Environmental Storytelling in Prey / Eric Beyhl, Lead Environment Artist, Arkane Studios 4C Conference 2024-10-18 | Environmental Storytelling in Prey / Eric Beyhl, Lead Environment Artist, Arkane Studios
“Will You Mentor Me?” : Mentorship in Game Development / Elena Lobova, Achievers Hub 4C Conference 2018-12-05 | Does mentorship in game development work? Do I need a mentor? How he/she can help (or harm) my project? Who can be a mentor and why would they want to help me? Good case practices and bad case practices of mentorship in game development. Tips, success stories and advices on how to benefit the most from working with a mentor.
4C: Prague 2018 Video Report 4C Conference 2018-12-03 | 4C: Prague 2018 is a melting pot where attendees can discover the future of gaming. This year more than 90 industry experts presented at a number of diverse sessions ranging from art, business, marketing, game design, leaderships, and lots more. http://conf4c.com
Gameplay components caching / Alexander Balakshin, Sperasoft 4C Conference 2018-11-22 | This session would be useful to engineers who work with component based game engines such as UE4, Unity and some proprietary ones. The presentation will cover problems of runtime stability, objects ownership and performance overhead of situations when one game component or a system needs an access to another game component. The following list of approaches will be compared: Getting a component of particular class from an entity. Raw pointer to a component Smart pointer to a component Custom structures such as component handles Complexity of implementation of these methods will also covered.
Bringing Ray-tracing into Remedy‘s Northlight Engine / Tatu Aalto, Remedy 4C Conference 2018-11-22 | Remedy’s Lead Graphics Programmer Tatu Aalto is spearheading the studios foray into real-time raytracing. The presentation will delve into how Remedy integrated RTX raytracing into its Northlight engine and discuss the results. Some examples include work on raytraced reflections and diffuse global illumination. Presentation will show several example comparisons against state of the art screenspace techniques.
Board Games with Digital App / Petr Murmak, Czech Games Edition 4C Conference 2018-11-21 | In 2007, Czech Games Edition was founded and the first released board game under this brand was Galaxy Trucker by Vlaada Chvátil. Since then, more than 50 games and expansions have been produced, including the Alchemists board game where players use their mobile phone to see results of alchemist's experiments. The game delivered a new way to play through the marriage of the analog and digital worlds. There are more examples where combining these two together can be beneficial. Mansions of Madness from Fantasy Flight Games is a very successful title using the combination of the physical components on the table and a digital companion app for delivering the story. This session will cover some of the basic, as well as some in-depth, aspects of combining board games with digital companion apps.
The Path of Creative Leader / Constantine Gavrykov, Wargaming 4C Conference 2018-11-21 | A field guide to the essentials of being a Design Manager and Creative Leader. What skills will help you survive and flourish. What practical methodologies, knowledge and philosophy will help to be effective and inspire the troops to take on impossible creative challenges.
Real-Time Fluid Simulation in Shadow of the Tomb Raider / Peter Sikachev, Eidos Montreal 4C Conference 2018-11-21 | This talk presents real-time fluid simulation used in the Shadow of the Tomb Raider game. We utilize a physically-based Navier-Stokes solver to simulate character interaction with different substances floating on the water surface, such as oil or algae. The proposed technique is well scalable to arbitrary-sized water volumes, while running within 0.5 ms on current-gen consoles. We use compute shaders to run all computationally intensive calculations on a graphics card, and leverage the so called asynchronous compute for better GPU utilization. The proposed technique will be showcased in the real game levels, along with the examples in test environment. In-depth implementation details are given, along with the optimization guidelines.
When shit hits the fan you need a plan / Ralf Adam & Vera Frisch, Tiger Team & Gamecoprs 4C Conference 2018-11-21 | The development phase of a game doesn’t always run as smoothly and trouble-free as all involved parties may have hoped at the beginning of the project. Well… in fact it NEVER does! Especially during the course of a larger production – that may take up to 2 years or more – a lot of parameters can change. Especially smaller independent game studios can be hit hard and flatfooted, and the rejection of a milestone and the sudden stop of development fee payments through a publisher can immediately cause a severe and threatening crisis for a team. In their talk Vera and Ralf will show ways how any development studio can effectively protect itself against such situations already during the ramp-up and pre-production phase of a project. Besides, both speakers will present best-practice behaviour and methods on how to react when the going really get tough, and the roar of guns already fills the air.
Growth through Cooperation / Slava Makarov, Wargaming 4C Conference 2018-11-21 | The main principles, that we use to select our partners and cooperate with them. Over the years cooperation with other businesses has become one of the key principles, which promotes the growth and development of our products. Within our collaborations we are always looking for a win-win result, that both our company and our partners can profit from. Today this approach has become part and parcel of the overall company strategy.
Less shooting in the dark / Mia Lahteenmaki & Sophia Vo, Rovio 4C Conference 2018-11-13 | Games user research can help to improve the right parts of the game already in the development phase and reduce the risks of launching or soft-launching the game. Ideally, user research can help the team to steer the product to the right path, at a reasonable budget, before investing it all for 1-3 years with a full team, in the wrong direction, which eventually costs more money, time and pain. We will demonstrate how developers can already test their game in early phase with real players, to steer the direction before committing too far in the project. We will share an mobile game case study using two key user research methods to study game prototypes and will underline the pros and cons of each method. Developers attending the talk can incorporate these methods from today.
Turning a troubled child into a winner / Vladimir Funtikov, Creative Mobile 4C Conference 2018-11-13 | ...
Building your studio UX competency and culture / Jason Schklar, UX is Fine! 4C Conference 2018-11-13 | Great UX drives game quality and KPI. This interactive session will get participants to think more holistically about game user experience, design for an audience that would rather play than read, and work collaboratively to identify and fix UX issues.
Building an Animation Runtime and Pipeline / Maurizio de Pascale Ph.D, IO Interactive A/A 4C Conference 2018-11-13 | Since 2012 all Hitman games have been running using a modified version of Morpheme, the animation middleware. Unfortunately NaturalMotion stopped licensing their technology last year, leaving us on a dead end track. Luckily new approaches to runtime animation have emerged and matured recently. These techniques achieve better visual results than blend trees and state machines, while at the same time reducing the complexity and the amount of manual work to setup the animation graphs used in games. Pushed by the circumstances and armed with a strong belief in these new techniques we've started a journey to build from the ground up a new runtime and pipeline for animation to be used for all our future games. This talk details our efforts and learning so far. After a quick recap of the theory behind runtime animation, we'll share details and samples from an actual implementation.
QA on co-development project / Sergey Sonets, Sperasoft 4C Conference 2018-11-13 | How Sperasoft QA team integrates into processes of AAA companies
Player data in game development, why, when and how / Sebastian Long, Player Research 4C Conference 2018-11-13 | In order to be 'data-informed' and to truly benefit from player data toward making incredible games, this talk will share key sources of data, and how they can be applied during development. Data is much more than DAUs and ARPPUs - we'll be outlining the overlapping types and sources of data, as well as when and how they should be used throughout development, long before softlaunch. By increasing the diversity and frequency of player data being involved in your project, attendees will understand how to cleverly invest in each type, and when, to get maximum ROI. The ordering is critical, and with this talk attendees will learn why looking at UI before UX before UA is critical to success. For many teams already launched or using player data in development, they'll learn what sorts of data they've 'left on the table', and how that could be affecting their retention
World of Tanks 1.0: Road to the biggest patch in the history of the game / Milos Jerabek 4C Conference 2018-11-09 | World of Tanks 1.0: The path towards the biggest patch in the history of the game The talk is focused on how the big 1.0 patch was created, from the initial idea on paper, prototype, all the collaboration and work done, optimisation all the way into how we communicated this to the players. Focusing on the team and how many people worked on it, what difficulties we had to resolve and all the issues we had to face to, the talk should be eye opening both to players as well as to developers, explaining the size of the effort and explaining what you are facing in the moment of patching such a big project like World of Tanks during the live production.
When Mixed Reality Experiments are Just in Time / Alexander Bobko, Wargaming 4C Conference 2018-11-09 | ...
How to build a successful Battle Royale game in a few months / Jami Laes, Futureplay Games 4C Conference 2018-11-09 | The audience will get an inside view into the process and development of Futureplay's hit game Battlelands Royale.
Common Sense in QA / Dmitri Marinen, Wargaming 4C Conference 2018-11-09 | Is it possible to have a highly efficient team of 30 QA Engineers? Yes. Is it possible for manual QA engineer to become an Automation engineer in 2 months? Yes. Can Junior QA lead project? Yes. It is all about people and Common Sense and I want to share with you how to achieve this.
UX Research Methods/ Shawn Stafford, Sebastian Long, Mia Lahteenmaki, Celia Hodent & Jason Schklar 4C Conference 2018-11-09 | Controlling, manipulation, understanding and using variables are a foundational element of any scientist and require constant education and discussion. Whether you call them independent and dependent, or predictor and predicted, a good understanding and control of variables is a necessity to produce quality research. This panel will discuss the challenges, practices, and methods of UX researchers. Topics will include the world of demographics, psychographics, Likert scales, diagnostics, journals and more. If you can manipulate, observe, measure, or capture it, then we have a history to discuss, opinions, and best or worse practices.
Run Fast, Sound Great / Jonathan Ashby & Will Augar, Frontier Developments 4C Conference 2018-11-09 | Key members of Frontier’s audio programming team show how to create a bespoke Voice Management System to mitigate an excessive voice count that’s draining CPU time and memory resources - leading to a cluttered mix that’s hard to tame. Middleware solutions don't have all the answers, and developing a bespoke Voice Management System can take a significant amount of time. This talk will provide an overview of that development across a number of titles including Jurassic World Evolution. A brief critique of previous implementations will provide an historical perspective and reveal lessons learned and key insights into choices made. An outline of the latest system's functionality and implementation will show how programming best practices such as generic systems, code reuse and separation of concerns can greatly help Voice Management System development at your studio.
Best Practices in Emergent Narrative Design / Alexander Horn, Ubisoft Reflections 4C Conference 2018-11-09 | In this presentation, Alexander Horn will examine emergent narrative from a narrative designer’s perspective. A narrative designer’s role varies greatly from studio to studio, but one issue familiar to most writers and narrative designers is the tension inherent between the game’s story created by the studio, and the narrative experienced by the player. There are many different approaches to addressing this challenge, as well as various tools. We will investigate the use of these tools and methods through specific examples from open-world and narrative-focused games. This talk will cover questions such as “What is Emergent Narrative?” and “How do we best design for emergent narrative?” Audience members can expect to gain a better understanding of emergent narrative and the best practices for supporting and utilizing it.
Making New Mistakes / Judith Hoffman, Big Huge Games 4C Conference 2018-11-09 | DomiNations YEAR THREE: What to do when people keep playing your game… DomiNations was an instant success upon launch in 2015 for the reborn Big Huge Games, proving that historical themes have an audience even in the mobile era. However, entering the third year, we still had not built out a reliable release cadence for the game, with far too many missed release dates and player issues. Over the last twelve months we’ve worked to build a sustainable process to ensure our players always have new content on a regular schedule in the game. This talk covers the specific steps taken to improve production, planning, and LiveOps to support a game that may end up with a twenty-year lifespan!
Scale up your production with smarter tools / Veli-pekka Kokkonen, GOTO Labs 4C Conference 2018-11-09 | Game productions are getting larger, while teams are getting smaller. Developing tools that allows whole team to create and implement content is more crucial for successful product than ever before. How to enable the whole content team to create and modify game logic without programmers help, while still keeping the game maintainable? How to prevent team members doing overlapping work? Our team has been creating tools at Unity Technologies and for multiple AAA games, and in this session we're sharing some of the tools we've developed and design principles and methods to help you to design your own tools.
Ylands: The Highs and Lows of Early Access / Ales Ulm, Bohemia Interactive 4C Conference 2018-11-09 | Ylands, Bohemia Interactive’s sandbox game and platform that lets players create their own adventures, has been in Early Access for one year. As we are getting close to leaving Early Access and releasing Ylands 1.0, this feels like a good time to discuss what lessons we learned about setting goals and priorities, communication with players, and, in general, keeping the balance between satisfying players' expectations while maintaining a reasonable and sustainable development cycle. With close to 30 large updates released we have found, often the hard way, what seems to work and what seemingly great ideas resulted in a lot of work and no significant improvements to gameplay.
Challenges migrating to VR development / Arthur Houtman, Force Field Entertainment 4C Conference 2018-11-09 | Challenges migrating to VR development In the space of 4 years Force Field, the studio previously known as Vanguard Games has become one of the biggest studios completely dedicated to VR. Arthur Houtman Force Field’s CEO and an industry veteran with over 25 years of development management experience takes the audience along the sometimes bumpy road the company traveled to become one of the leaders in VR development. Next to getting an understanding of the challenges of developing VR content he will also give tips on keeping a studio flexible and ready to react to shifts in the industry. Some of the takeaways from his talk: Preparing the team for the shift to another platform Strategically managing a constantly evolving platform Creative challenges designing for VR experiences When to jump in, timing is key Looking ahead, what’s in store for immersive entertainment
The sonic art of Foley - manipulating objects and emotions / Almut Schwacke 4C Conference 2018-11-09 | You only care a little bit about sound? WHAT? Let me kindle your audio enthusiasm by taking you on a journey through easily the most playful and fun occupation in audio – Foley, the incredibly fascinating craft of bringing stories to life by manipulating everyday objects. I‘ll tell you all about it, show you my favourite objects and enchant you with a live Foley session. As a bonus I‘ll give you the tools to sharpen your ears in everyday life. And there‘s more to gain than just fun. The more understanding and affection we all find for the other departments the better our games will turn out. Having an idea about sound you‘ll be able to frame your audio needs properly and give more precise and helpful feedback to your audio team.
“It’s Alive!!!” Controlling the Frankenstein after launch! / Mohsin (Mozzy) Syed, Glu Mobile 4C Conference 2018-11-08 | You have harnessed the energy of the universe, the lightning bolts have struck, and your game is suddenly alive! Now it’s time for “LiveOps” – the activities that will make the game grow, keep the players engaged, and ensure the team stays creative and happy.
No Humans, No Challenges / Anastasia Bikineeva, Wargaming 4C Conference 2018-11-08 | We have humans and we have challenges, this is a story of building trust in multicultural tech environments, including setting the teams up for success and do's and dont's.
Photogrammetry techniques in textures and props creation / Vitaliy Dzmitrakovich, Wargaming 4C Conference 2018-11-08 | There is no doubt, that photogrammetry in recent years has become a new standard in the game industry. In this session I'd like to share our team's three year experience of shooting, processing and creation game models, textures, HDR-panoramas, as well as RnD in the field of photogrammetry.
Crafting Empires & Puzzles / Tim Lonnqvist, Small Giant Games 4C Conference 2018-11-08 | Making game in a genre the team is not familiar with can be challenging...but having a clear plan and super-efficient approach to development can make a huge difference! This talk covers how Small Giant Games designed of a hugely ambitious game that proved to be massive hit, and how the small team size and limited development time both helped in the process.
Real-life predictive-analytics models / Dmitriy Shchegrikovich. Wargaming 4C Conference 2018-11-08 | Title: Real-life predictive-analytics models to support player lifecycle Registration, onboarding, active involvement, activity decay, churn and winback – each stage in player’s lifecycle requires its own predictive analytics tool. The Session will present a toolset of fully automated machine learning models for managing product audience. All models will be discussed in a WHW manner: When to apply a model, How it was built, and Who is the target audience of the model. Along with the models discussion, I will share the industry best practices and personal experience in posing and answering complex business questions in a data-driven way.
Localization QA: Deliver Linguistic and Cultural Quality To The Players / Sara Porello, Wargaming 4C Conference 2018-11-08 | An insight into the job of localization QA in the gaming field, with a focus on the differences between translation and localization QA. The presentation will demonstrate and explain localization QA processes, methods and issues, and will be useful to both non-experts and insiders to get an overview of LQA duties and activities. The speech will demonstrate how localization can play a pivotal role in respective target markets, affecting the users’ experience in several ways, and what issues can arise from low-quality localization. The presentation will feature several examples from Italian and other languages, but all examples will be understandable to an English-speaking audience.
Building an International Community for Serious Play / Matthew Lee, IGDA Serious Games 4C Conference 2018-11-08 | For the last 30 years, entertainment has understood to be the core value of our industry and the interactive experiences we create, fueling the growth of videogames as a medium from a niche hobby into one of the most celebrated and impactful to exist. Yet, while it may be the core value, it has never been the only one. Today, many major game studios are openly acknowledging that by engaging in academic and educational endeavours (e.g. Assassin’s Creed Origins’ “Discovery Tour” or EVE Online’s Project Discovery), with even smaller studios finding success with games which touch on serious issues (e.g. This War of Mine). In this talk, the chair of IGDA Serious Games discusses the need for a community – a culture – to support value-driven development, one not limited by the divide of commercial and serious games, so we can build more meaningful experiences, and better demonstrate the power of games.
Building Game Development Communities / Chris Hamilton & IGDA members 4C Conference 2018-11-08 | Join us for a conversation with community leaders and organizers from around the world as we talk about creating, fostering, and growing local game development communities. We'll also have a candid discussion on the ups and down, the joys and sorrows that can come with being a community organizer.
Building and breaking the genre / Petr Kolar, Bohemia Interactive 4C Conference 2018-11-08 | How do you perceive genres? Is it something you need? Do you feel constrained by it? Let's have a look how we at Bohemia Interactive helped create genres and how we broke them in our new title Vigor.
Project Discovery: Real scientific contribution through video games / Bergthor Hauksson, CCP 4C Conference 2018-11-08 | Find out how CCP and Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS) allow EVE Online players to make real contribution to science, first through protein classification for the Human Protein Atlas and then by analysing light curves of distant stars in hunt for exoplanets.
VO Masterclass / Mark Estdale, OM 4C Conference 2018-11-08 | Hiring and working with actors, is like hiring anyone to join your team. Get it right you win, get it wrong, you lose. This practical session is about getting the big YES! from your team and your players.
How Game Jams can foster communities / Jo Summers, Global Game Jam 4C Conference 2018-11-05 | Jo takes you through some example game jams, how designing jams in different ways can get different output, and how to run a jam to best benefit the community. She will talk about how to define a successful event and share some stories and examples of successful games and community building that have come out of game jam events from around the world. This session hopes to give you some more information about how valuable game jam events can be in supporting local grassroots, indie communities, and hopefully inspire the audience to create, attend and support game jam events in their area.
Asset Creation in Dishonored 2 / Adrien Thierry, Arkane Studios 4C Conference 2018-11-05 | An overview of the way we created assets for the levels of Dishonored 2 at Arkane Studios. We will see how to plan our creation process on a big game project which have a specific art direction within a team of many artist. How to emphasis this artistic vision with concrete examples in a game production context.
Lessons learned from prototyping with WoT / Aidan Millot, Wargaming 4C Conference 2018-11-05 | While Prototyping is fun it can be very hard to master the skill. Generally this is because to improve you need to learn from experiences and with prototyping if you don’t succeed then you don’t always get a second chance. This talk aims to share our experiences building prototypes on WoT over the past 12 months. We will share the approaches we took to build our prototypes. We will look at the positives and negatives of each. We will share our tips on how to Manage the idea. Advice on approaches to build the idea. Finally suggestions on how to deliver your prototype. These are all lesson learnt while building prototypes over the last 12 months. This talk aims to provide practical tools the audience can use for the next time they need to do a prototype.
I Can Be My Worst Enemy / Genevieve LeBlanc, Clever Endeavour Games 4C Conference 2018-11-05 | Work-life balance in game development is being fervently discussed these days, with a necessary focus on management practices. But even under the best employment conditions, we must also take our wellbeing in our own hands. This can be especially difficult for Community Managers, because social media never sleeps and being part of a community is so much more than just a day job. Based on my experience, I give some tips on how to balance your personal and professional lives while occupying a CM position. I'll present the strategies, tools, support networks, and safety measures I rely on in my daily life.
Craft the Right Experience — Before It’s Too Late! / Wezst Hart, Wargaming 4C Conference 2018-11-05 | Why don’t more companies make products like Apple? Furthermore, why don’t more companies have fans like Apple? User Experience designer Weszt Hart will discuss how a Day Zero focus on experience and craftsmanship plays a vital role in creating brand loyalty and amazing products that people will enjoy for years. He will also discuss what UX design is about, what UX means in the gaming industry, the ROI of UX, and where many companies fail with experience and craftsmanship. He will present visual examples in gaming and beyond.
Motion Capture for core gameplay animator / Maskym Zhuravlov, Naughty Dog 4C Conference 2018-11-05 | This lecture presents a personal summary of best practices in utilizing Motion Capture for creation and iteration of core gameplay animation features. While the lecture touches upon all the common subjects such as pre-shoot preparations, shoot structure, vendor and actor management, it emphasizes on what all that means for gameplay prototyping and iteration. The lecture is supported by materials from development cycle of Remedy’s “Quantum Break”.
Building a Community for Seeds of Sol with Development Streams / Rainer Angermann, Rarebyte 4C Conference 2018-11-01 | The Austrian studio Rarebyte is working on the action adventure rogue-like Seeds of Sol. Getting visibility for an indie title is strongly tied to building up a community around the game. In this session, Rainer Angermann talks about how the company uses the gaming-broadcasting network Twitch as one of their primary methods for community-building. He discusses issues, learnings, and pitfalls when developing live with and especially for a community.
Pretend Your Product Doesnt Matter / Rob Martyn, GSN Games 4C Conference 2018-11-01 | Game developers often think fundraising is for development costs - "how much will it cost to make the game I want to make" - and publishers are for marketing But there's a F2P business model based on counter-intuitive principles. What if you raised just enough money to build and launch the absolute minimum core play experience for less than 1/10th the cost, to see if you can find a market? Operate your game as a generic "Lifetime Value" generator that you could arbitrage with Cost Per Install and, once profitable, raise REAL money for as much UA as you could spend profitably (and fund further development to improve LTV. Could you raise funds more easily on a game that is already demonstrably profitable? If this is an easier and more reliable path to success than trying to raise $15M for a new game of unknown market appeal, what would you need?
Tackling the deadlines block by block / Petri Alanko, SysExCom 4C Conference 2018-11-01 | Lots of creative people face writer's blocks in each of their projects. I've found several handy ways to tackle these - a few good stories on the side, too.
Turning A Sinking Ship Into a Submarine/ Emre Deniz, Opaque Space 4C Conference 2018-11-01 | With tight schedules, invested resources and high-running passion, it can be difficult to predict and pivot away from failure during development. This session explores how a small game studio foresaw impending doom and leveraged existing resources, production tools and content into creating intellectual property to turn potential catastrophe into valuable market opportunities.
