals for game projects. They will apply these tools to a current project, and will walk away with a clearer vision of their current game and a set of tools to apply to future projects.
Audience addressed: This is an intermediate level class primarily intended for game designers, but it may also be useful to product managers, producers, and executives.
(Part 2/2)
Description:
This talk gives a technological and architectural introduction on how to build and operate a scalable backend service for mobile games.
Attendees will gain an understanding of technological options for the client-to-server interaction and how to design a backend infrastructure that can handle a reasonably large number of concurrent users to survive a successful game launch.
The session will conclude with a look back on our recent game launch and how our own architectural choices helt up in reality during “feature week”.
Take Away
Participants will get an overview of the various architectural and technical challenges on the server side, gain some real-world insight and learn how to avoid „catastrophic success“ on launch day.
Audience Adressed: Client&Server Devs, Production staff
Explore to Create
Richard “Lord British” Garriott discusses how in his 43+ year game development career, he has been inspired to and by exploration to create lasting intellectual property, as well as reach the final frontier himself.
In this 2 hour masterclass Sjoerd De Jong will dive into the depths of Unreal Engine 4 rendering. From the perspective of an artist Sjoerd will go through a big portion of the real time rendering process the engine runs through each frame, and what its practical implications are on art production. The masterclass will focus primarily on occlusion, geometry, and lighting rendering in order to give the attendees a better understanding of performance considerations, art pipeline, and rendering features of Unreal Engine 4. The class targets both game developers and people from the film, architecture or visualization industries.