Learn directly from industry leaders

Indie development companies are struggling. Finding opportunities & resources can be daunting or disheartening. Being an indie team that is intersectional / POC-led compounds these issues further. Pooling information, understanding our options and banding together is how we’ll be able to make it through. Studio director & producer Kai Nyame Abbey shares actionable tactics for weathering the storm of scoping, funding and managing morale during hard times, lean times and the times when nobody else seems to be listening.

Every game designer wants to share a value with their players. We feel the power of love and loss in Ori and the Blind Forest and are transformed when we realize we’ll be dying many thousands of times in Celeste in order to succeed. In this talk, you’ll learn how to analyze a game from a value perspective, and explore what it means to apply the Value-At-Play (VAP) method (by the TiltFactor Laboratory) by following the journey of a small studio looking to instill more love, curiosity, and wonder into the world. Leave this talk with a sense of how to integrate the values you want to share.

Having a multi-platform simultaneous release has a lot benefits, but also comes with a lot of challenges, specially for a small team, and even more so if it's the first time releasing on all those platforms. You end up learning a lot of lessons the hard way, and we're here to share the ones we picked up along the way to our release, and hopefully that will make you have an easier time with yours.

What would video games look like if they understood how you felt? Neuroscientist-turned-designer Noor Amin explores biofeedback, a novel feature that leverages peripheral devices to create games that are responsive to the user’s body. Using examples from indie, academia, and AAA development, Amin illustrates how biofeedback expands designers’ toolkits in mechanics, accessible controls, and playtesting. She sheds light on how understanding human cognition can open deeper and more emotional avenues of engagement with the games that we love.

Marketing in the game space doesn't have to be a mystery, but it is something to consider early. In this introduction to video game marketing, Julien Balbontin from CONTINUE, a creative content collective, will talk about things to consider when you're ready to start. Learn more about how to create buzz, build a community, and things to keep in mind while crowdfunding. We hope you conclude whether you get a TikTok or not as well.

This talk is about the significance of dynamic/interactive/ adaptive music to enhance the player experience in colony sim management and base building games. This will provide insight to the many benefits of custom music composition that is tied to game mechanic design.

It’s time to rethink the way games are made. According to GDC’s 2020 State of the Industry Report, game development is “driven by young workers who tend to depart within a decade.” The “burnout of entire micro-generations of developers.” The industry is slow to acknowledge that the way we work may be the problem. We can fix this. In this panel, we talk to industry leaders tackling institutional problems at studios they work in, build, and run. These are practical solutions for leaders on how to build culture, hire effectively, communicate openly, seek funding, and put people before products.

This session aims to destigmatize the experience of losing a job, whether through layoffs, firings, or leaving toxic work environments. Participants will learn effective coping mechanisms to deal with the emotional aftermath of unemployment. Additionally, attendees will receive practical advice on navigating the loss, moving forward, and re-entering the job market with confidence. Lastly, this session will help build a network of professional resources and emotional support for those affected by job loss in the gaming industry.

Worried about your game’s narrative after redesigning a core mechanic? Or cutting out a big chunk of content? Or realizing the text engine can’t print vowels? No problem! The Writer Will Fix It. (If you’re a narrative designer/writer whose work has been affected by unexpected development challenges, take a moment to scream before tuning in to learn some strategies for Fixing It.) This talk is part tutorial, part retrospective on the development of fantasy tactics game Wargroove 2. How can narrative folks address difficult challenges and ship not just a game, but a story we're proud of?

Folks from the squad working on new games at The New York Times share behind-the-scenes insights into the new game development process. Sandra Honigman (Product Manager), Devin Lizardi (Software Engineer), and Heidi Erwin (Senior Digital Puzzle Designer) walk through the process of bringing games to market, building new games, and designing puzzles. They discuss the making of the 2024 NYT game Strands, and some of the game design thinking behind 2023’s NYT game Connections.

This talk will encompass the many ways game communities are built through collaborations among game scholars, players, and makers, focusing on the recently published and free-to-read essay collection, Made in Asia America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (Duke University Press, 2024). By tracing a narrative of their engagement with gaming communities over their careers, the speakers hope to show how collaborations are possible for multiple forms of knowledge sharing and inspiration, from the classroom to the expo to online game-jams and to making space within mystifying academic circles.

It's AWESOME to be Cripplepunk is a talk that includes suggestions for making disabled life both in and outside of the studio a bit easier, a bit more comprehensive (like shit, life is still fun!) and a list of resources for free or low-cost game/zine creation tools, accessibility options, and grants.

Meet Miriam Melgoza, a Mexican indie gamedev with experience working in various indie teams. She understands the challenges of maintaining team cohesion and offers insightful advice on enhancing communication within a team. Promoting non-violent communication (NVC) and compassionate leadership, she advocates for fostering a supportive work environment. In this talk assistants will acquire practical techniques for cultivating stronger team dynamics, based on Miriam's personal experiences and how these strategies have contributed to the success of indie teams in the competitive gaming industry.

As it stands South Africa has no formalized triple A scene. As a result many promising and enthusiastic South African game developers have to find alternative methods of entering and maintaining careers in the game development field beyond what is believed to be the golden standard of game development.

From ChatGPT to Midjourney, generative AI has risen in prominence in the tech industry, including in game dev. Behind the lofty promises lies a darker truth - one of theft, exploitation, and dehumanization. Join an artist/programmer duo as they disperse myths surrounding GenAI, showing its true costs on workers' rights, creative ownership and the environment. This talk will hone in on how the technology perpetuates existing inequalities that devs of color face and give advice to empower devs at all levels on how to counter its harmful effects.

Worldbuilding Untold Histories provides insight into the challenges involved in creating games and experiences centering Black history. Dominick’s game “Ki Es Ou Ye” focuses on the inner world of a soldier, Vodou priestess, and household servant in 17th century Saint-Domingue as they seek to understand how the news of their recently declared freedom will affect them. Jazsalyn, the creator of Natal Dimension, explores the potential of game-engine technology as an experimental art form for rediscovering Ancestral Intelligence and understanding its significance in the development of AI.

I'll be speaking about what happens when you put yourself in your work and who gets access to you as a creator? In my FMV game, "after HOURS", I played a woman who was molested as a child and suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder. Sometimes, people conflated me with the game's protagonist, especially at events where I was standing at my game booth often exclaiming, "You're the girl from the game!". People would ask me questions about whether I had been abused. The boundaries between me as the game designer and the character I portrayed were completely blurry to players.

Psychological safety, the ability to voice one’s opinion and concerns without fear of punishment, is an important aspect for building highly productive teams and safer work environments. For those who are interested in understanding more about how they can contribute to building a better place to work, this talk will explore the basics of psychological safety. In addition, attendees will learn about concrete tools for both leaders and team members to use within their work environments to inform others and encourage a higher degree of psychological safety.

Join Ed Lago, Senior Producer/Biz Dev/Scout at Creature Label as he shares his insights and the lessons learned after reviewing more than 200 game pitches. With his experience working for the Indie VR Fund initiative in a partnership between Creature and SideQuest, Ed deep dives into valuable and actionable suggestions on how to improve your game pitch, avoid common mistakes and stand out. Helping you be in a better, more confident position when pitching to publishers and platforms.

This talk provides vertical slices of UX to attendees, going from high-level overview of features into the specifics of UX patterns and heuristics used in games such as Genshin Impact, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Darkest Dungeon, and League of Legends. Attendees will leave the talk with a far deeper understanding of what game UX is and how to apply UX thinking to their ongoing and future projects.

This talk is about creating character design that generates cultural impact by expressing vivid and varied multicultural backgrounds with real life experiences while avoiding historical inaccuracy when using references and expressing style over substance in a world heavily dictated by practicality on dressing. There will be discussions on iconic characters in media and how their way of dressing expresses their socio background, character backstory and how to apply that to your own characters with vibrant and iconic character design that truly expresses what your story is all about and how alternative fashion subcultures influence and mold my own character designs.

How exactly can indie devs work with the press to push their games out to audiences, what do journalists actually look for in a press release, what even makes for an interesting press kit? Video game journalist, Michael Mosley, will provide the answers to those questions as he talks about his experience working with developers of all sizes and show how small development teams can talk to freelance journalists about their games.

This talk explores how video games can serve as powerful tools for therapy. It delves into the concept of the "just right challenge" and showcases examples of games that target specific cognitive, visual and behavioral skills. Drawing from peer-reviewed articles with examples, the talk emphasizes the therapeutic potential of gaming. This is for game developers who are interested in creating authentic, culturally relevant gaming experiences that can be used and marketed as tools for therapy that positively impact mental health and community well-being.

Open to beginners and accessible to all, come check out animating in Google Slides! In this workshop, we'll be covering the basics of animation, basic character design and we'll have a hand's on section of creating characters and animating in Google Slides together with a provided template. This is a great workshop for anyone starting out in animating or art, looking for a quick way to get animations done or needing more guidance on animation processes.

Discover how to turbocharge indie game marketing with Twitch! Join a charismatic Twitch Affiliate and marketing pro as they unveil the secrets to leveraging Twitch streamers for exponential game promotion. Learn actionable strategies and real-life case studies, including how a small indie game skyrocketed to success, like Stardew Valley, by fostering community engagement and strategic collaborations with Twitch streamers. Get ready to level up your marketing game and unlock the full potential promoting your indie game with Twitch!

This talk will focus on creating characters and situations that don't vilify an entire people. You'll learn about narrating stories that create the distinction between a bad person and a bad people. With the world moving towards more diversity and inclusivity - and sometimes being attacked for it - it is important to create games and worlds that are unapologetically you while also leaving no room for those screaming for another white savior complex game to complain. So come join and create! The world is large enough for everyone to exist and thrive in after all.

Architecture has many functions in video games, for instance, establishing the world; evoking moods such as whimsy or danger; providing paths, or concealing characters. But there’s one that is not often mentioned: conveying the passage of time. This presentation explores the architecture present in various games and contrasts it with real-world depictions of lived cities, taking viewers through time and history of place via the buildings that exist in it.

Race and racial representation in games is a fraught topic. We have to simultaneously hold the real-world experiences of BIPOC next to some of the joys of games - escapism, fantasy, and frivolity. This talk introduces tenets of critical race theory (CRT) as a starting place for understanding the realities of race in the context of the U.S. and connect CRT to how we remake and reproduce race in game design through character design, world-building, narrative, mechanics, themes, and more. Together we’ll look for opportunities for flourishing in representing BIPOC holistically in games.

There are many ways that we as game developers stir emotion and craft stories for our players and the role of a Voice Designer is no different. Join Ulysses as he describes a variety of characters and concepts that have helped him weave everything from underwater eco conscious charm to thunderous spiritual grief into his work. Content wise I am only planning on replacing some ideas in place of others. For the most part I am still just describing the value I see in voice design that developers and audio designers can consider.

Victor Varnado presents "Empowering Inclusive Play: The Narrative Engine's Role in Accessibility," exploring his development of technology that transforms gaming for the visually impaired by turning visual data into spoken commands. Using machine learning and natural language processing, this engine enables blind players to use voice commands for gameplay. The talk includes a live demo showing its practical use in real-time gaming. Attendees will learn about accessible game design and its impact on the industry.

Video games are a uniquely well-suited medium for Indigenous futurism. Through analysis of successful games, Indigenous philosophies, and literature this talk aims to analyze why a lens of Indigeneity is necessary for enduring technological innovation and social stability in the games industry. This talk shares a summative checklist of strategies to design using Indigenous principles and writing archetypes instead of stereotypes.

Calling all developers, gamers, and desk dwellers! This workshop is designed to help you with those aches and pains that we develop from being hunched over the latest project or finishing a campaign for fun. Discover the secrets to conquering seated life and beyond with mobility stretches and strength movements. Plus, unlock the key to sustained energy with bonus nutritional tips. Get ready to level up your wellness game and experience cons without taking (too much) damage.

In Save the Villainess, players control Jane, a neurodiverse woman of color (WOC) who falls into a romance novel… only to become a hunted villainess (e.g., female antagonist). While the game begins as a mystery, it develops into a meditation on identity and free-will – one that examines how a WOC can survive an unjust society that condemns her. By questioning the concept of a villainess and using satire to deconstruct related injustices, Save the Villainess reflects on the inequities of a sexist, racist, and classist society – and shows how the inequities of the past resonate today.

esfuerzo means effort summarizes the production of a 2D storytelling platformer game that presents a hero's journey informed by Mayan mythology. As the developers, discusses the conceptualization and production of the game, they will be playing the game from the introductory level through the three levels that compose the game - the underworld, the earth and the heavens. The game mixes Mayan mythology with current reality regarding the massive migration of youths from Central America to the United States.