Join us for an engaging workshop led by a seasoned expert in worldbuilding. Discover the art of crafting immersive narratives across genres and mediums, with practical tips drawn from years of professional experience in gaming and novel writing 

Workshop Takeaways: 

Understanding the Importance of Worldbuilding: 

• Enhances storytelling across various genres. 
• Crucial for creating immersive gaming experiences. 
• Key component of successful intellectual properties (IPs). 

Exploring Worldbuilding in Big Business: 

• Examples from iconic IPs like LOTR and the Three-Body Problem. 
• Demonstrates how worldbuilding drives commercial success. 

Practical Tips for Effective Worldbuilding: 

• Ensure versatility to accommodate diverse story genres. 
• Design worlds adaptable for multiple media formats. 
• Utilize resources like Wikipedia for cultural enrichment and inspiration. 

Crafting a Multifaceted World: 

• Create a setting conducive to various storytelling styles, from mystery to adventure. 
• Foster cultural depth to enrich the narrative experience. 

Leveraging Personal Expertise: 

• Offer firsthand insights and experiences from professional endeavors. 
• Provide actionable advice drawn from years of practice in gaming and novel writing. 

Tutorials are a great paradox of game design. They are one the first things player sees after launching a game, but usually the last thing that developers work on. Everybody hates them, but we all need them. They are boring, but they are crucial to give us a smooth experience. Playing a tutorial is easy, making a great tutorial is super hard. 

In this workshop, we will: 

• learn about different requirements for a great tutorial 
• meet different players and their expectations 
• look at different tutorials 
• learn how to structure and deliver a tutorial 
• brainstorm a mechanic for a fictional game together 
• come up with ways to tutorial the mechanic 
• discuss and polish our ideas 
• sum up what we learned 

How Landscape Architecture and Environmental Psychology can be used in creating open world level design? On this workshop you will create a simple open world level layout. Environmental psychology theories will allow you to make sure that the layout is easy to understand and map out in the player’s mental map.

• Target audience: beginner to intermediate Level Designers and Level Artists.
• Requirements: Unreal Engine 5 – basic proficiency in setting up level geometry and terrain.
• Takeaways: learn the theory of player wayfinding and navigation methods, know how to design level layouts that are aligned with human nature of cognitive mapping.

A deep dive into the process of creating relatable characters, covering topics such as how to design a character from scratch, how to take your character from being a function in the plot to someone people love or hate, and how to create a proper context for your characters and tell their stories while making them fit the larger narrative. 
 
The workshop will focus on changing the way you see characters in the plots you’re working on — rather than archetypes or props, they will become relatable human beings. 
 
Being familiar with Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty will help you a lot during this masterclass! 

Young novelists and screenwriters are given one piece of advice: write about what you know. What about narrative designers? Should we design what we know? 

This workshop focuses on the idea that our own memorable experiences can and should be used as the input for our design work, and that by doing so we can create memorable and unique experiences for the players. We will work on identifying sources of inspiration in both mundane and dramatic experiences from our lives and adapting them for different genres and gameplay loops.  

We hope to capture the formula of adapting personal experiences to games—or, at least, create an inspiring design experience for the participants. 

Workshop Brief

The objective of the workshop is to develop a small island world in teams. The process of worldbuilding will happen through working together in and between teams and achieving consensus in relevant discussions. A few rules will be provided to participants to give them a sense of structure and better understanding of how they should direct the worldbuilding effort.

The participants’ goal is to create a believable, comprehensive and quality narrative of the conquest of a newly-discovered island by rival Imperial houses. Participants are primarily responsible for the worldbuilding and narrative elements concerning their own house, but can collaborate in a friendly or hostile manner with other houses, as well as one non-participant faction. Every team will be additionally assisted by a Game Master. Discussions of both the entire worldbuilding and narrative processes, as well as their individual steps, are central to the workshop, and every team’s efforts will be evaluated by their co-participants in regular assessments, earning points for the quality and creativity of their work. It’s worth noting that a team’s house does not need to conquer their rivals in order to achieve victory for their faction, as tragic downfalls can make for better stories than triumphs, and narrative & worldbuilding quality is what’s preferred over a gamified approach.

Takeaways for Participants
● Opportunity to work on worldbuilding within a group of experienced narrative
& world creators, with a large degree of creative freedom;
● Learning from each other’s experience, and narrative and worldbuilding
approaches through cooperation and discussion;
● Opportunity to analyse, and discuss the workings and economic structure of a
small medieval state in an in-depth way;
● Improving cooperation skills, as the workshop is geared towards solving
problems through discussion, collaboration and ultimately consensus, as
opposed to being a competition in strictly pragmatic problem-solving;
● Fun! We wanted to make this team-based effort as enjoyable as possible.

How we gathered our party to deal with the devil that was Baldur’s Gate 3, without losing our souls along the way.

How do you present players with exciting gameplay content in highly narrative-driven games? This talk will cover some of the challenges and interesting examples of decisions that CD PROJEKT RED faced during the production of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and Patch 2.0 for Cyberpunk 2077. It will also cover some of the structural challenges the company faced with its RED 2.0 Agile transformation in the gameplay teams, discussing how we tackled silo structures in our departments.

An informative retrospective of how our approach to making characters has changed over the last decade at Guerrilla. Covering the journey from launching Killzone Shadow Fall on the PlayStation 4, all the way through the latest release of Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores.

This is a case study from other areas of entertainment showing the ingredients of what makes a world compelling, believable and relateable, regardless of how fantastical it is. The talk includes a break down how specific designs were able to connect with an audience and still remain relevant today (Star Wars, Dune, etc). In the last portion I could show an original piece of art that illustrates that process, pointing out the specific references put into practice.

Would you like to know how the Space Force One crash site location was created, what challenges the environment artists encountered, and how they managed to blend awesome gameplay, an interesting story, and memorable art? This talk is a breakdown of the artists’ work on one of the most memorable locations in Phantom Liberty. It will highlight the main stages of their work, explain what the main goals and challenges were, and show some behind-the-scenes insight into production at CD PROJEKT RED.

In 3D games we see many types of user interfaces. In this session you will learn what they are, and how to best select which type of interface should be presented to our players depending on the player’s level of 'presence’ while playing your game. You will see a case study covering a fictional abstract AAA open world game realised for this talk and how the UI is structured from the ground up while best respecting immersion in our game world and giving the game’s core systems room to breathe.

Join me in realizing a manic perfectionist’s fantasy by turning back time and redesigning a narrative sequence from Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. Together, we’ll go through all the steps of designing a diverse, non-linear player experience — all while implementing key lessons learned from Cyberpunk 2077. If you’re the sort of person who stands in the shower for an hour, taking apart a conversation you had with someone 3 years ago, you’ll feel right at home!

If I could transfer some of my current knowledge back in time to help my younger self, an aspiring level designer who doesn’t know how much he doesn’t know, I would give him the information from this presentation. I would emphasize how naive my assumptions were, how I misunderstood the players and human nature in general, and everything else that helps make great games.

Have you ever wondered why some games can evoke such strong emotions in you, while others only provide a shallow experience? Or why a single image can provoke a stronger reaction than dozens of games? This talk will take a look at an often forgotten or downplayed aspect of the process of creating environmental art — storytelling. We’ll cover exactly why it’s important to remember about the story, how much a game can lose if you choose to ignore it, and how storytelling can be used in practice.

Roguerunner.exe is roguelike mode in Ghostrunner 2 that let players test their skill in 5 stages. To provide high replayability value we used features made for the main game and adjusted them to the Roguelike genre. Despite being made in the most

Head Crabs and Xenomorphs and Creepers, oh my! While some creatures are just forgettable cannon fodder to the player, others are key pillars to the appeal and success of an IP. Using examples from media and her career, Molly Heady-Carroll will take you through her methods of designing memorable creatures designed for purpose and how they can maximize the potential of your IP.

Session will be about preparation for Sandbox and privacy changes

Immerse yourself in the riveting discussion led by our panel of distinguished video game writing and storytelling experts on AI and its impact on their work. 🤖✨ 🌟 New Era of Creativity: Explore the ethical consideration surrounding AI’s integration. 💡 Weighng The Risks: Is AI a tool for amplifying creative voices, or does it pose a threat to innovation? 🚀 Practical Guidance: Learn from our experts’ experiences, stories, and discuss the way AI tools affect the future of narration.

Come hear about what’s new with Steam in 2024. Includes a look at trends, recent feature development, and a peek at what’s coming next.

Building and Sustaining an Indie Game Studio: Lessons Learned will focus on the business and management side of running an indie studio. The panelists will share their experiences with founding and growing their studios, including securing funding, team building, company culture development, and strategic planning for the future.

Onboarding and first-time user experience is the „make it or break it” moment. If onboarding fails, the new player is immediately lost. With rising costs for acquisition, you can’t afford to slack the early gameplay moments. In 2024 you need more than ever to deliver the experience that will make your new players come back. In this talk, we will talk about „all things onboarding” and how to improve the early minutes of your gameplay.

Presentation will focus on automatic face asset creation in the production environment in open world game. It will include consistent creation and animation data flow from 3D face topology to full dialog support including animation data sharing between all characters.

Learn how to construct an immersive world in Open World games that combines strong gameplay and narrative aspects. Use the work methodology successfully used at Techland in the production of OW AAA games such as Dying Light 2: Stay Human. Get to know your player and their needs. Learn how to design Open World loops, how they connect to all other game elements, and what pitfalls await you as an open world designer.

Join Harry Hamer, Principal at Lvp, as he dives into how investors assess gaming startups and how to be investment-ready when the time comes to fundraise.

Embark on a fascinating journey into the heart of the evolution of video game music with Borislav Slavov and his presentation 'Adaptive Symphonic Music in Video Games’. Delve into the intricacies of Baldur’s Gate 3’s music systems through a live demonstration that brings the magic of exploration and combat scenarios to life. Explore the future of video game music as Slavov unravels the potential of adaptive compositions that dynamically respond to player choices. Immerse yourself in the future of game soundscapes – where music is not just a backdrop, but a dynamic force that shapes your gaming adventures like never before.

Baldur’s Gate 3, Cult of the Lamb, Disco Elysium, League of Legends — what do all of these games have in common? They were all wildly successful on Twitch, partly thanks to their Twitch integrations. In this talk, Thomas, the creator of these integrations, will talk about how he worked with these game’s developers to create a memorable and interactive experience for their viewers. He will walk you through Twitch integration basics, Dos and Don’ts, as well as a couple of case studies.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty introduced players to two new, endless, open world activities — Vehicle Contracts and Airdrops. Join Jakub in this retrospective, where he will go through the steps of designing, implementing, testing, and maintaining the Vehicle Contracts activity. Learn about the challenges and mistakes he faced when creating replayable, action-based, randomized content in an Open World Game.

Twitter storms and Steam review bombing want us to believe that companies are sneaking inclusion and „wokeness” into video games as part of some covert attempt to ruin the industry and our products. This talk is about what inclusion in businesses really is and what it can add to your studio culture of any size and any stage of your journey in games.

During this talk we will present an in-depth analysis of the workload in the Polish game dev industry, based on a community survey that took place at the beginning of this year. We will talk about how much we work, what is our approach to overtime and crunch, and how the everyday practice corresponds to the Polish labor law. We will also, with your help, try to define what is crunch — or at least, how the Polish game developers perceive it.

Alan Wake 2 features vast and highly detailed outdoor environments with dense vegetation. In comparison to Control, the geometric complexity skyrocketed so much that we had to move to a GPU-driven rendering pipeline. This talk is about that journey. We’ll cover our overall design and the fine technical details of how to make it perform well. Mesh shaders are a central part of this pipeline; we’ll show how to efficiently cull and render meshlets, to take full advantage of the PS5 and XBSX|S GPU.

It’s always been the studio’s goal to make our games feel as if they were developed in local languages. This talk provides an insight into how CD PROJEKT RED have improved their localization tools and pipelines for the Phantom Liberty expansion for Cyberpunk 2077. It covers such issues as the protection of the company’s IP, optimizing the workflow, cooperation with external vendors and high-profile talents and lastly — developing a full Ukrainian localization in just one year.

With 17 years in game dev and a decade in budgeting, the speaker tackles the challenge of forecasting game development budgets. Using Anshar Studios’ 'Layers of Fear’ and 'Gamedec,’ they illustrate how budgets evolve and why. The session offers solutions and a detailed guide on structured budgeting from ideation to post-production.

This is not a lecture but a stand-up comedy routine about both the dirty and hilarious underbelly of the game development industry. Packed with jokes and unsolicited opinions the talk will be a fast-paced ride through the art and craft of game-making and the blind spots and biases of those who make games—including the speaker. The GOLD EDITION! includes: at least three new jokes, various tweaks and bug fixes, a new costume options for the main character, and a higher-quality burning dumpster.

A dedicated Asset Pipeline team enhances productivity through process automation and helps to deliver top-quality game content. This talk will showcase both small tools that can automate repetitive tasks as well as bigger systems tailored to the needs of specific users and projects, such as character creation and motion capture.

The integration of genAI is revolutionising game development, particularly in the realm of art pipeline transformation. Using firsthand experiences from collaborations with industry leaders like Playtika, Papaya games and Superplay, this talk provides concrete examples of genAI’s impact on mobile gaming, addressing efficiency, psychological and legal factors.

Join renowned Composer and Masterclass instructor Tom Salta as he takes you on a dark musical journey through The Outlast Trials and how the music to one of the most terrifying games ever created was implemented into a nightmarish multiplayer experience.

Designing sound for intense gameplay comes with a set of very specific challenges. In my lecture I’m gonna focus on content creation techniques and strategies allowing you to achieve desired audio goals in the most extreme situations (or at least get closer to achieving them).

In this talk, Colin Walder and Giuseppe Marano present an overview of the music and mixing tech developed for Cyberpunk 2077, and how creativity was put into the hands of the players through the audio modding system. They discuss the challenges involved in authoring dynamic transitions within a vast and dense open world, and how to design a system that allows for injecting audio hooks into quests, scenes and dynamic encounters.

After a great success of the last year panel (available on the DD’s YouTube page), Radzym Wójcik is bringing again representatives of international GameDev investment scene, including the leading investors (both strategic and funds) and advisors. You can come and ask your questions or just listen to the moderated discussion. If you don’t know how to start your fundraising from international investors or want to maximise your chances in the process, this panel is for you.

What connects Playtika, Rovio, Huuuge Games and Ten Square Games? They’re already selling IAP via their own Web Stores and are preparing for Digital Markets Act – a seismic change in the mobile gaming industry that will allow publishers and developers use alternative payment methods instead of Apple’s or Google’s. Billions $ are already flowing through D2C (Direct-To-Consumer) channels and DMA will enhance this trend. Listo to the talk on how to prepare for changes in distribution and payments.

In Unreal Engine, many Graphic User Interfaces can be done using only premade widget classes. But when you need extra performance or are trying to create something unusual, you may need to use Slate. There are also multiple cases where you can significantly speed up the development process by writing just one custom window. In this talk, I’ll show how to program GUI in C++, use it in your game or hook it up to the editor. I’ll also demonstrate tools for debugging and testing your work.

Although many platforms have multiple CPUs and technology pushes us forward to utilize this architecture, in many cases game developers stay behind holding on to the easier but much less efficient solutions. My lecture will present an easy way to step into the next level of efficiency in your games using a well-known, but less popular paradigm, Entity Component System, implemented in a modern way in Unreal Engine 5. I’ll show you why it is worth trying and how you can merge it into your project.

Are you developing a P2P game in Unreal, or maybe you are looking for a way to optimize your Dedicated Server infrastructure? Come to my talk where we will make a deep dive into both with a technological and cost analysis.

In this presentation, we’ll explore the unexpected lessons game leaders can learn from Hermes, the versatile and eloquent Greek god. We’ll evaluate the main challenges Dead Mage has encountered over the years and examine how Hermes’ methods may offer solutions. Learn practical strategies from this mythological figure to enhance collaboration and productivity, providing leaders with fresh insights to address contemporary game development challenges.

An inspiring and thought-provoking discussion on the current state of the gaming industry and where it’s headed. Sara Machado (Sumo Group) will share her experiences and practical insights to help break down some of the barriers within recruitment that are keeping underrepresented groups out of the industry.

How to optimize shadow performance with a dynamic day/night cycle utilizing the Virtual Shadow Mapping in UE5 to gain up to 70% frame-time with minimal visual loss

In this talk, Jinesha will walk you through the differences between co-development and outsourcing. She will explain the pros and cons and why partnering with a codev studio could help your development goals. You’ll learn about the pillars of successful co-development, tips on how to build trust to maintain autonomy, and deliver the best quality. Jinesha will also share her personal failures and learnings from her past and current codev experiences, and much more.

Sometimes, you wish you could turn back the clock and wonder what would happen if you made a different decision. This presentation will guide you through the production timeline of the GORD game – from its pre-production in 2019 to the post-release patches of late 2023. It will show the main turning points and major mistakes that ultimately led to the release of a game with a lot of promise but failed a lot of expectations.

Creating art for your indie games feels like drowning in a pool of jelly? What toolset to use to single-handedly create art & animation for the entire adventure game in a short time span (a year sounds good to me).

In this session we present GPU Reshape, a just-in-time instrumentation framework with instruction level validation of shaders, tracing down issues to the exact line of source code. We discuss the challenges with instrumenting across multiple intermediate representations, and how a unified model was achieved through a custom intermediate language capable of seamless bi-directional translation. With a deep dive into current validation methodologies, and what the future of instrumentation may hold

Award-winning Voice Actor, and VO Director Mike Bodie provides an insider’s view into the intricate world of casting actors for video games. Learn how developers find the perfect talent to fill performance roles in their games. Gain behind-the-scenes insights into auditions, and discover the process actors undergo to create compelling auditions.

Heavy workload? Task saturation? High-paced and fast evolving environment? Keep calm — and be Stoic! Stoic philosophy brings mental well-being, discipline and integrity when and where they are so badly needed. Dr. Piotr Stankiewicz, renowned expert in the field, provides an easily accessible, plug-and-play guide to employ it.

Dive into the essentials of mobile game security, focusing on player progression and authentication through popular platforms. Discover the strategic balance of game logic placement for enhanced security, learn to defend against data interception and manipulation, and grasp best practices to prevent cheating. Lastly, we’ll discuss finding the right measure in security implementation.

Last year Promotional Content became a new way of featuring apps and games on Google Play. It is easy to use, it gives a developer a lot of control over the process and as of 2024 it is one of the most powerful tools to drive organic growth on this platform. However, succeeding with Promotional Content requires much more than just cool visuals and descriptions. During this session you will learn about basics, good practices and how to make it a part of your organic growth strategy.

Being a small Dev is tough. Steam/mobile markets are.. well, brutal. You’d like to conquer the console world, but you don’t know how? You are working on all platforms and discovering that days are just too short? You had a bad experience with a publisher? You’d prefer to not go crazy during the process? – please join and we’ll try to cover it all. I’m a first time DD speaker (but have years of experience elsewhere) and I would really like to meet you there!

Join Artur Szymański as he delves into the large-scale world creation using Houdini-based tools in the Train Life game, transitioning from a single 8×8 km² landscape to an expansive 4000 km² environment optimized not only for PC but even for the Nintendo Switch. Discover the integration of Unreal World Composition, the use of 'corridors’ blueprints in level design and level art, and the rigorous optimization process that compressed data from 100GB to 6GB without sacrificing world size.

The goal of the talk is to provide case study tips regarding the proper execution of documents necessary to efficiently execute a premium Steam game business development analysis, including contemporary methodologies, algorithms and general structure. The attendees will learn how to draw proper conclusions by completing a direct competition analysis, preparing a P&L, sum up competition rev estimates and more.

In this session, multiple award-winning composer Richard Jacques will cover various interactive music techniques used in scoring AAA games. Featuring examples from James Bond 007: Blood Stone and his recent GRAMMY® nominated score to Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, Jacques will share his 30 years experience in scoring games, covering everything from initial approach, to real world examples of compositional technique and content delivery, along with creative and technical choices made.

The presentation will cover topics about the sex gap in salaries, mobbing, discrimination against women, and other findings from a survey filled out by 400 women working in the Polish gamedev industry.

This talk focuses on elements of Phantom Liberty’s audio design development that went on to improve the soundscape of Cyberpunk 2077. The talk analyzes various examples from both narrative and gameplay areas, showcasing new paradigms for cinematic audio storytelling and immersion improvements in gameplay/open world, examining examples of actual designs and highlighting improvements to the team structure.

Audio systems in open world games can prove to be generic and repetitive. This was something that we wanted to avoid in post apocalyptic world of Dying Light 2. Explore the game’s groundbreaking audio design where sounds and music create unique moments every time the game is played. Discover how audio systems were designed to introduce cinematic feeling to open world games. You will learn how we approached open quest design and freedom of movement when creating sound for a big scale project.

Often in game development we fall into the same old trap of miscommunication and unexpected outcomes on areas of the game that should, in theory, be more predictable. This nearly always involves stretching the Direction team to make sure thing stay on track which can lead to a mess. The aim of the talk is that you will go away with the knowledge to adopt a system to ensure a feature avoids micromanagement, misalignment and above all remove the bottleneck created when wholly relying on Directors.

Learn how Larian created meaningful choices and consequences in Baldur’s Gate 3. Just as we rely on our players to collaborate with us on our stories, we need an audience to help us survive this talk. Through use of cutting edge interactive technology (heckling and raising of hands), we’ll let you choose which of our many misadventures you want to hear about. Whatever happens, you’ll hear some new anecdotes about development of BG3, and we’ll probably teach you something in spite of ourselves.

We will talk about history of disruptive tech, including some things which will make history in the next couple years. We will share some epic success and epic fail stories from general gamedev lore and personal experience. This includes AI, VR, and reinvention and implementation of the most basic things like IK which are rooted in thousand year old works. We will talk about why low hanging fruit hangs low, and about Schrodinger tech which is both useful and vaporware until moment X.

How to build an enticing open world game? How to elicit and sustain the natural curiosity in the player during exploration? The lecture aims to explain the aspect of work with the player’s curiosity in daily work of Open World Designer. During my speech I will show challenges for Open World Designers related to creating a curiosity-driven world as well as what tools or techniques are needed to complete them.

Gain an insider perspective on Cyberpunk 2077’s game-changing Update 2.0: how it was made, the obstacles it overcame, its huge impact on the base game, and its synergy with the Phantom Liberty expansion. We’ll dive into specific changes like the netrunner overhaul and the new Relic skill tree, showing how the game evolved. This presentation will take a look at game development, improvement, and what helps create a better gaming experience.

Picking up the right art style is crucial for both how Your game will stand out from the crowd but also how it will affect Your production process and how well it will sit with the game design overall.

Looking to join a Polish AAA company in the field of level design while having little or no experience? Your speaker arrived in Poland following his dreams of working in games in 2016. Having no relevant work experience was only one of his worries: he knew that he wanted to do something with Quests… Or Levels. Or Game Design. The point is, he had no idea what he wanted to do or how to get to it. 8 years later, he wants to invite you to learn from his reflection on what went wrong and right.

Unveiling some key moments and takeaways from the exciting journey of Battlefield 2042, from a challenging launch to delivering for our community during past 24 months. Join us as we explore how a dedicated team listened to their players, discovered their identity in Live Service, and transformed a struggling game into a thriving product.

We spend a third of our lives at work! So why not make it the best environment it can be? And we don’t mean simply adding a slide from the second floor or installing a Tiki-bar themed meeting room, though we admit those are fun. This talk covers what we’ve learned over several decades in the industry for how to directly affect happiness and satisfaction in the office, and how to create and maintain a healthy, respectful team culture that is conducive to creativity and collaboration.

We will explore how a focus on user-centered design principles in game development can lead to increased player satisfaction and higher revenue.

A dive into how we expanded and evolved several teams to adjust for the large scope of Baldur’s Gate 3 and its constant release cycles starting during Early Access into full release. Incorporating automation, permutation testing, playtesting and in-house play sessions to generate both an immense amount of game feedback and a large amount of general game issues. How dev teams can help reduce waterfall issues reaching the QA stage and how we scaled our QA team quickly internally.

Sometimes we hear that a certain cutscene in a game takes us out of the gameplay and it would be best to just skip it, while other times players can’t wait for the next fragment filled with narrative to the brim. How to make our characters more embedded in the world, what to do to make players curious about what happens next, how to evoke the desired emotions, and finally how to achieve it without spending millions of coins? I will show you an animator’s perspective on all of this.

Dive into the fascinating world where movies and video games meet. Explore how shared visual language, evolving storytelling, bleeding-edge technology, and even migrating talent are forever blurring the lines between these two entertainment powerhouses. Discover how games become cinematic experiences and how film techniques fuel spectacular game worlds.

Non-player characters are the bread and butter of story-driven games. Participating in LARPs (live-action role-playing games) allowed me to impersonate NPCs and experience firsthand how it is to be one and what it takes to engage and entertain players. In this talk, I will share insights from over 18 years of larping and how it helps me design better, more complex, and believable NPCs in video games.

This topic i user story based and will focus on how People Can Fly handles its work structures focusing on positions placed between two roles. In our case those mid positions are DevQA, TechQA and Associate. How those positions work, what are advantages and how they can be implemented for increasing efficiency in work environment by additionally rising work satisfaction in all involved teams.

This talk showcases how CDPR’s Tech, Audio, and Localization Team cooperate to deliver the highest quality of voice-overs for the game in 10 different languages. It reveals the details of how VO pipelines are organized and automated and how they allow to track status of each of the recorded lines. It also focuses on the approach to the artistic side of voice postprocessing. It ends with the lessons the teams have learned during the process based on our success stories and shortcomings.

Baldur’s Gate 3, Cult of the Lamb, Disco Elysium, League of Legends — what do all of these games have in common? They were all wildly successful on Twitch, partly thanks to their Twitch integrations. In this talk, Thomas, the creator of these integrations, will talk about how he worked with these game’s developers to create a memorable and interactive experience for their viewers. He will walk you through Twitch integration basics, Dos and Don’ts, as well as a couple of case studies.

Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the first games to incorporate frame generation technology. The talk will cover all technicalities and issues encountered during the integration process, drawbacks and solutions to them.

Looking back at a decade of gaming industry experience, this session will delve into personal insights, valuable lessons and crucial mistakes in UI/UX field within the consoles and PC fields. This session will be dedicated to exploring the design process that Arvy has worked out throughout the years, common UX hurdles for beginners and pros, the value of developing a personal brand and the importance of creative thinking in graphic design for gamedev.

During my presentation I would like to present some advices on how to plan and organize work in an interative process, when creative ideas often change – how to minimize the potential threats, how to prepare for such situations and how to cope with the changes.

If you look closely the top f2p games all have deep economies. Why? Because they come with a baseline of monetization which simply works. However it isn’t simple to design and maintain an economy which lives for years of gameplay. In this talk we will cover the fundamental base you need to establish, how to structure economies in online games, how to monetize it and most importantly prepare it to be ever expandable.

The speech is a showcase of methodologies to enhance your ability to hack existing features in your project to increase long term efficiency and speed at which you improve your project. With & without assistance of AI & GPTs. A part of the speech will be about the basics of using AI for production and design of games. I’ll share insights and examples of content and features that we’ve been building in the last 4 years across 2000+ updates to our game and platform and how it changed with AI.

2023 marked an interesting year in Gaming. The industry saw many rounds of layoffs but at the same time the value of the whole gaming market is at all time high. Is it still possible to raise funds for a Startup in this conditions? Do VC’s have now problems raising money?

The presenter will talk about how a composer can approach constructing adaptive soundtrack, speed up the process and discuss implementation of such music in FMOD middleware, focusing on useful tips, challenges as well as advice. The audience for this talk is aspiring video game composers and composers who are willing to learn more about the tools for and challenges of adaptive music creation.

The why and how you should be designing infinitely replayable games. In a recession with game releases like Palworld and tinyBuild’s own portfolio, we have clear data that it’s all about time spent – and games where players spend a lot of time are recession proof. The presentation will dive deep into the why and how, using data sets from tinyBuild’s own portfolio.

The traditional rendering pipeline using Vertex shaders isn’t giving us enough freedom. Tessellation and Geometry shaders are just patches over a pipeline that doesn’t keep up with the modern times. So, what can we do? The answer to that is Mesh Shaders! A tech that is already successfully used in Alan Wake 2 and Unreal’s Nanite technology. We’ll explore how they can speed up your rendering, what meshlets are, and what else it can be used for. Come and see the tech of the near future!

What is the easiest way to learn about a new technology if not through examples of its usage? This session will promote the new Mesh Shader pipeline which can help to create even more better-looking games. I want to show off this new technology by demonstrating a few examples of its usage, and at the same time teach listeners how to write their first Mesh Shader. The presented examples are just the tip of the iceberg regarding what this technology can do.

What does successful accessibility in marketing look like? How do you decide on your first steps? How do you implement accessible features in communication without over-promising on the accessibility within your own game? Drawing on CD PROJEKT RED’s own experience with accessible marketing, this talk will cover these questions and more to cover the processes, team buy-in, knowledge, and considerations necessary to define and build a plan for successful accessible communication.

After a great success of the last year panel (available on the DD’s YouTube page), Radzym Wójcik is bringing again representatives of international GameDev investment scene, including the leading investors (both strategic and funds) and advisors. You can come and ask your questions or just listen to the moderated discussion. If you don’t know how to start your fundraising from international investors or want to maximise your chances in the process, this panel is for you.

In Unreal Engine, many Graphic User Interfaces can be done using only premade widget classes. But when you need extra performance or are trying to create something unusual, you may need to use Slate. There are also multiple cases where you can significantly speed up the development process by writing just one custom window. In this talk, I’ll show how to program GUI in C++, use it in your game or hook it up to the editor. I’ll also demonstrate tools for debugging and testing your work.

Join me for a talk on integrating Gaussian Splatting into Unreal Engine 5. Discover how to translate Gaussian Splatting 3D models into dynamic Niagara particles. Together, we’ll explore the potential of this technique, traditionally used in scientific visualization, to expand our available toolset for graphics rendering. Additionally, you will learn how to create your own Gaussian Splatting models from photos or with the help of AI.

Telling a story of how a union came to be in a field long considered impossible to unionize. In this talk we will show: what the union can do for you, what are the benefits of having a union in your workplace, what are the union’s rights and how it’s going to solve the problem of current, unsustainable production cycles.

Join us for a panel at Digital Dragons 2024 on 'Transparency in Salaries: Impact on Game Dev Culture’. Hear from studio representatives who’ve embraced open salary policies and those who haven’t. Discover how transparency shapes company culture, team dynamics, and industry standards.

Many people dream of a leadership role, but do we really know what it involves? In my panel I would like to talk about my journey from a developer to a team leader and how my scope changed from coding to taking care of Techland’s tool team. Would like to look under the surface of the common beliefs about what leadership is about and talk about challenges, and struggles but also its most rewarding moments.

Discover the secrets of fostering thriving communities for developers and game enthusiasts both online and offline. Join us for a panel discussion where a diverse lineup of industry experts unravel their adventures in building Polish game dev communities that welcome seasoned professionals, upcoming newcomers, and industry veterans, and how these communities thrive every day. FromLublin, Warsaw, Wroclaw, to all across Poland!

Are you curious about how some of the most successful Unity games are built? Do you want to learn the best practices and tips for designing scalable and maintainable game architectures? We are going to talk about the Controllers Tree architecture that is used across multiple games made by Playtika. Obviously, there is no silver bullet and this architecture is not suitable for every game, but it works great for the ones we are going to talk about. Let’s together dissect its pros and cons.

The most hated word in production management ‚transparency’ stripped out of it bad meaning and showed in a more favoured light. Why transparency in communication with the team is crucial and why you should consider using that skill more often than you think.

In the gaming industry, we’re shifting from quantity to quality due to new laws, privacy norms, and market saturation. 'The Shift in the Industry – We’re Going Back in Time’ will cover how this change affects game development and marketing across all platforms. It’s not just about Hybrid Casual games; it’s a broader move towards more engaging, quality content. We’ll explore adaptation strategies, cross-platform development, and leveraging brand/IP for marketing.

Yesterday’s Debt and Tomorrow’s Dream Explore the insights gained from 12 years at the forefront of tech and content development in MMO game for girls. Our particula focus is how we successfully ported our game across multiple platforms. This talk goes into our effective strategies for managing technical debt. In addition, we maintain a rigorous, non-stop weekly release schedule. You will gain a practical roadmap enriched with proven strategies. These strategies and firsthand expe

In times of crisis impacting the game development industry, instances where contractors do not receive payment for their work are becoming increasingly common. This lecture, (delivered in Polish), aims to present, in the simplest and most informal way possible, the options available for effective debt collection. This includes both the pre-trial phase and the stage of pursuing receivables in court, as well as conducting enforcement activities.

There is a great need to discuss the process of game design. Many of us feel frustrated when we encounter „hit or miss” design – throwing out ideas and counting on one of them to be the answer. Jordan Mechner, the creator of Prince of Persia once said: „Nobody knows what will succeed”. Theoretical principles for Game Design are now better defined than they once were. But when we apply them in practice, we still encounter numerous unknowns. How can we deal with such unknowns? Let’s find out!