Portuguese game development scene, what is happening, what games are coming out of Portugal. A short and quick overview of the environment and how the european crises gave a punch and push to a new era of industry. Videogames degrees didn’t emerge from the academia but from professionals developers and the degrees network created covers from programming, 2D and 3D videogame art, UI Design, Game Design, Production and Marketing. With 200 students finishing their degrees around videogames every year Portugal small industry is growing and attracting some known studios to the country.
Ever wanted to record your own animations? Lacking the markers, mocap-studio or the money for a proper mocap session? Or you want to use handcrafted objects in your game? The Kinect v2 sensor can take care of that, beyond actual in-game interaction. So we will take a look at implementing gesture controls for your game, but mainly we will show other uses that make your gamedev life a bit easier.
Our 70s heisting simulator went through Steam Greenlight and Early Access, culminating in its release in the beginning of June. We built the game "out in the open", sharing stuff we worked on actively and doing our best to involve the community. This is a post mortem of that experience, with focus on how we handled building, involving and managing the community.
We can’t see into the future – but experiences collected in the past will help us to weigh future decisions differently.
In this session we’ll have a look back how technology changed at Chimera Entertainment and why certain decisions have been made.
From low level programming languages over game development frameworks to custom and standard tools needed in a game developers everyday life. It’s about decisions, successes and errors - Revealing Chimera’s experiences may help you with your future tech strategy.
Building a game is not too different from building any kind of product…or as a matter of fact building anything. There are phases in game development that need a certain type of attention and certain expectations have to be fulfilled.
In this talk, Dan will run you through the production cycle, by sharing his experience and lessons learned during the years and giving examples from the development of the games he worked on.
This topic should serve as inspiration and discussion starter to improve building great teams and great games; one brick at a time.
The speech purpose is to show how Virtual Reality incorporated into a project, changes drastically our common knowledge about video game development and what a developer should be aware, when he chooses to use it in his project. Virtual Reality changes the basic principles and status quo for art, sound, design and programming. For the next few years video game developers have to adjust and create, almost from scratch, best practices for creating video games in VR. The speaker will try to convey what he has learned from over a year of development of a Virtual Reality game – Detached. Topics like frame requirements, camera movement, nausea, input, sound design, sense of presence will be discussed.
When Paladin Studios embarked on a journey to create their premium game “Momonga”, they didn’t know it would be the first in a series of 3D mobile games with ball physics. It eventually even kickstarted the transition from a Premium to a F2P-design oriented studio. In the unique format of doing post-mortems of Paladin’s last three games in one session, Zirm compares how mechanics, designs and monetization evolved. He outlines the iterations the projects went through and shows how reality is a kick in the nuts sometimes.
Zirm shares lessons learned on how Paladin had to grow up as a studio to make the transition from Premium to F2P, how effective game monetization is more than just adding In-App Purchases, how a lot of free to play mechanics go against a game designer's instinct and how Yoda was right when he said “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” The session is spiced up with practical tips, anecdotes and the world-exclusive preview of Paladin Studios’ newest (ball) game.
The (German) game industry concentrates mostly on the digital market, but there are also many business opportunities off the beaten paths.
Todays news are almost always depressing. Still, there has been an uprising of games that center around experiencing settings beyond your typical fantasy hero story. Blindflug Studio wants to take that notion one step further: How about we design games that take current, meaningful, even political topics to sculpt their core game mechanics out of it?
This talk is partly post-mortem of First Strike, the surprise nuclear-war strategy hit, which sucessfully blasted in the iTunes and Google Play charts all around the world. It shows where its inspiration came from and the wonderfully curious reactions it spawned from game critics, users and the, sometimes baffled, mass media.
And it is also presenting Cloud Chasers, the anticipated second title of Blindflug, which is striving to give every player their own unique immigration story by putting them in the shoes of a young family crossing the deserts to the world above.... and probably dying along the way.
Chime, the music puzzle game from 2009, will return at the end of 2015 as Chime Sharp, an upgraded and rebooted version for PC and Mac. Ste Curran discusses the gameplay changes that made him return to the game, why he chose to crowdfund the project and the rules he's learned for a successful Kickstarter; financially and, crucially, emotionally.
Unreal – CryEngine – Unity – they all announced new license schemes compatible for Indies and other developers that do not have sufficient budget to purchase a traditional engine license. But how “Indie” are those licenses really? We took a look at the publicly available license terms and will discuss what the Engines really cost, when used for the production of a successful Indie – Game.
This session is all about facial animation. Believablility and emotional impact in games heavily relies on the facial expression of the game characters. But isn't this a very expensive and super time-consuming feature? No! It doesn't have to be. This talk will cover a couple of techniques, workflows and software/hardware solutions that are afordable and easy to set up. The workshop starts with an overview on facial animation techniques in general. The main part will cover a complete workflow from the creation of a virtual face, animating it with faceshift and face plus and finally bringing it into a game engine like Unreal Engine 4.
This panel will discuss experiences and lessons learnt in Early Access – which approaches to take in communications upfront and during launch, when to go for Early Access and when not, what to expect when going for it and which best practices everyboday learnt and would advise on in general.
Creating a good game tutorial is essential to bringing people into a game but it is also one of the most difficult things to do. Making the tutorial for mushroom 11 was a challenging task. With its new mechanics and controls, the game had to teach players the basics, such as moving, shaping and splitting, before ramping the difficulty up. The developers chose to avoid text and hand-holding almost entirely, in favor of using puzzles to teach first time players. Julia will go over these puzzles, demonstrate their design and evolution, and discuss the lessons they learned (and relearned) as designers.
Ellen will focus on the unpredictable nature of live development, what it is like to release new features in a live environment with 60 million players, and what it’s been like working with a big publisher like Rovio.
HOW TO THRIVE
IN THE MODERN DIGITAL AGE
The past generation of consoles almost killed a social phenomenon that made gaming big in the first place: playing games together with friends on the same couch, in the same room. Most multiplayer games for Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 connected friends via the net, not the same screen.
It became a rare opportunity to sit, play and talk. In the meantime, a new trend of game design from the indie game scene arose: “Local Multiplayer Games”. These games such as Nidhogg, Gang Beasts or Towerfall are based on two core principles: they are accessible also for casual gamers and they are fun to watch. Designed by rules ofsocial interaction, these games - celebrating the community of players - raise a new paradigm of playing together, open up chances for games as public events and support social interaction not only in private living rooms, but also in bars (like the Nidhogg bar events in NYC), at festivals (like the A MAZE. events), in semi-public forums on the internet (like the Let's Play genre on YouTube) and in new places like cinemas (like the Game <3 Cinema event series).
What does this mean for concepts of games and spaces? What new ways of interacting with individuals and society become possible by this? And how can we benefit as designers and game enthusiasts?
The talk shares a vision of games as public interaction and thinks about new approaches on how to make games social events, not only with friends but also with society.
Charles will talk about how Revolution has embraced the relationship with its community over 25 years, and how this was rewarded when Revolution successfully kickstarted their latest adventure, Broken Sword 5 - the Serpent’s Curse in 2012, breaking records at the time.
Creativity often needs some sort of inspiration. In order to get some, we at studio fizbin try to get as diverse input as we can. We often find ourselves exerimenting with different painting styles or building prototypes out of baufix, paper and duct tape! With this talk we want to lure your inner child out of her/his cave to tinker around whenever you are in need of some creative inspiration! But beware, live tinkering includes the possibility of not-so-serious injuries through lower voltage shocks.
Gaming-Aid would like to help developers to gain more strength for the hard parts of their development journey. What happens if the project is not working as planed? What if it all falls down? How to cope with the failure? The hole in which developers can fall into can be very deep. We would like to speak about these situations and want to give tips and best practices on how to survive, physically and mentally.