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Art
Defining & Achieving Visual Quality!
As John Lasseter put it, “Quality is the best business plan”. This sounds simple enough, the higher the Quality of our project, the more successful it will be, right? Yet in an ever-evolving industry, with myriad competing considerations, how do we go about achieving quality? By what standards do we go about defining and subsequently strategize achieving it?
Games industry veteran Erol Kentli delves into the varied considerations, including:
- Visual style and target platform
- To the relationship between scope and finesse
- The impact of autonomy and team engagement
- The perspectives of the development team & the qualitative expectations of the buying public, and how these might differ
- Establishing quality benchmarks, whilst simultaneously front-loading performance testing
- How we might apply a variety of established creative and management methodologies to the realm of visual beauty with a view to strategizing success!
Session Takeaway
- Insight into considerations around what Quality is, how it is perceived & the benefits of pursuing it.
- How we can strategically plan & scope for Quality.
- How we jolly-well achieve Quality!
Exploring Practical Applications of the 80:20 Rule in Concept Art
The Pareto Principle suggests that 80% of output comes from just 20% of input. For concept artists, this idea can be a powerful framework for deciding where to focus time, attention, and skill development, especially when working under tight deadlines and shifting project demands. In this session, a working concept artist will share how the 80/20 rule can be applied in practice: from rapidly learning new software and tools, to onboarding onto large, lore-heavy IPs, and prioritising daily tasks for maximum creative impact. The talk breaks down how to identify the set of features, skills, and decisions that consistently deliver extraordinary results. Attendees will leave with a practical, repeatable framework for improving efficiency, reducing wasted effort, and elevating their day-to-day performance as a concept artist in a production-focused environment.
Session Takeaway
- Using the 80/20 rule to understand softwares - what are the crucial elements we need to master to get the results we want?
- Creating workflows using the 80/20 rule.
- Using the 80/20 rule when trying to understand a new IP/lore/design principles.
- Planning and preparing for the end goal.
- Having an exit strategy to finish your concept pieces efficiently.
On the Lore Around Art
Who is the artist, what is the circumstance of the artwork's creation, what is the fabric it tries to weave and how are its parts connected?
Session Takeaway
- Why art can't stand on its own and always comes with a context.
- On the importance of said context. What does the artist bring along, it's surrounding and what part comes from our selves.
- On the importance of a red thread that weaves itself through a body of work.
- Be it PR, myth building or unfortunate circumstance, how the context drives or tanks the value of an artwork.
What Games Can Steal from Film Pipelines (and What They Shouldn’t)
Modern game development relies heavily on DCC tools such as Maya, Houdini, and Blender, yet these tools are often treated as isolated asset exporters rather than part of a cohesive pipeline.
In this session, I’ll share practical approaches for building more robust DCC pipelines for games by borrowing ideas from film and animation pipelines while also highlighting film workflows that break down in real-time production. Drawing on experience across film, animation, and game cinematics, I’ll cover which concepts translate well to games, which ones should be avoided, and how to adapt both without over-engineering.
The focus is on pipeline architecture and production realities rather than specific tools or code. Attendees will leave with concrete strategies for improving DCC pipelines to better support iteration, scale, and collaboration in modern game development.
Session Takeaway
- How stronger DCC pipeline structure improves iteration speed, stability, and collaboration across art, cinematics, and engineering.
- What kinds of pipeline capabilities games can benefit from, based on lessons learned from film and animation pipelines.
- Why investing in pipeline architecture and tooling pays off as teams and content scale.
Audio
Cairn: Moving Sound - Martin Stig Andersen in Conversation with Rob Bridgett
Acclaimed audio director and creative sound designer Martin Stig Andersen discusses his compelling and inspirational audio work with friend and fellow game audio guru, Rob Bridgett. Since his first foray into games, Andersen has continued to make his personal mark on the landscape of story-telling interactive sound and music. His innovative work on Limbo and Inside, among several other noted titles, has long since earned him a place in the game audio hall of fame. Be inspired by his unique approach in exploring the ‘why’ of sound, and its subconscious power to convey and communicate meaning in one of his latest works, Cairn.
Session Takeaway
- Why making the sound of Cairn beautiful, almost like an album, was as important, if not more important than it being ‘correct’.
- How the up-close ‘micro’ sound in front of you works in contrast with the expansive soundscape around you.
- Innovation in a unique approach to Atmos mixing.
- Developing breathing and foley as a language and syntax to communicate vital player feedback and meaning through sound.
Learnings from 30 Years in Game Audio
Having spoken at the inaugural Develop Conference audio track 20 years ago, we’re delighted to welcome Nick Laviers back from LA to his native land to share from his deep knowledge and rich experience. It has, in fact, been thirty years (and counting) during which Laviers has successfully worked at the forefront of videogame development, responsible for award-winning ear candy on dozens of major titles and series, including Harry Potter, Command and Conquer and Star Wars: Jedi.
In a revealing and inspiring talk, he’ll discuss key learnings wrought from navigating the joys and vicissitudes of a constantly changing industry and ever evolving technology, a global pandemic and now a potential AI revolution. Find out what you might learn for your career from his three decades at the coalface of AAA game music, sound, dialogue and audio tech.
Session Takeaway
- Reflections on what might lead to career longevity working on multiple AAA games.
- Thoughts on what provides the best conditions and platform for games audio production, drawing from 30 years of professional experience.
- An industry veteran's perspective on AI in the audio domain and where things might be headed.
Visual Approaches to Creative Sound Design
The way we talk about sound is holding back the way we design it. In game audio we too-often rely on a narrow set of descriptors: bright, dark, warm, gritty. We also tend to default to technical processes — more compression, less reverb, more distortion — or literal source references — more metallic, more watery, more engine. While useful, these ways of talking about sound can flatten creative intent, restrict exploration, and make it harder to communicate nuanced ideas. To design more expressive, evocative audio, we need better creative language - and one of the richest sources of inspiration comes from the visual arts.
In this session, Ashton Mills draws from his experience as a sound designer and creative leader in game audio, exploring how visual thinking can augment our approaches to sound design. Ashton demonstrates how concepts like line, shape, texture, contrast, and movement can be translated into sound, offering different ways to imagine, design, and communicate audio ideas.
The talk explores how soft and hard lines map to envelope design, how visual texture differs from timbre in shaping sonic identity, and how art movements such as impressionism, expressionism, and realism can inform creative intent and stylistic choices in game audio. Through practical examples from RuneScape:Dragonwilds and sound design DAW sessions, Ashton will bridge the gap between the philosophical and the concrete; offering attendees techniques they can apply to their own work.
Session Takeaway
- Unlock new imaginative approaches to sound design.
- Discover untapped sources of inspiration for creative work.
- Improve collaboration between sound and other disciplines.
- Give better creative feedback and have new ways to respond to feedback.
Business
Beyond Awareness: Supporting Neurodiverse Teams Without Burning Out Managers
Over the last few years, awareness of neurodiversity and mental health in games has grown significantly. Many studios now genuinely want to do better. The challenge is sustaining that support in a way that works for both employees and the people managing them.
This talk focuses on what happens after awareness, when good intentions meet deadlines, live projects, and already stretched managers. It explores the practical realities of supporting neurodiverse teams in fast paced production environments.
Drawing on real examples from global AAA teams, I will examine what support actually helps neurodivergent employees thrive, where accommodations can unintentionally create friction, and how emotional labour often quietly shifts onto managers without the tools to carry it. We will look at how to move from reactive, individual fixes to team level systems that protect psychological safety without burning people out.
This session is practical, honest, and grounded in lived experience. It is not about perfection or policy heavy solutions, but about building sustainable team norms that make space for difference while still delivering high quality work.
Attendees will leave with a clear framework for supporting neurodiverse teams, protecting manager wellbeing, and embedding inclusion into everyday studio operations.
Session Takeaway
How to support neurodivergent employees in a sustainable way that works in real production environments
How to protect manager wellbeing while fostering psychological safety and inclusion
How to move from individual accommodations to team level systems that scale
What common mistakes to avoid when supporting neurodiverse teams
Hiring for Success Under the New UK Employment Rights Act
The new UK Employment Rights Act represents one of the most significant shifts in employment protection in recent years, with shorter qualifying periods for unfair dismissal and increased scrutiny on hiring decisions. For employers, this means that recruitment mistakes will carry risk much earlier in the employment lifecycle.
This session explores how hiring processes must evolve to remain effective, defensible, and fair under the new legal landscape. Liz Prince will break down what the changes mean in practice for employers, particularly around selection criteria, interviews, probationary periods, and decision-making documentation.
Attendees will gain a clear understanding of why traditional informal or ‘culture-fit’ driven hiring approaches may no longer be sufficient, and how to build structured, evidence-based recruitment processes that reduce legal exposure while still supporting great hires. The session focuses on practical steps organisations can take now to future-proof their hiring, from redefining role requirements to improving assessment methods and record-keeping.
Designed for leaders, HR professionals, and hiring managers, this talk provides actionable guidance to help studios continue hiring with confidence in a tighter, faster-moving employment law environment.
Session Takeaway
- Understand how the new Employment Rights Act changes hiring risk and timelines.
- Learn how to structure recruitment and selection to reduce unfair dismissal exposure.
- Take away practical steps to improve interviews, assessments, and hiring records.
How to Work with your Ex Dev Partners to Resolve Blockers
Deadlines, insufficient documentation, repetitive feedback loops, and compressed timelines can all be avoided through effective communication, collaboration, and internal readiness. Join me as we walk through how to engage with our external partners in a meaningful way to resolve conflict when it arises.
Session Takeaway
- Learn how to effectively communicate with your vendors to get needs met.
- Emphasize listening to your vendors needs to come to resolution together.
- Learn how to resolve conflict through communication.
Product Validation: How to Spot a Flop Before it’s Too Late!
You have seen it a million times before. A game releases to crickets, and after the sad headlines, layoffs, and internal chaos, the employees say the same thing: "we should have seen this coming".
So what happened?
In this session we will go from start to end, conception to testing to production to ship, and build a framework of how to identify (and solve!) product issues BEFORE you ship. If you are releasing any sort of project in 2026 or beyond, this talk is sure to be useful.
Session Takeaway
After seeing this talk you can apply to your own project:
- A practical framework to define success at the project and feature level, so your development is always aligned and pointed towards the vision.
- Key insights on how to validate your project before its too late, how to playtest efficiently, how to not waste development figuring it out.
- A check list of warning signs to watch out for from announce to ship, so that your marketing is measurable and translates to actual sales.
Scaling Without Breaking Your Studio
As game studios grow, the biggest risks to performance and long-term value often shift away from the product itself and towards leadership capability, decision-making clarity, and how pressure is handled across the organisation.
This session explores the predictable pressure points that emerge as studios scale, and why many challenges attributed to hiring, process, or delivery are often symptoms of deeper leadership and system strain.
Drawing on experience across multiple growth-stage studios, the talk explores the inflection points where execution risk, attrition, and leadership overload tend to increase. It looks at why leadership capability often lags behind headcount growth, how decision bottlenecks and unclear accountability quietly erode value, and the hidden cost of pushing for growth without strengthening people and leadership systems.
The session also shares practical leadership shifts that support resilience, clarity, and sustainable performance under pressure.
This is a grounded, experience-led session for founders, studio leaders, and investors who want to reduce execution risk, protect long-term value, and support studios to scale responsibly in uncertain conditions.
Session Takeaway
Recognise early leadership and people risks as studios scale
Understand how leadership systems affect delivery and execution risk
Apply practical shifts to support sustainable performance
Tech Raises Money Better Than Games. Here’s Why
Games studios are creative powerhouses. But when it comes to raising investment, we consistently get it wrong - and we tend to get it wrong in the same ways.
Ella Romanos has spent 19 years in the games industry working as a developer, as a consultant advising studios on funding strategy, and most recently as a founder raising pre-seed for her own VC-backed startup. That last role was the one that finally showed her how badly the industry misunderstands what investors actually need.
This talk is an honest post-mortem on the assumptions games studios bring to the funding conversation - and why those assumptions cost us deals, credibility, and time. Ella will cover the mistakes she made herself, the patterns she observed in others, and the shift in mindset that changed how she pitches, plans, and thinks about proof.
Key topics include: why games studios confuse creativity with investment readiness; the vanity metrics trap and what investors actually want to see; the difference between proving a concept and proving demand; why the games industry thinks it's unique (it isn't); and what tech startups do differently that we should steal.
This is not a talk about how to write a pitch deck. It is a talk about why most of us are asking the wrong questions before we ever get to one.
Session Takeaway
1. Investors do not fund ideas, passion, or creative potential - they fund proof of demand. Understanding what proof means in your specific context is the work that needs to happen before you approach a single investor.
2. Most games studios are pitching the wrong thing. The game is not the investment case. The commercial model, customer validation, and evidence of repeatable demand are the investment case.
3. The games industry has far more to learn from the wider tech startup world than it typically acknowledges - especially on customer validation and building proof before scale.
4. Vanity metrics (wishlists, social follows, demo downloads) are not investor evidence. Knowing the difference between activity and traction will save you months of unproductive fundraising conversations.
5. You do not need to be far along to be investment ready - but you do need to be honest about where you are and what you have actually proven. Investors reward clarity and credibility over ambition alone.
The Power of Stopping: Spotting a Sunk Cost Fallacy Before it Sinks your Project
It's no great secret that projects overrun, that humans don't always make good plans and even when they do, they are inherently bad at spotting when plans are crumbling around them.
How do you stop the train when it’s obvious that your project or feature is overrunning? Game developers are often left feeling powerless to stop or course correct in the face of overrun because they don't have the tools to confidently identify what is going wrong. This talk explores the deeper reasons behind project failure and explains the psychological and behavioural reasons why teams miss warning signs. It will look at the folly of a sunk cost fallacy as well as demonstrate how to ignore the instinct to keep digging when things are already going south.
Although external factors can often derail a project, this talk will demonstrate the tools that Producers and the wider development team can utilise to help guide the team in creating achievable goals, pivot in the face of changing priorities but most importantly, highlight when a project is overshooting the mark so you can pull the plug before it's too late.
Session Takeaway
1) Show how to make Scope drift visible: Being clear on goals and priorities.
2) Recognising that Sunk cost is not a reason to continue: How to decide on future value.
3) How to ensure you have a “kill-switch” process: Ensuring you have a culture that can use it.
Coding
A Frame’s Life: Frame Timing, Synchronization, and Latency in UE
Every frame in Unreal Engine goes on a long journey before reaching the screen.
In this talk, we’ll walk through that journey from gameplay code through the game thread, render thread, RHI thread, DirectX, the GPU, and finally onto the display. We’ll explore how these stages synchronize, how frames are queued and presented, and how small decisions can add measurable latency.
By the end, you’ll have a clearer picture of frame pacing, vsync, VRR, swap chains, input delay, and Unreal’s game thread synchronization options, so you can make more informed decisions on the tradeoffs between performance and responsiveness.
Session Takeaway
The audience will learn about the many different factors that make up whether a frame makes or misses a vsync.
From Potatoes to Super-chips: Optimising Player Experiences Whatever the Mobile Device
Mobile players expect smooth, responsive gameplay regardless of whether they’re playing on an older phone/tablet or on a modern flagship device. For developers already targeting mobile, or considering extending PC and console experiences onto mobile, hardware fragmentation across many vendors and generations remains one of the biggest challenges to delivering great player experiences.
In this talk, Nordeus share practical lessons from developing and optimising Top Goal, a football title currently in soft launch aimed at supporting a wide range of devices and regions. Arm will complement this with insights into on-device profiling techniques that empowered the Nordeus team to make efficient and effective performance improvements where it counts.
The session will cover accessible, free profiling tools available to developers today, along with concrete examples of feature scaling and optimisation strategies that preserve gameplay feel across low-end and high-end devices alike. We’ll also discuss why mobile is increasingly important for player retention, enabling engagement between PC and console sessions in short, everyday moments.
Attendees will leave with a clear, practical approach to tackling device fragmentation, improving player experience, and making informed performance decisions that scale from “potatoes” to modern super-chips.
Session Takeaway
- Why to profile on real devices, early and often. (Emulators and desktop builds don’t reflect real-world CPU, GPU, or thermal behaviour)
- How to optimise for frame stability and responsiveness, not just FPS. (Consistent frame pacing and low input latency define player experience)
- How to scale features intelligently, not indiscriminately. (Preserve gameplay feel across “potatoes” and super-chips by targeting the biggest bottlenecks first)
Inside F1 Game Development: Dynamic Objectives
This session will explore how a small team from Formula 1 game series developed a lightweight yet dynamic objectives system that provides players with contextual goals and feedback during races, meaning to help players tangibly improve their racing performance while feeling fun and authentic to Formula 1.
The talk will include concrete implementation examples with gameplay footage and behind-the-scenes formulas as well as highlighting challenges, performance considerations, and insights into how the team integrated voice acting to create an immersive experience that feels natural within a racing game.
Session Takeaway
Attendees will learn practical approaches to:
- Designing adaptive gameplay systems that enhance player experience.
- Balancing realism with the arcade nature of gameplay systems.
- Accounting for time manipulation systems (rewinding) when inventing new features.
- Designing a modular system to account for the ever-shifting scope and tight schedule in annually released games.
- The importance of speech cues for creating natural-feeling objectives.
Moving from Engineering To Management
This talk will explore the different pathways that an engineer (or IC) can take in order to move into management. It will include personal experiences within management (both as an employee and as a manager) and a thorough dive into management itself, exploring the pathways to management, different types of managers, and how to properly balance opportunities. Additionally, it will discuss in detail the different steps an engineer must take and the responsibilities that come with each of those steps.
Session Takeaway
- The questions to ask and conversations that can be had to define a path into management
- How to balance engineering and management responsibilities
- The different options available within management
Optimising Optimisation: Why it’s Still a Challenge and How Does the Industry Solve it?
Having problems with frame stutters? Are your servers unresponsive due to performance issues? You’re not alone...
All too often releases are plagued by commentary on poor technical optimisation, despite the time and passion the devs put into making these brilliant games.
So, why does optimisation become an issue and how do we solve it? This session will explore why optimisation remains a challenge that affects so many games; and how external pressures such as the rising cost of GPUs, hardware availability, player expectations and the increasing pressure of time and money on game development are only adding to the challenges.
Our panellists will then share how developers can use knowledge, tools and processes to better address it in their games.
Session Takeaway
Understanding the challenges around optimisation that the industry is currently facing.
Insights into the impact of poor optimisation across all departments of a business.
Sharing of expert knowledge, tools, and processes that can improve the optimisation processes on their games, and shift attitudes across their studios.
Postmortem - Shipping Godot VR and Porting to PSVR2
We set up an indie studio because we wanted to build cool things in VR. Part of that is working directly with hardware so we chose Godot so we could build our own tech stack overtime. This talk dives into the technical challenges of using an unproven engine and shipping in a difficult technical space where almost everyone is on Unity/Unreal with multiple layers between them. The challenges of hitting framerate and the design and technical choices and mistakes we made.
Review rewriting the font engine, dealing with undocumented APIs from platform holders and variety of corner edge cases that taking control of your tech stack as a tiny indie studio bring. Then add on the decision to port to PSVR2, Apple and variety of other hardware.
Session Takeaway
- How to build an engine as an indie.
- Understanding of Godot, and the pros and cons of seeding your tech state with an existing engine.
- Some VR / Godot specific programming lessons.
Stealing from AAA for Fun and Profit: Lessons in Code Quality
Scaling a project from prototype to production is a time when a lot of technical debt comes due, as the small team at Failbetter Games working on our upcoming game, Mandrake, found when entering production. This is a talk about how (and why) we decided to tackle this problem head-on with a focus on code quality and architecture, the challenges we faced, and the benefits that came back to us as a result.
Session Takeaway
- Where the cheap wins are when adopting a focus on code quality.
- Tips on moving from prototype code to production code.
- The cost/benefit tradeoff of doing all this at indie scale.
Technical Debt : Keeping your House Clean and Tidy
Technical debt is a phenomenon both overpresent and understudied. No matter your role in a production team, you've certainly encountered it yourself, or heard someone complain about it.
But what, exactly, is technical debt? What causes it? How bad is it? Can we avoid it? How?
We'll shed some light on the scary monster that plagues so many projects, see how it came to be, why it's often here for good - or at least unavoidable - reasons, and how, if we learn how to handle it intelligently and without fear, it can become a familiar part of our daily job.
This talk is non-coders friendly !
Technical debt does not happen only in code, and managing it is not the prerogative of programmers.
General examples and daily-life metaphors will be used, and while there will be some anecdotes from my own experience as a developer, we won't be digging into technical details.
Session Takeaway
A better understanding of what technical debt is, how it can hinder your production and impact your team.
Learning to identify its root causes and understand that you often can't avoid it...and that sometimes you don't want to.
Practical tips on how to evaluate and manage the debt you will create so it doesn’t overwhelm you.
Design
AI Wants to Play: A Game Designer’s Guide to AI in Every Stage of Development
AI is reshaping game development — but beyond the hype, what actually works in practice? This talk is a hands-on tour through every stage where AI can help, from initial prototyping to runtime gameplay, drawn from the speaker's recent work as a Studio Design Director owning the AI roadmap and a Creative Director using AI to prototype and ship games.
We start with AI as a design tool. Using platforms like Lovable, Claude, and Gemini, the speaker prototyped a suite of games in weeks rather than months — rapidly iterating on everything from mechanics to visual design. We'll cover audience modelling, gameplay videos and mockups, and provide an honest comparison of AI tools that actually matter to game teams today.
Next, we look at AI in the game itself. A custom card game system — inspired by DeepMind's Agent57 — trains a single 12,000-parameter neural network to master multiple card games using universal strategic features, evolving from PPO to Deep Monte Carlo with league training. Meanwhile, Rumour Mill and the Whispers show how LLMs can generate characters, dialogue, and even core mechanics at runtime.
We also examine shipped games pushing the frontier: Meaning Machine's Dead Meat, and Jam & Tea's Retail Mage, plus a look at DeepMind's Agent57 and SIMA 2 projects to contextualise where the research is heading.
Every example comes with honest results — what worked, what failed, and what's worth your time. Attendees leave with a practical framework for adopting AI across their own studios.
Session Takeaway
- A practical decision framework for choosing the right AI tool and technique at every stage of development — from prototyping with Lovable and Claude, to modelling audiences with TinyTroupe or Gems, to choosing between RL, LLMs, and heuristics for your runtime NPCs.
- How to use AI to radically accelerate game prototyping — with an honest comparison of tools (Lovable, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Gemini) and real case studies showing what each is best at, so you can adopt the right tools for your team immediately.
- How a single lightweight AI model can learn to play multiple games — a concrete architecture (27 universal features, 12K parameters) that's 196× smaller and 45× faster than brute-force approaches, including the evolution from PPO to DMC and the practical lessons from training failures.
- Design principles for LLM-powered NPCs that players actually enjoy — drawn from shipped games (Dead Meat, Retail Mage) and the speaker's own prototypes, including why AI dialogue needs a strong authorial foundation, how to handle latency and too-capable NPCs, and when AI imperfection becomes the mechanic.
- An AI tools landscape overview you can take back to your studio — covering prototyping, content generation, audience modelling, and runtime AI, with clear guidance on what's ready for production, what's experimental, and what's still hype.
Deduction as Exploration in TR-49
The classic detective story starts with them exploring the scene and collecting evidence, and ends with the detective sitting in their chair, smoking a pipe and piecing it all together. This talk explains how inkle's breakout mystery game TR-49 takes a different approach that puts the deduction step first, by turning the puzzle process from a quiz about the evidence that can only end in a tick and a new puzzle into the way the player explores the "map" of the game, opening new "locations" by the deductions they make: which in turn allows us to make space for the deeper mysteries, with less clear-cut answers, that bring the game to life.
Session Takeaway
- A different model for deduction mechanics; moving from quizzes to exploration.
- Examples drawn from our recent release, TR-49, of how we did this in practice.
- Pros and cons for this design strategy.
Design for Change: Should Designers Be Letting AI Make Product Decisions?
This talk questions the growing assumption that Artificial Intelligence should guide key product or UX decisions in product teams. Rather than accepting AI recommendations at face value, I will explore where AI genuinely enhances research, prototyping, and design decisions, and where it subtly shifts responsibility away from human designers. Attendees will discover practical frameworks for using AI in ways that strengthen product quality, user insight, and ethical outcomes.
Session Takeaway
- How to evaluate when AI adds true value to UX and product decisions.
- A simple framework for balancing human judgement with AI support.
- Practical ways to keep ethical design and user needs at the centre of AI‑assisted workflows.
Designing Immersive and Explorable Open Worlds with Narrative Encounters
This session examines the development of the Open World Encounter in Project Avatar, covering the design domains of systems, narrative, and gameplay. It highlights how the encounter framework enhances player exploration, improves immersion, and seamlessly blends gameplay with the project’s rich lore and strong IP identity. Through this overview, we explore the design principles, technical solutions, and development workflow that shape how players discover, interact with, and understand the world around them.
Session Takeaway
• Practical methods for designing open world encounters that balance systemic behavior with authored narrative intent.
• Techniques for integrating lore and worldbuilding into moment-to-moment gameplay without disrupting player agency.
• Actionable workflows and cross discipline practices that help teams build scalable encounter content for large open worlds.
• Practical solutions for preserving already produced content and resources during scope adjustments.
Games as Dreams: Using Symbolic Archetypes to Craft Powerful, Flexible Narratives
It’s every Narrative Designer’s worst nightmare. A quest has been cut, an enemy descoped, or a character nixed. We know we should be calm, collected and above all flexible, but the panic sets in. The game narrative makes no sense anymore! This session will explain and explore a tool to help in this situation and many more: “Dream Mode”. By using symbolic archetypes, like the kind we encounter in dreams, we can turn overwhelming narrative complexity and confusion into functional building blocks that can quickly be moved around, adapted, or removed entirely. And in the process build stronger, more powerful and more flexible narratives.
Session Takeaway
- How to use “Dream Mode” to transform a narrative into its symbolic and functional core
- How to distil characters, locations, enemies, objects and gameplay/story beats into symbolic archetypes
- Some of the most useful and recurring symbolic archetypes
- How to work with these building blocks to adapt a narrative when change occurs, and test out new approaches quickly
- How to reduce complexity in a narrative and amp up the emotional power
Interface as Identity: Designing UI That Complements the Brand
UI and branding are often treated like separate jobs. Branding frames the game from the outside and sets expectations. UI is what happens once you’re inside, where those expectations turn into experience.
UI isn’t only about clarity and function. It is a visual language players learn through repetition, and it carries tone, perspective, and intent through structure, typography, spacing, motion, and density. Long before a logo is refined or a trailer is cut, the UI is already shaping how the game feels.
This talk explores how interface decisions influence identity, how branding later reacts to what the UI has already made real, and how to design the two so they support each other instead of pulling apart.
We’ll look at familiar examples where UI choices become part of the game’s voice, and cases where the outside promise and inside experience don’t match. The goal isn’t to make UI look like marketing. It’s to build a shared voice: the same intention expressed clearly in two different contexts.
You’ll leave with a simple framework and checklist you can use early in development, even on small teams.
Session Takeaway
- A simple framework for aligning UI and branding from early development
- How to define a shared anchor and one consistent signal players recognize anywhere
- How to adapt style when direction shifts without rebuilding everything
No, Puzzle Games Aren’t Dead, You Just Didn’t Realise They’re Emotional Experiences Too
Games are emotional experiences, this is very clear in genres like first person shooters or adventure games. However, puzzle games are about logic and deduction, and it’s not immediately clear that emotions are even present, let alone important. I will make the case that despite appearances, puzzle games are indeed emotional, and in articulating how different mechanics create different emotions, we can better understand why some puzzle games stick with us longer than others, and what to consider when building our own puzzle games.
Session Takeaway
- Why you should think of your game mechanics and the intended experience together.
- Examples of how the mechanics reinforce a particular experience.
- New appreciation of puzzle games and puzzle mechanics.
Positive Spaces: Creating Engaging Sandbox Games Through Narrative Design
Not many people know that the Football Manager series has people working in narrative design behind it, helping players create amazing stories of their own with every save. It’s not just a sports management simulation, but a true sandbox title. This session looks more broadly at sandbox games in the industry, what makes them engaging narratively, and how the developers know when to provide players with hooks and emergent stories, and when to let them do their own thing with the tools provided.
Session Takeaway
- A deeper understanding of narrative design.
- A deeper understanding of sandbox games.
- How to create the scaffolding for players to create their own narratives.
S.T.E.A.L. like a Game Designer: Why “Just add Crafting” Never Works
The S.T.E.A.L. game design model seeks to remove subjective game design terms, such as “fun” and “gameplay”, with objective terms, such as syntax, tension, and emotion, that designers are able to measure. Using objective terms over subjective terms will equip you with the tools to determine whether certain features of a game achieve the type of player experience that you are is aiming for in your game.
Session Takeaway
How to adapt features from other games to the needs of the game they are working on and preserving the impact on players.
remove subjective terms such as “fun” and replace them with with objective, measurable, implementable terms such as syntax, tension, intended emotion and alignment so that designers can determine what those features achieve the intended player experience.
break down games into understandable and meaningful elements, seeing how each part impacts the next. When a player isn’t having fun, the S.T.E.A.L. framework gives designers the tools to determine why.
Scheduled Serendipity: Manufacturing Creative Aha Moments
Inspiration is treated like lightning: an unpredictable and uncontrollable moment. In practice, the best studios do not wait for “Aha” moments to happen randomly, they create the conditions for them to occur reliably.
This talk is a pragmatic guide to elevating your work from waiting for inspiration to strike into a reliable creative powerhouse. How to go from being creative to creating a creative environment.
I will cover how artists and scientists alike have tried to explain the sources and process of creative insight, and how you can use those lessons to create an inspiration pipeline you and your team can run on purpose.
We will look at the two engines behind great ideas: taste (your ability to choose what matters) and process (how you generate, clash, and transform inputs into something new).
You will leave with repeatable practices: how to curate inputs beyond the industry echo chamber, how to use constraints to force originality, how to schedule incubation without wasting time, and how to turn the fuzzy feeling of “this is cool” into shippable creative decisions.
The goal is fewer blocked weeks, fewer derivative dead ends, and more deliberate, high-quality creative breakthroughs.
Session Takeaway
- A repeatable method to create conditions for “Aha” moments instead of waiting for them.
- Practical techniques for curating stronger inputs beyond games and trend loops.
- How to use constraints and transformation loops to avoid derivative design.
- How to schedule incubation and mode switching without losing production momentum.
- Tools to convert vague excitement into clear, shippable creative decisions.
Telling Conflict-Less Stories
We are taught that conflict drives story—to believe that conflict is the only way to tell a “good” story. That without opposition, escalation there is no movement, no meaning, no growth. But what if that assumption is not just limiting—but actively harmful?
Telling Conflict-Less Stories argues that adversarial narratives narrow our imagination, normalize violence, and reduce complex problems. Rooted in Aristotelian hero-centric themes, these stories offer violence without solutions. These structures insist on isolation, domination, and conquest—values that are the foundations of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. The result is not catharsis, but trauma; not resolution, but a narrow focus of ONE answer to all problems - violence.
This talk proposes a shift: from conflict to tension, from opposition to questions. What if stories were driven by curiosity instead of combat, by cooperation instead of conquest, by empathy, exploration, and collective transformation? Drawing from cozy games, Indigenous and
non-Western narrative traditions, and structures like kishōtenketsu, Conflict-Less storytelling decentralizes the hero and recenters the world—its systems, relationships, ecologies, into shared meaning-making.
This talk is a mix of case studies, practical advice, and my signature entertaining delivery.
It demonstrates that the world is already full of conflict-less stories and IPs making hordes of money, along with the disturbing, mounting evidence that centering conflict in our stories limits our ability to solve problems in any other way than incorporating violence, or at best they only strive to preserve the status quo. In other words, proof that stories driven by conflict are putting restraints on our imaginative problem solving.
The solutions offered in the talk create/increase/allow for more:
- Investigation
- Empathy
- Suspense
- Curiosity
- Multiple perspectives
And most importantly:
- CONTEXT for your narratives and experiences.
Session Takeaway
- Unlearn the 5 Conflicts and Learn the 5 Tensions.
- Case studies of how Conflict-Less Narratives are already making money.
- How to subvert the Win/Loss condition in your games.
The Machete and the Broom: Two Roles of a Game Designer
There are two types of game designers when it comes to daily practice, the Machete or the Broom. We are either acting as the “visionary” - cutting a swath through the jungle, leading the way to our fully-fleshed-out game; or we are the “collator” - sweeping up behind this, clarifying where the path is through each decision.
This talk unpacks the concept of these two roles by way of demonstrating how to contribute to, and amplify, core design principles on any new project.
Session Takeaway
Learn when a game designer is being a machete or a broom, and what the relationship between these roles is
Knowing when to push forward and when to take a short left on design decisions
Applying this lens helps designers at any level contribute to clear and concise designs
Discoverability
5 Easy Steam Store Page Tweaks to Boost Your Visibility
Your Steam page is the most important marketing asset you have, but most devs unintentionally make it harder for the algorithm to help them. In this session, I’ll walk you through five dead-simple tweaks you can make right now to boost your CTR, increase wishlists, and get your game recommended to the right players.
We’ll look at capsule art clarity, the “verbs first” short description rule, choosing screenshots that actually sell your game, tag alignment, and a couple of keyword tricks that helped Modulus hit 100k wishlists.
Attendees will walk away with a clear checklist, real examples from Modulus and other indie titles, and a better understanding of how small, thoughtful changes can dramatically increase your visibility, wishlist velocity, and long-tail discovery on Steam.
Session Takeaway
- How to apply five quick store page improvements that increase click-through rates and wishlist conversion on Steam.
- Useful benchmarks using proven data from Chris Zukowski.
- How to evaluate and iterate on your own Steam page using a simple checklist that any team can implement immediately.
How a Small Indie Hit #1 New & Trending with a Steam Demo: Lessons from a Horror Game
Launching a demo on Steam can be a powerful marketing beat in indie development. In this talk, Helen breaks down the full, unfiltered data behind the public demo launch of Forbidden Solitaire, a retro FMV horror card game that hit #1 in Steam’s New & Trending Demos and broke into Trending Free, without a publisher or external marketing agency.
Drawing from internal metrics, the session walks through how a small team planned, timed, and executed a demo launch designed to maximise wishlist conversion, Steam visibility, and streamer engagement. Helen will cover how an earlier, curated streamer demo informed the public release; how the team polished and positioned the demo; and how Steam tools (wishlister emails, news posts, reaching existing audiences and streaming live video) added visibility.
The talk includes concrete results: wishlist gains and losses, downloads, completion rates, median playtime, and chart performance; alongside outcomes from press and streamer outreach, and social media. It also explores how the team used the demo data and feedback, to further hone their efforts for the next marketing push.
Attendees will leave with practical ideas for demo-driven marketing, insight into Steam discovery for smaller games, and a realistic picture of what a focused, data-led campaign can achieve for small teams, especially those working in trend-led genres like horror.
Session Takeaway
- Timing and focus matter: Demo launch + Steam tools + targeted messaging = max eyeballs & wishlists.
- Curated attention beats general noise: Thorough and thoughtful streamer & press outreach cut through, sparking genuine enthusiasm.
- Data feeds the next campaign: Campaign data and demo feedback drove game improvements and will make subsequent marketing beats even stronger.
How to Develop and Execute a Marketing Content Strategy Without Losing Your Mind
We've all been there - grand plans for multi-channel marketing campaigns that will spread far and wide, and an eager audience across myriad platforms just ready to like, comment and follow our posts. Then, reality sets in. There's too much to do and too little time to carry out our dream marketing campaigns.
In this session, Najmah will walk through how to design a content strategy that takes into account your limited resources while still keeping up a sustainable and consistent marketing plan.
Session Takeaway
- A step-by-step playbook on marketing content strategy.
- How to make the best of limited marketing resources.
- Creating a focused and impactful marketing plan.
The Creator Marketing Gut Check
Influencer marketing remains a hotly debated topic within the games industry. For some developers, it has driven discovery, wishlists and momentum. For others, it has been expensive, disappointing, or actively damaging to trust.
This session draws directly from real developer conversations and industry discussions, including common concerns such as creators overshadowing the game, sponsored content feeling inauthentic, or campaigns failing to convert into meaningful results. Rather than dismissing this scepticism, the talk examines why creator marketing can feel like it “doesn’t work” and what’s different when it’s approached with purpose.
The session breaks down why creator campaigns can sometimes feel ineffective, and when they can genuinely add value, helping teams assess the pros and cons before investing time or budget. It explores how creator marketing differs from traditional advertising, why disclosure and creative control matter, and why success should not be measured purely in short term sales.
Designed for developers and small teams, this talk aims to provide clarity rather than advocacy. Attendees will leave better equipped to evaluate whether creator marketing is the right choice for their game, and how to approach it without wasting budget or trust.
Session Takeaway
The common dilemmas in creator campaigns and how to navigate them.
A framework for deciding whether creator marketing is worth pursuing for your game.
How to work with creators in ways that respect audiences, budgets, and long-term trust.
Why Most PC Game Marketing Fails After Launch (and How to Build Systems that Actually Retain Players)
For many games, launch is treated as the finish line. Wishlists convert, reviews come in, visibility spikes and then momentum quietly fades. Not because the game isn’t good, but because post-launch marketing is rarely designed to support retention, re-engagement, and long-term discovery on PC.
This talk breaks down why game marketing so often stalls after launch and what studios can do differently to build systems that keep players coming back months and years later.
Drawing from real Steam data, post-launch campaigns, and hard-earned lessons from PC releases, this session examines the most common failure points: over-indexing on launch-day hype, misreading wishlists as retention, under-utilizing Steam’s ecosystem, and treating marketing as a short-term visibility push instead of a long-term player lifecycle strategy.
Rather than focusing on paid acquisition tactics, the presentation explores how successful PC games align product updates, community, store presence, and communication into a single retention engine. Attendees will learn how to identify the signals that predict long-term engagement, how to structure post-launch beats that re-activate players, and how to turn updates, events, and community moments into sustained growth rather than temporary spikes.
This is not a theoretical framework or a “launch checklist.” It’s a candid, experience-driven look at what failed after launch, why it failed, and what actually worked to stabilize retention, improve engagement, and extend the commercial life of PC games.
Session Takeaway
- Launch success does not equal long-term success - Wishlists, reviews, and launch visibility are only the starting point. Without a post-launch system that supports re-engagement and ongoing discovery, momentum will fade even for well-received PC games.
- Retention is built through systems, not spikes - Sustainable PC game growth comes from aligning updates, community, store presence, and communication into a consistent rhythm. One-off beats and reactive marketing cannot replace a structured post-launch approach.
- Marketing works best when it is tied to player behavior, not hype - The most effective post-launch strategies focus on how players actually engage with the game. When marketing supports real play patterns and reasons to return, engagement and long-term performance improve naturally.
Games:Edu
Coming soon
Indie
Finding the Balance: Big Team Process vs Indie Mindset
This session looks at how teams can build strong production foundations without losing the creative spark that drives great games. Through lessons learned in both small indie teams and larger studio environments, Michael will share insights into different workflows, team structures, and approaches to sustaining both people and creativity.
Session Takeaway
- Practical strategies for balancing sustainable workloads with efficient production pipelines.
- Clear approaches to structuring teams and workflows that support both accountability and creative experimentation.
- Actionable methods for maintaining team well-being while delivering innovative, high-quality games.
How Rethinking Pay and Power Helped Us Build a Resilient Co-Dev Studio
The most common company value is integrity while the second most common is collaboration. But how many truly live by those values when pay structures reward competition and the most important decisions are made behind closed doors? Values alone don’t shape studio culture.
This talk is a case study of what happened when an industry veteran and an outsider founded a co-dev studio where pay is transparent, power is shared and the company culture is built within the studio structure.
Leveraging her background as a Research Scientist, Daph frames this talk as an experiment. She walks you through the original hypothesis, what rethinking pay and power meant, and their observations as the studio grew from 2 to 18 people over two years, contributing to multiple AAA co-dev projects. She will also provide a practical evaluation of these structural decisions, including their difficulties, successes and impact.
This talk is for anyone from any discipline interested in learning about how studio structure can build resilience, improve retention and affect collaboration in a co-dev environment.
Session Takeaway
- An case study of how transparent and aligned pay structures influence collaboration, competition and retention
- An understanding of how studio culture can be shaped by structural decisions, and not just values
- A new perspective on industry norms related to pay, power and resilience
How to Make Whatever You Want and Still Get Attention
In absence of any sort of studio backing, funding grants, publishers, or doing anything the industry tells him to do, Stanley Baxton has managed to develop several award-winning narrative games, and went on to be part of BAFTA Breakthrough 2025 with his game LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST. In this talk, he’s going to break down how he did it, making a case for abandoning the “normal” way to develop games, and how the industry is ignoring vital talent at the fringes.
Session Takeaway
- Why we need to look beyond “getting into” the industry as a means to make meaningful games, and how this makes the entire field stronger.
- Why making “hyper-local” game for very specific “audiences” should be pursued by more developers, and can be as culturally impactful as it is artistically fulfilling.
- How someone can start striking out into making “non-commercial” games in “not real” game tools, why they should, and why I believe this needs to become more common advice to newcomers and students.
- Why, despite the fact that I’ve been able to do this, that I am still in several positions of economic privilege, and that we need more systems to support artists on the fringes.
Mike & Rami Are Still Here: Live from Develop:Brighton
They're old. They're tired. They're barely hanging on. Mike Rose (No More Robots) and Rami Ismail (previously of Vlambeer) have been knocking around the video game industry for 15 years now, Mike on the publishing side, and Rami on the developer side. Now they've finally fulfilled their dreams of starting a video game industry podcast (which is an entirely unique idea and has never been done before), through which they tell terrible stories, give terrible advice, and swan around like they own the place.
In this very special live episode of Mike & Rami Are Still Here, the duo will talk memories of past Develop:Brighton visits; what is on the horizon for our industry at a time of extreme worry, and maybe even take a question or two from the audience, if they can stomach it.
Session Takeaway
- A better understanding of publisher funding in 2026. What should you be asking for? How many units will you actually sell?
- What can we expect sales to look like going forward into 2027? Are things levelling out? Are they getting worse?
- What tips and tricks are there for surviving as a studio right now? How can you rise above?
Pitching to Publishers Sucks (& What We Learned Pitching Cabernet)
Arseniy Klishin from Party for Introverts shares the tips and tricks he wishes he knew while securing funding and a publishing deal for their recent narrative RPG Cabernet. In his talk he provides an array of developer-friendly insights and advice about the pitching process, developing prototypes, making adjustments to the pitch and demo based on publisher feedback, and more. With topics ranging from the common challenges indie developers experience in the publisher-oriented market to demo improvement suggestions to setting expectations for the meeting and beyond, he will provide easy alternatives to lessons usually learned the hard way.
Session Takeaway
In this presentation, attendees will gain an increased confidence in pitching abilities, a breakdown of what to expect from pitch meetings from the developer perspective, and strategies for a more successful pitching process.
Shipping S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Our Way: Self-Publishing, Game Pass, and 1 Million in 36 Hours
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl - a first-person open-world shooter built on Unreal Engine 5 - was released under the extraordinary circumstances of full-scale war in the developers’ home country. In this session, Agostino Simonetta, Chief Commercial Officer at GSC Game World, shares the real story behind launching this unique Ukrainian title: self-publishing without a traditional publisher, the pivotal Microsoft partnership, integration with Game Pass and cloud services, and the immense challenges of shipping a major game during wartime.
Session Takeaway
- How to successfully self-publish a major title without a traditional publisher, including key decisions on control, risk management, and partner selection
- Real strategies for building and maintaining an authentic indie-style marketing voice that resonates with fans, even under tight resources and high pressure
- Practical ways to keep development and release on track during extreme external disruptions like war, blackouts, and team relocation, while still delivering post-launch support and maintaining player trust
The Quiet Things – How I Made and Shipped my Passion Project
From having the rug pulled out from under my feet in the waves of layoffs, to funding and shipping my very first indie game, this session will look at how I started a company and we made The Quiet Things against a challenging backdrop. I’ll take you through my journey, from making the first prototype of the game for a University project, to raising £150k in funding through a mixture of grants, crowdfunding and bootstrapping. I’ll talk about the challenges and benefits of self publishing, and show a roadmap of what our budget and production really looked like, all the way to release.
While the talk doesn’t directly involve in depth discussion of the games’ content, it’s worth noting The Quiet Things deals with some challenging topics around childhood abuse.
Session Takeaway
- Funding options available to indie developers.
- Marketing a game with limited time and resources.
- A realistic picture of what it takes to ship an indie game.
- Managing self publishing as a small team.
Indie Power-Up
A Beginners Guide to Tiktok (for Indie Games)
Learn the basics of using TikTok to launch your game and build your brand from Panda Cat Games’ Social Media Manager, Molly Holmes. She’ll share her tried and tested tips and tricks, and what she’s learnt about launching your social presence from scratch and building a following - so that you can do the same for your indie games company. (Warning: May include spreadsheets and graphs!)
This will cover:
- Why TikTok?
- Getting started
- What works and what doesn't (trends, rules, attention spans)
- Growing a following
- How to monitor and improve
- Generating ideas and content
Session Takeaway
- Basic understanding of TikTok.
- Knowledge of how to get started.
- Why TikTok can be important for indie games.
- Tips and tricks for how to get the best out of it.
Breaking Limits: How Mentorship Builds Better Studios
Since its inception in 2019, Limit Break has grown from a small cohort of 100 participants to a massive network of over 1,600 mentors and mentees. But how does a volunteer-run non-profit achieve this scale, and more importantly, why should game studios care?
In this session, Limit Break Founder Anisa Sanusi shares the origin story of the UK’s largest mentorship program for maginalised talent. She will reveal how a grassroots initiative evolved into a pillar of the industry, supporting thousands of careers from entry-level students to seasoned veterans.
Attendees will discover how supporting mentorship programs improves staff retention, levels up their skills, and fosters a healthier, more diverse studio culture. Anisa will also offer practical advice on running a successful non-profit. Whether you want to start your own employee resource group, launch a charity initiative, or simply become a better mentor, this talk will give you the tips you need for managing volunteers, organising community events on little or no budget, and that success often means embracing the chaos, ditching perfectionism, and just doing whatever it takes to get the job done.
Session Takeaway
- The Benefits of Mentorship: Understand the business benefits of mentorship, including higher staff retention, increased skill development, and improved team morale.
- Building a Community: Practical steps on how to set up and manage your own non-profit, charity, or internal employee resource group using a volunteer model.
- Better Mentoring and Leadership Skills: Learn how mentoring can help you to become a more effective leader in your own studio.
Fireside Chat with ZA/UM - How Unionisation Empowers Everyone!
The video games ecosystem has encountered many steep challenges recently with increasing redundancies, reduction in new talent entering the industry, and the rise of generative AI to name a few.
Such uncertainty would make anyone doubt the future and wonder where they stand. This was no different for the staff at the Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM. Yet there was a difference, such a difference that it brought employees together to talk, share their concerns and build the courage to address such matters to management. Time passed, yet as of October 2025, developers at ZA/UM formed the first officially recognized trade union in the UK video games industry. Represented by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) as the "ZA/UM Workers' Alliance," the union secured a voluntary recognition agreement with management to negotiate on job security, pay, and conditions following industry-wide layoffs.
How did such development happen?
Join us for this eye opening session as we explore what it takes to build momentum towards unionisation amongst workers, examining the steps needed to make such change happen from start to finish, and go down the rabbit hole with members of the “ZA/UM Workers' Alliance” to discuss their experiences and the impact unionising has had throughout the studio.
Session Takeaway
- Firsthand telling what it takes to create collective action within a studio and strengthen resolve in having difficult conversations as a team.
- The process in breaking down barriers between staff and management to communicate on mutual grounds for the progression of the company.
- The benefits of unisonising as a video game company that provides advantages for everyone within the business, from empowering workers to meeting goals and compromises as management.
How to Start an Indie Game Studio From Your Home Bedroom
What does it really take to turn a game idea into a sustainable indie studio, without a publisher at the start, a big team, or a flashy office?
In this candid, behind-the-scenes session, you’ll get a practical roadmap to building an indie game studio from the ground up, starting right where many great studios begin: your bedroom. Drawing on HaZ’s real-world experience of setting up Beyond The Pixels, this talk breaks down the key creative and business decisions every aspiring indie developer must face.
We’ll explore how to scope your first game idea realistically, choose the right engine for your goals, and avoid the common traps that stall projects early. You’ll learn how to assemble a lean, flexible team, collaborate effectively, and start building a genuine, engaged community from day one, not as an afterthought.
Beyond development, the session dives into the often-unspoken business side of indie games: legal setup, trademarks, publishing routes, funding strategies, and the realities of managing cashflow. No buzzwords, no wishful thinking—just honest insight into what it takes to survive and thrive as an independent studio in today’s crowded market.
Whether you’re a solo developer, a student, or a creative ready to take the leap, this session offers a clear, transparent look at turning passion into a studio—and giving your indie game its best chance.
Session Takeaway
- A Solid foundation of what it takes to build an indie studio from scratch.
- Tip on how to deal with business and strategic decisions of running an indie studio.
- The confidence to just take that leap and go for it!
Making Ambitious Games from Scratch in the UK - Highs, Lows, Lessons and Resources
I've made a conscious choice to build my career in the UK. I love the culture, landscape, diversity and talent in this wonderful melting pot.
In late 2025, I gave a version of this talk to the Unreal Meetup group in London. The goal was to share my journey in launching a game development studio, finding funding, building a product and finding a way of working that can create incredible and competitive videogame experiences in an increasingly challenging market. After a great response, I'd like to evolve the talk for Develop, and share the granular steps and lessons that I've learned since embarking on the ambitious journey to start a high-end game development studio.
Attendees will go on a linear journey through my work so far, starting in a bedroom, and reaching Gamescom and beyond. As we travel, we will reach checkpoints, in the form of lessons, resources and takeaways, that can be applied to other projects, goals or journeys.
There's no special trick, secret or exceptional talent. Instead, there are repeatable actions, granular tasks and perspectives that can be applied by anyone. I must stress that I don't claim to have all the answers, nor am I a runaway success at everything I undertake. However, I have been able to break into the industry and take on my some of my wildest dreams and goals within game development over the years. I'd love to share that with my peers, and hopefully help a few others to do the same.
Session Takeaway
- Starting a studio from scratch. Step-by-step guidance, lessons and examples.
- Applying for and deploying project finance in the UK. Resources and strategy.
- The realities of building a videogame development studio. What do you actually need to do/have to make it work?
- A step by step journey towards our first high-end commercial videogame. Starting in our bedroom, all the way to Gamescom and beyond.
- How to get your work out into the world - daily tasks and actions.
Mobile
Mobile Games: When Approachability Rhymes with Accessibility
This talk explores how mobile games often excel at approachability but often miss accessibility, which excludes disabled players. Discover the meaningful overlap: customizable controls help both casual players and those with motor impairments, clear audio/visual cues serve new players and those with various disabilities from cognitive to visual and hearing. See how you can properly support OS-level accessibility settings like screen readers and text scaling, while also designing accessible mobile gaming experiences through inclusive design and accessibility-aware development in commonly used engines. Learn from expert game accessibility specialists Cari Watterton (Scopely) and Améliane F. Chiasson (Player Research) and make your next mobile game (or patch!) more accessible.
Session Takeaway
- Learn how to make your mobile game reach a wider audience of people who use mobile devices daily for their accessibility needs.
- Know how to leverage and efficiently support iOS and Android's accessibility settings.
- Learn how to cleverly align accessibility efforts with your goals and objectives.
- Get tips on how to prevent accessibility barriers at the design level to avoid needing to do extra work.
Scaling Cross-Platform Delivery: From Mobile Bottleneck to Self-Service Platform
Digital products live across mobile, web, desktop — but delivery usually doesn't. One central mobile team becomes a ticket factory for everyone else, web prioritises desktop, and releases turn into cross-team coordination hell. In this talk, Vladimir Pronin shares a production case where a mobile app transformed from single-team bottleneck into a self-service platform enabling parallel delivery from 10+ squads.
Vladimir unpacks the shift from "mobile as channel" to "mobile as platform": defining crisp platform boundaries that enable instead of constrain, guardrails that let squads ship safely without central approval, and shared observability that makes incidents solvable instead of mysterious. He shows how platform contracts replaced ad-hoc tickets, how outcome alignment stopped channel wars (app vs web vs desktop), and how delivery cadence went from monthly heroics to weekly business-as-usual.
Expect practical patterns for your own cross-platform reality: team topologies that scale, decision frameworks that stick, platform metrics that matter, and org design that makes delivery predictable. Perfect for technical leads tired of coordinating releases across silos and wanting platform thinking that actually ships.
Session Takeaway
- Mental model for platform boundaries that scale cross-platform delivery.
- Team topology patterns to escape centralised mobile ownership.
- Decision framework to align mobile/web/desktop around outcomes not channels.
Soft Launch Smarter: Data-Driven Mobile Testing on a Budget
In today’s ultra-competitive mobile market, gaming companies struggle to successfully release new titles. Multiple factors must align, including clear market opportunity, strong visual appeal, high retention mechanics, effective monetization systems, and sustainable user acquisition costs.
This session shares Amber’s learnings from its direct-to-consumer initiatives, with the goal of helping developers shorten iteration cycles and reduce research and development costs when launching new projects.
Session Takeaway
- What steps developers should follow
- Tools to use
- How to use data to make decision
The Merchandising Gap: Your Game Economy Isn’t Just Your Store
Most games promote IAPs in the same 4-5 places: launch screens, inter-round offers, tournament gates, limited-time popups.
Your game economy is bigger than your in-game store. Every session, players move through environments, pause between actions, and engage with content. These are all moments where IAP discovery can happen naturally, without interrupting gameplay.
In this session I'll share data from tests across multiple live titles (1.9M+ players in one cohort alone) showing what happens when you create merchandising moments beyond the usual promotional touchpoints.
The standout finding: increasing the surface area for IAP discovery within your game is real and impactful. In one case study, non-promoted products saw a +7.2% ARPU lift in test groups, meaning players exposed to broader merchandising didn't just buy what was promoted, they bought more of everything.
Key takeaway: IAP promotion and IAP merchandising are different disciplines, and most games are only doing the first one.
Session Takeaway
The difference between IAP promotion (direct-response offers) and IAP merchandising (discovery moments) and why most games are only doing the former.
A methodology for measuring the full revenue impact of IAP merchandising, including organic uplift on products you're not actively promoting.
Practical patterns from live case studies showing where IAP discovery moments work across different game types, and how to test them without risking retention.
Performance
Action Design and Stunt Coordination for Cinematics and Gameplay - Q&A
A question and answer session focussing on the process of designing action content and coordinating stunt shoots within Game Development.
Subject areas could range from the key safety requirements developers should expect a coordinator to manage through to the creative elements that factor in to producing great action content and the steps developers can take to maximise what can be attained from their capture process.
Depending on the space, live demonstration of key concepts with performers could be included. I believe this would elevate the session significantly but there are factors that would need to be discussed to ensure this is viable.
Session Takeaway
- Clarity - Answer key questions and give practical advice regarding the process of creating and capturing action content
- Action in Performance - Explore how action content is created, what can be achieved and how it can enhance and support Cinematic and Gameplay production
- Safe Practice - How a Coordinator can help developers manage and mitigate risk, allowing them to navigate action requirements safely and effectively.
How to Enhance your Mocap/P-Cap Shoot: A Collaborative Guide for Game Devs and Performers
This talk centres around the collaboration between the Game Developer and the Performer. For almost 25 wonderful years I’ve been working in Motion and Performance Capture. I’ve been fortunate to have performed in over 50 AAA titles as well as multiple feature films. I have transitioned to Performance Directing and 1st AD roles for Mocap and Performance Capture shoots and as such, I assist in the collaboration between Game Developers and Performers to prepare for and deliver a shoot, harnessing passion, precision and performance. In this talk, I share my experience on how developers and actors alike can get the most out of their time in the volume. From choosing their actors and auditioning, to preparing shot-lists and streamlining their schedules to ensure an environment in which both can thrive. This talk aims to unite the two creative worlds, and doubles as a talk for Performers, Casting Directors and Agents to include techniques for auditioning, building digital characters, working in digital environments; as well as common questions and fears that come with stepping into the volume. This is useful for the dev teams and casting directors to witness, to improve communication and expectations, and understand better how to prepare the actor for their days in Lycra. |
Session Takeaway
- How to prepare for/as an actor on a Motion or Performance Capture shoot, to achieve the best data; aligned to the creative vision.
- How to prepare a shoot that is both actor friendly and more efficient.
- Acting in the digital realm. How casting directors/performers can help Game Devs achieve the most out of their time in the volume; acting techniques for games.
Press Start, Mind the Gap: Bridging US and UK Game Casting & Production pipelines
As video game production increasingly spans borders, casting and voice recording across the US and UK has become less of a novelty and more of a necessity. With this comes a unique set of creative, logistical, and cultural challenges. This talk explores what it actually takes to run successful split US/UK casts, from aligning developers to two very different acting climates to building workflows that don’t fall apart when your team is in a whole other time zone.
We’ll dig into the realities behind contracts, pay expectations, session structures, and scheduling differences, and how to set clear expectations with developers early on so production remains fair, efficient, and actor friendly on both sides of the Atlantic without forcing one market’s standards onto another.
Attendees will leave with practical strategies for creating and understanding equitable production pipelines that still deliver one cohesive game.
Session Takeaway
- Practical strategies and ideas for creating equitable production pipelines that still deliver one cohesive game.
- Understanding of where they fit into the pipeline as actors, directors, agents, etc and how best to contribute.
- Better understanding of how game dev pipelines work to be a better collaborator.
FREE - Roundtables
How Does One Freelance?
Are you someone who is new to the games industry looking for your first client, or have you been in the industry for quite some time as an employee but are now looking to take the freelancer plunge?
When we first take that step, it feels like there are so many unknowns. I know when I first ventured my mind went to:
‘Where do I find the work so I can keep being able to pay rent?’
‘How much should I charge for my skills and time?’
‘What is a self assessment and how do I even go about it?’
And many, many more.
It took time for me to find the answers, and even longer to realise what I should have been asking in the first place.
In this ‘How Does One Freelance?’ roundtable we will discover those questions and openly explore the answers together to help establish whether this work structure is for you. We will discuss all the main FAQ’s, the pros and cons to the choices that don’t necessarily have a right answer, as well as ensure you know how to look after yourself from a work, money and business perspective in a sustainable way. By the end we will have gained insight from one another and leave with a much stronger understanding of what day to day life as a freelancer in games (regardless of your role) could look like.
Session Takeaway
The Work - We will break down different ways to build up your client network and maintain sustainable work so you are thriving and not just surviving.
The Money - A topic we often are too shy to speak about, but we will cover how to price your services and how to go about getting paid.
The Business - How not to have HMRC on your back about self assessment and tax, as well as better understanding legal contracts and business expenses.
One Year On: Progress, Gaps, and Possibilities for LGBTQ+ Inclusion
This year’s LGBTQ+ round table will compare where we were at last year's roundtable, were we are now, and tackle key issues LGBTQ+ professionals are facing in the ever-changing social and political landscape. The hosts will present a series of topics, which attendees will be free to openly discuss, sharing their thoughts, insights and experiences, in a safe and supportive environment. Attendees should leave with a better understanding of what others are or have experienced, steps they have taken to navigate these, the knowledge they are not alone in most instances, and tangible or actionable takeaways to facilitate a better working and social environment for all.
Session Takeaway
What LGBTQ+ professionals are experiencing in 2026.
Practical ways to navigate and mitigate negativity.
Examples of changes to EDI practices around the world along with practical advice on how to navigate them and minimise the effect on yourself.
Steps you or your business can take to support LGBTQ+ individuals and employees.
Overcoming Barriers to Mental Health Support in the Workplace
This roundtable will open a vital discussion about the barriers many games industry employers face to implementing positive mental health and wellbeing practices. The types of organisations that make up our fast-paced industry are so diverse that there is no "one size fits all" approach to getting mental health support at work right. This fosters an environment in which leaders will often struggle alone to support the mental health of their teams, not knowing how to overcome barriers including finances, time, personnel, and more. Opening up an honest discussion about these barriers, and sharing best practice on how to overcome them, will ensure attendees leave with practical actions to level up their workplace wellbeing.
Session Takeaway
- Understand the barriers to implementing mental health support faced by organisations across the games industry.
- Gain insight into methods to overcome these barriers, with best practice and recommendations that can be flexible to suit your organisational make-up.
- Connect with industry peers to understand that you're not alone in facing these challenges: this is an opportunity to learn from others and share your insights in a supportive, facilitated environment.
- Leave with actionable goals to improve mental health support in your company.
Raise the Game Roundtable
Join us to talk about how to make the games industry a more equitable, diverse and inclusive place to be. Through this roundtable, we’ll aim to discuss actionable takeaways to make your studio or company a more inclusive place to work for, and share tips on how to do so sustainably. You will also learn what Raise the Game and their partners are up to, and how you can get involved.
Session Takeaway
- How to make your studio a more equitable, diverse and inclusive place.
- Take action sustainably.
- Make long-lasting changes in your studio culture.
- Become a more organisationally mature studio.
Sexism, Sexual Safety and Allyship in Gaming
The games industry thrives on creativity, collaboration, and community—but is not immune to the wider societal problem of sexual harassment and sexist behaviours. We appreciate this may feel like a challenging topic, but we are very used to having these discussions, and making them sensitive and engaging.
Sexism, Sexual Safety and Allyship in Gaming sets the scene by grounding these issues in a broader cultural and legal context, including an overview of the UK’s Worker Protection Act.
We’ll explore why sexual harassment is not just a legal risk, but a serious barrier to wellbeing, retention, and innovation; considering this issue in the context of gaming.
The session will consider challenges that are particularly acute in the gaming industry: power imbalances, freelancer and contractor vulnerability, social events blurring professional boundaries, online spaces, and long-standing cultural norms that can normalise “banter,” exclusion, or silence.
We’ll examine common behaviours to watch out for and discuss their real impacts, especially for women, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalised groups.
Crucially, this talk is not just about identifying problems, it’s about action. Attendees will learn practical, accessible ways to be a good ally and active bystander, regardless of role or seniority. This includes how to safely intervene, support colleagues, challenge harmful behaviour, and help create environments where people feel able to speak up, so everyone can do their best work and feel they belong in gaming.
Session Takeaway
- Identification of potentially unharmful behaviours.
- Becoming confident for bystander intervention.
- Supporting affected parties.
Too Many Ideas, One Game: ADHD Survival Guide for Game Dev
Game development is already a difficult, long, messy marathon. Add ADHD traits like novelty chasing, time blindness, and idea overload, and it can feel like you are constantly fighting your own brain.
This light hearted talk is a practical, real world look at how to work with ADHD in game development and turn common pain points into strengths. Instead of trying to force a “normal” workflow, I will share approaches that harness what ADHD can be good at: creative problem solving, momentum bursts, rapid iteration, and high energy finishing pushes.
It is not a medical talk or about motivation hacks. It is an overview of strategies, habits, and production choices that help you ship, stay sane, and use your brain the way it actually works. It's around how I have turned something that could be considered debilitating into a super power to get sh*t done.
Session Takeaway
- A simple way to capture ideas without derailing the main project.
- A method for choosing the next task when focus is inconsistent.
- A repeatable approach for turning hyperfocus into finished work.
Writing in the Age of LLMs: A Creative Professional’s Roundtable
Large language models and generative AI are developing rapidly. They're embedded in our phones, our web browsers, and are increasingly shaping the global economy. Meanwhile, creative professionals across nearly every discipline of game development are grappling with fundamental questions about their craft and future. This roundtable brings together developers, designers, and writers for an honest, open conversation about navigating this new landscape.
This roundtable is not a debate about whether AI is good or bad. As a baseline, participants should be able to acknowledge the environmental and ethical concerns around this technology while remaining open to its potential to shape the future. This session is intended as a safe space to share our fears about job displacement and creative devaluation, our hopes for new creative possibilities and efficiency gains, our strategies for adapting our workflows and skills, and practical tips for working with (or around) these tools.
Whether you're an AI skeptic, enthusiast, or somewhere in between, all perspectives are welcome. The only requirement is a willingness to listen and engage respectfully. As writers and creatives, our job has always been to imagine new possibilities—let's explore together what opportunities might emerge, what risks we must remain vigilant for, and how we can shape this moment thoughtfully. Come with your questions, experiences, and uncertainties. Leave with new perspectives, practical insights, and a community navigating this transition alongside you.
Session Takeaway
- A clearer understanding of how other creative professionals are thinking about and responding to generative AI.
- Practical strategies for adapting creative workflows while preserving what makes human creativity valuable.
- Connection with peers who share similar concerns and can offer mutual support.
- A framework for having productive conversations about AI with colleagues and employers.
- Specific resources and tools that other attendees have found useful.
- Greater confidence in navigating uncertainty and making informed decisions about AI in your own practice.
Keynote
Coming soon
Free
Coming soon
