| 9:00am-10:00am | Beyond Games as a Service with Live Ops Crystin Cox (Director of Live Operations, Microsoft) Topic: Design ? The rise of games as a service has changed the video games industry and brought about massive growth, but what comes next? Come learn how LiveOps is shaping the next big step in games and how game teams of all types can use this powerful approach to game development to better engage their communities. |
| 10:00am-10:30am | Kill the Hero, Save the (Narrative) World Hannah Nicklin (Studio Lead, Narrative Designer & Writer, Die Gute Fabrik) Topic: Game Narrative ? Hannah Nicklin, lead writer and narrative designer on MUTAZIONE, discusses the key techniques, challenges and potential of writing for ensemble casts compared to 'heroes' tales'. Drawing on inspiration from the world of long-running TV shows rather than film, and unpicking real-life examples from the process of writing MUTAZIONE, Hannah will set out how killing the hero form of storytelling not only produces better narrative worlds in games but also allows to us to tell better, more relatable, truer stories about how we live together in the world. |
| 11:00am-11:30am | 'Void Bastards' Art Style Origin Story Ben Lee (Art Director, Blue Manchu) Topic: Visual Arts ? Void Bastards is a vibrant, anarchic looking strategy-FPS shooter hybrid. Intrinsic to the game's presentation is a look and feel firmly rooted in comics and traditional animation. In this session, art director and illustrator Ben Lee will break down the various influences and events that shaped the art style throughout the game's production. Attendees will learn about how his approach to art direction changed between initial discussions and final release. Additional topics will be how the art style tied into the development of the game world and impacted the design, the relationship between a tight art style and an achievable production schedule and working with a small, globally distributed team. |
| 12:00pm-1:00pm | Writing Tools Faster: Design Decisions to Accelerate Tool Development Niklas Gray (CTO, Our Machinery) Topic: Programming ? This session discusses the drastic design decisions we made in The Machinery to overcome the problems we had in previous engines (Bitsquid, Stingray) where writing tools became the primary development bottleneck. First, we minimized the the tech stack to put more control in the hands of the developers. Second, we moved the responsibility for things like undo, copy/paste, save, revert, etc into a shared central data model so that tools get it for free. Third, we standardized the way in which data interacts with views, so that the same views can be reused for different purposes. This talk will discuss the consequences, pros and cons of our approach and show how it works in a concrete example: implementing an animation state machine editor. |
| 1:00pm-1:30pm | Face-to-Parameter Translation via Neural Network Renderer Tianyang Shi (Senior AI Researcher, Netease) Topic: Programming ? Character customization systems in RPGs are becoming more and more sophisticated. As a result, it turns out to be time-consuming and laborious for most players. How to help players quickly create a satisfactory role? In this talk, Tianyang Shi from NetEase Fuxi AI Lab will show how to differentiate the game engine by using a neural network and how to create a character automatically according to a single facial photo. |
| 2:00pm-2:30pm | The Forest Paths Method for Accessible Narrative Design Alexander Swords (Writer & Narrative Designer, Alexander Swords) Topic: Game Narrative ? We have some great models for storytelling, but often they're broken by the attempt to fit them into interactive experiences, or applied to cultures outside of Western norms. Starting with the dramatic question and the sequence method, the Forest Paths Method has been built on the principles of understanding the building blocks of drama to combine narrative and design elements into successful patterns tailored to the pillars of your game. These patterns can then be used by the whole team to start a new project, problem-solve current issues, or analyse past successes or failures. This session will follow an example of a fictional new game through the process, and by the end show a narrative design pattern that could service the start of development. |
| 3:00pm-3:30pm | 'Gears 5' Real-Time Character Dynamics David Coleman (Technical Art Director, The Coalition - Microsoft) Topic: Visual Arts ? This talk will discuss the Gears 5 real-time dynamics system used for thick, heavy leather armor, chains tied at both ends, hair such as dreadlocks and ponytails draped over shoulders, buckles, pouches, tentacles and many other challenging dynamics accessories! The presentation will cover the features of the dynamics system, demonstrate how the dynamics were setup within the Unreal Engine 4 animation blueprint system, as well as challenges and lessons learned to ensure the system kept within performance budgets in support of Gears 5 running at 60 fps on XBoxOneX, in all game modes. |
| 4:00pm-5:00pm | Stop & Think: Teaching Players About Media Manipulation in 'Headliner' Jakub Kasztalski (Founder & Creative Director, Unbound Creations LLC) Topic: Design ? Most games are designed to be fun and engaging, to keep the players playing. But at Unbound Creations, our goal is different. We want our players to stop, and reflect on their actions. This talk will use concrete examples from our award-winning games to show how we teach players about ethics through play, encourage critical thinking about media and fake-news, and make polarizing social/political issues humanely relatable. In “Headliner: NoviNews” you play as chief editor of the national news, deciding what articles get published every day. You watch as the world around you lives of several main characters gradually change. From the start, the game was designed to make players question their choices and become more critical of media. I will explain how we achieved that. Early in pre-development, we mined Google and Facebook data to find topics that are the most important and relatable to our target audience. We made issues relatable through personal struggles of in-game characters. We have also done the research to represent both sides of complex arguments fairly, based on actual rhetoric used in media. Our simple design principles led to complex series of trade-offs and moral dilemmas with no clear win or lose conditions. Lastly, we used gameplay mechanics to encourage (but not force) our players to organically engage in media-manipulation techniques, thus teaching players to recognize them in the real world. |
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