PROGRAM

Stop waiting for progress bars and reclaim your development flow. This presentation provides actionable strategies to minimize iteration time in Unity, helping teams reduce context switching and boost daily productivity.

Key takeaways include:
* Mastering the Inner Loop: Optimizing assembly definitions, domain reloading, and scene loading to achieve sub-three-second feedback.
* Streamlining Asset Pipelines: Leveraging parallel imports and shared caches to eliminate unnecessary re-importing.
* Solving Graphics Bottlenecks: Practical techniques for shader stripping and managing variant explosions.
* Advanced Tooling and Profiling: Utilizing Editor profiling and project auditing to identify and resolve hidden performance bottlenecks.

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Hiring in the game industry looks different today than it did just a few years ago. Increased competition and shifting priorities have changed what studios expect from candidates at all levels.

Drawing from experience in Talent Acquisition across gaming in Europe, this talk explores how the “bar” for talent has evolved. I’ll share common patterns I see in applications and interviews, why strong candidates are often overlooked, and what developers can do to better align with current expectations.

As artificial intelligence becomes an ever-present collaborator, the question is how we, as humans, can remain authentic in our own creativity. In this talk, Fawzi Mesmar uses his framework of creative sobriety: a method for cutting through noise, reclaiming originality, and cultivating ideas in ways no machine can. He will also explore our responsibility as creators: to ourselves, to our industry, and to the audiences we serve while confronting the creative dilemma: the truth that creativity demands vulnerability, and the courage to move forward in spite of fear. In a world where AI is everywhere, and existential threat to many crafts people is around the corner, staying true to your vision armed with authenticity is still uniquely human.

Anno 117: Pax Romana faces a unique set of technical challenges when it comes to rendering its highly dynamic world. Visuals range from overlooking entire cities to observing tiny details in the daily activities of their residents, and all of it is built by the player. This talk provides an overview of key engine improvements that were made during the development of Anno 117 and how these helped shape the look of the game. In particular it will cover how complex assets like buildings are optimized while being adaptive to uneven terrain and how Raytracing was implemented to facilitate the flexibility and scale required by an Anno game.

Delving deep into theory and practice, and drawing from 5+ years of experience crafting modular narrative systems, this talk explores how designers can create truly responsive narrative worlds without a combinatorial explosion of content. In addition to general best practices and examples from successful game designers as well as the speaker's own work, the talk demonstrates how anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralist study of myths in the previous century can prove surprisingly helpful in designing flexible game narrative systems that remain coherent and provide variable consequences as they modularly adjust to players' choices. Achieving great narrative flexibility and freedom with finite content is the holy grail of IDN, and this talk outlines practical strategies and tricks for providing players the experience of such freedom with a limited content budget.

Developing and porting a game to multiple platforms and storefronts can significantly increase your userbase, but it does not come for free.

In this talk, I will share stories, business considerations, tips and pitfalls, and advanced techniques that will help you decide where to launch your game, delivering an optimised experience tailored for each platform and audience.

Inclusion doesn't always require sweeping reforms, it can start with a sticker, a whisper, a secret society. In this talk, I’ll share the idea behind The Very Secret Society of Women in Games, a playful, grassroots mentoring initiative designed to spark connection and belonging for young women considering careers in games.This isn’t a case study with metrics or KPIs. It’s a thought experiment made real, an invitation to consider how the tiniest acts of outreach can shape the future of our industry. By nurturing inclusive mindsets before people even enter professional spaces, we can help grow the kind of community we all say we want: one that’s diverse, welcoming, and ready to make better, more inclusive games.This talk is for anyone who’s ever felt overwhelmed by the scale of change, and a reminder that small, intentional ideas can plant seeds that grow into movements. You don’t need a big platform to start. You just need the courage to begin.

This talk explores how stylised and handpainted texturing can be used to create a strong visual identity in games. Using production examples and workflows, the session covers:
>building consistent visual styles through references and art direction
> creating efficient texturing workflows in Substance Painter and Designer
> using custom generators instead of overly flexible smart materials

The talk also examines the role of AI in modern art pipelines, arguing that tools alone do not produce strong visuals — consistency, context, and intentional artistic decisions do.Focused on practical workflows and real-world production constraints, this session is aimed at artists and developers who want to create more distinctive and cohesive stylised worlds.

Many teams still make early design decisions based on pre-segmentation: “This appeals to new players focusing on social gaming” “this is more for casual players,” “the returning audience wants more of this challenge,” or “core gamers will understand it instantly.” The problem is that these segmentation labels often create false confidence and lead to costly misjudgments in tutorial design, pacing, UI complexity, and feature prioritization.

Once that happens, game-tests stop being a tool for discovery and become a way to project prefabricated assumptions, protect hierarchy, and create artificial momentum.This talk shows how qualitative, psychologically informed game-testing helps teams move beyond assumptions and read e. g. the emotional reality of player experience. Starting with short real-world case examples, we will demonstrate how apparently solid audience assumptions can lead to wrong design decisions — and how emotional- and motivation focused analysis reveals the actual source of friction, uncertainty, or engagement before teams spend time and budget on the wrong solution.

In this session we explore how we could close the gap between engineering craft and other game development crafts, how could engineers support each craft delivering its part to ultimately create coherency between the teams.

Agentic AI is rapidly becoming part of game development, but adopting new technology is rarely about starting from scratch. Most teams are balancing new AI capabilities with established tools, legacy systems, production pipelines, and the realities of shipping games.

In this fireside chat, senior professionals from software and graphics engineering share their perspectives on how AI is changing day-to-day development across disciplines. We'll discuss where agentic workflows fit into existing pipelines, the trade-offs between automation and maintainability, how teams can adopt AI without disrupting proven processes, and where human expertise continues to make the biggest difference.

Rather than offering one-size-fits-all answers, this conversation focuses on practical experiences, lessons learned, and the challenges of thoughtfully introducing AI into modern game development.

Self-publishing is the new go-to market strategy for many game studios. From fresh start-ups, to seasoned Indies, to AA and AAA. Kickstarter plays a vital role for many games in this trend. We will explore based on data and insights why a small campaign also helps, how to make a big campaign and where a clear profile of both, studio and IP, come in.That said, there will be plenty of time for a gamified Q&A, so bring your questions and get ready for some fruitful discussions