Talents in Games Conference

Tuesday, December 1

14:00 - 14:45
ENG

Ranko Trifkovic, Narrative Designer, Grandpa Tiger's Narrative Design

[Game Design] 5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Writing (for) a Game

Here are 5 pivotal questions to answer before the start so that you can craft an amazing story with a powerful impact on your players, instead of grinding to a halt at 77.8 percent and spending the rest of your time crying under the blanket!

What is writing FOR a game vs writing a game? How to gain clarity on the theme and plot? Avoiding typical pitfalls. Presenting practical solutions to narrative design.

14:55 - 15:40
ENG

Grigorii Sokolov, Senior Game Designer, Nutaku Publishing

[Game Design] Production of Adult Games

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This talk will introduce you to the specification of the adult free-to-play games design. We will briefly review the market, talk about similarities and differences with mainstream design, and discuss the most common approaches of adultifying already existing games.

15:50 - 16:35
ENG

Marcin Sordyl, Co-founder, Punk Notion

[Visual Arts] Using VR to Make Art in non-VR games

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When people think about 3D art in games, they have in their mind mostly: sculpting, traditional vertex manipulation, or 3D scanning last time. What if there is another way? In our new game: "The Last Show of Mr. Chardish" we used VR tools (Quill software) to paint 3D game assets. The goal was to make the artstyle more unique and make the process of asset creation faster. Did our assumptions work? The talk will be about why you should (or should not?) try this approach in your games.

16:45 - 17:30
ENG

Mikita Lagunow, Community Manager, Nordcurrent

[Community Management] A Few Days of a Community Manager Life: Techniques of Involving Your Community

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Community Management is not about boredom. Every day I come to work smiling and ready for a new adventure. What challenges are waiting for you and how to keep your players from getting bored? A few stories from my work experience about techniques that would be useful in the development of your community.

Wednesday, December 2

14:00 - 14:45
ENG

Poornima Seetharaman, Lead Game Designer, Zynga
Vimal Sathish, Lead Game Designer, Zynga

[Game Design] D7 via 7 Designs

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This session will provide the fundamental design pillars and decisions that would help improve early game retention, and the foundation for beyond as well.

14:55 - 15:40
ENG

Isaque Sanches, Technical Game Designer, notagame

[Game Design] That Time I Made 250 Scientists Solve a Riddle On a Dance Floor

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This talk explores the motivations, the design challenges, and the overall stranger-than-fiction weirdness behind the creation of a local multiplayer mixed reality game for 250+ simultaneous users, commissioned by Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown’s Neuroscience Department, to be performed in a scientific congress event.

What first began as a simple gamified team-building exercise evolved into a full-on multiplayer game, in which all users had to play at the same time, in which all users could interact directly with wireless controllers, and in which all players had to cooperate to solve a common puzzle.

15:50 - 16:35
ENG

Pavel Mezentsev, Lead Programmer, G5 Games

[Development] The Passionate Game Programmer: Secondary Skills for Primary Objectives

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Taking a shortcut to the next level of proficiency through soft skills and adjacent disciplines. Overview of particularly useful things to learn along the way to boost your efficiency and career.

16:45 - 17:30
ENG

Amanda Kirby, Community Manager, Versus Evil

[Community Management] FIRESIDE CHAT

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Join Amanda Kirby from Versus Evil for an exciting conversation about community management best practices. Discover trends and great how-tos and learn how to improve your everyday work.

Fireside chat hosted by Oleg Nesterenko, Managing Editor, GameWorldObserver.com

Thursday, December 3

14:00 - 14:45
ENG

Esther Tan, Director of Digital Commerce, Whisper Games

[Community Management] General Ways to Manage Your Community in China

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Community management is vital to the sales, feedbacks, and general acceptance of video games. This session gives a brief introduction on how to manage video game communites in China, covering social media platforms, traditional forums, instant messengers, etc.

14:55 - 15:40
ENG

William Besnard, Creative Director, Vile Monarch

[Visual Arts] Design Is How It Works: Engineering for Designers

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Designing Games is a creative activity, but often we forget about how much of it could be considered Engineering work. Without analysis, designers can encounter pitfalls that can compromise their vision and direction. This talk provides a series of techniques inspired by system engineering that can be used to ensure the reliability and consistency of designs and to limit the cost and risk of development.

15:50 - 16:35
ENG

Anastasia Kazakova, Product Marketing Manager, JetBrains

[Development] A C++ Ride Through the Gamedev Universe

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Gamedev is a lot in C++. And C++ language on its own is a mix of compatibility restrictions and the adoption of best practices from other languages and technologies. Recent independent research studies show that C++ developers are still staying with C++11, slowly adopting any new standards. While in gamedev the situation is better than on average.

On the other side, many developers tend to avoid using unit testing frameworks and code analysis tools, and keep finding workarounds to emulate language features not yet accepted to the language standard (reflection!)

In this talk, we’ll overview the C++ ecosystem sliced by the Gamedev area, align trends, and analyze the reasoning behind them. And see if there is a modern tooling in place that can help dealing with all the difficulties.

16:45 - 17:30
ENG

Elena Kuznetsova, 3D Artist, Gismart

[Visual Arts] Graphics Development Pipeline in Hyper Casual

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 In her speech, Elena will go in-depth into the graphics development pipeline and optimization, elaborating on when one needs to create and when ready-made assets and packs can be used, how to work with references, and most importantly, how to save time and money.

Friday, December 4

14:00 - 14:45
ENG

Vera Velichko, CEO, OWL Studio

[Visual Arts] Key Art Illustration - Everything You Have to Know to Create a Perfect Key Art

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It's one of the questions from artists I hear quite often - what do I have to know to create an illustration? In this speech, we'll get to the details. Which art discipline the artist has to know to handle the illustration work? What is the best way to practice it? And also - as soon as we are speaking about not just an illustration, but Key art, the most important art on the project - we'll discuss how the Key art works, what do we have to know about composition and human perception working on it, and how can we present the game itself with just one picture.

14:55 - 15:40
ENG

Viktor Ketipov, CEO, Kipi Interactive

[Development] Multiplayer Programming in Unreal Engine 4

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You have a good understanding of Unreal Engine 4 and want to create a Multiplayer Game, but have no idea where to start? How do you connect to another client? Is Server-Authoritative or Peer-To-Peer Server model more suitable for your case? What is the difference between RPC and Replication? Who owns what? What is network role, relevancy, and priority? How do you test a Multiplayer game? You will find answers to all these question including tips and tricks to build up your arsenal.

15:50 - 16:35
ENG

Julian Colbus, CEO, DigiTales Interactive

[Game Design] Detective Game Design Problems

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Game design is such a wide and varied discipline that job titles in the field have become increasingly granular over the years – and ever since we started working on our debut title Lacuna, I’ve become more and more convinced that 'detective game designer' merits its own denomination as well. Detective gameplay (or 'investigation gameplay') poses a number of unique challenges centered around two main problems: the struggle between story and puzzles (or 'cases') as well as communication between the player and the game.

16:45 - 17:30
ENG

Kathryn Hymes, Founder, Thorny Games

[Game Design] The Collaborative Approach to Storytelling: Building Relationships Through Gameplay

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In this talk we will explore several misconceptions about game design and game development in general which are surprisingly very common within the games industry. We'll look at some myths, platitudes, faulty common sense, and flat out pseudoscience on a varied array of topics such as: serious games and their effectiveness as training tools, Skinner boxes and user conditioning in general, user analytics, user taxonomies, gamification vs neuroscience, etc.