Gender (and Diversity) design in video games – “totally!” or “…not again…”?

The (mis-)representation of perceived gender norms have been a topic in games for the last couple of years. Even if some may think that the discussion is unnecessary, it is important to reach a dialog and find a way to mitigate the issues without necessarily losing the fun. Four seasoned industry representatives will tackle just this and talk about their perspectives, try to answer your questions from the audience and build some pointers to consider for your future game and character designs.

Look at your own biases and get some perspective on the current discussions as well as underlying real issues. Learn about how the topic influenced how other developers work and how they design their games with gender in mind.

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Though insisting on the fact that he’s still 29 Ralf C. Adam has spent more than two decades in the games industry. Ralf got his start in the early Nineties, and since then he has worked for a multitude of Publishers and Developers in different positions, among them Infogrames/Atari, Sunflowers Entertainment, JoWooD Productions, Gameforge and Travian Games. His portfolio also includes freelance work for Disney Interactive, Ubisoft, Eidos and Vivendi Universal. With expertise in Producing as well as in Game Design and Writing, Ralf has contributed to a wide variety of titles, including "Desperados - Wanted Dead or Alive", "Spell Force - The order of Dawn", "Settlers" & "Anno" Series and in the F2P Online segment "Ikariam" or "Guild 1400". In the more recent past Ralf has also contributed to the production of two full- feature animation Movies (“The 7th Dwarf”, “The little Medic”) in his role as Managing Director for Virgin Lands, one of the leading Graphics & Animation Studios in Europe. Both Movies are coming to the theatres in Fall 2014

Independent Reality. An honest assessment of the indie development world

A straight-forward talk about indie development and the realities of the current market. This is a discussion about the business realities, discovery problems, and experiences that indies often have when trying to rise above the noise. This talk will not focus on doom and gloom but it will explore costs, market sizes, and other entertainment mediums. We are in the best time to make games. Development costs are down, the tools are cheaper and easier to learn, and developers are in the best position they have ever been

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Peter Alau is a game industry veteran who mispent his childhood and his quarters in arcades. He has worked for Maxis, EA, Sony, Sony Online, Digital Extremes, Linden Lab, GameSpy, and currently runs Business Development for Apportable. He has worked in the Video Game industry for 20+ years, and worked with many of the largest companies and titles. You can blame him for killing a few bad titles and he'll take a modicum of credit for ensuring the release of few good ones. He was supposed to be a professional musician before the siren call of interactive entertainment lured him into the games industry and refused to let go.

 

 

Games Education: where from now?

Talent is core to a killer game, a high potential studio, and a vibrant ecosystem. How do we ensure that up-an-coming talent is prepared for the ever-evolving game industry? This panel will explore expectations of students and the promises of academic institutions, and discuss skill gaps and needs. And, how academic, research, art and industy entities interplay for a healthy ecosystem now and in the future.

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Björn Bartholdy studied communication design (diploma) at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart and media design (diploma) at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. He also worked as a freelance designer for Bayerischer Rundfunk, RTL, VOX and VIVA. In 1994 he founded cutup, a media design agency, and was its creative director and business manager until 2002. The agency won many national and international prizes in the categories of film and TV design as well as new media. In 1999 the majority of the agency was taken over by Bertelsmann. Björn Bartholdy ran the virtual design department at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy in Ludwigs-burg from 1999-2002. From 2002 to mid-2004, he led the content strategy de-partment at very.tv in Cologne. Since 2003 he has been responsible for the de-partment of audiovisual media at the KISD, Köln International School of Design (Cologne University of Applied Sciences) and since 2006 he has been course con-vener of the Bachelor in European Design. Björn Bartholdy is a long-standing member of the "Eyes and Ears of Europe", the European association for design, promotion and marketing of audiovisual media. He has published three books: SHOWREEL.01 and .02 on audiovisual design and has also written "Broadcast De-sign", an account of current TV design. He has also contributed various articles to the Design Dictionary (Birkhäuser) Magazines and other Publications. In 2006 he started the initiative to found the Cologne Game Lab (faculty for Cultural Sciences, Cologne University for Applied Sciences), where he teaches Media Design. He co-directs the institute together with Prof. Dr. Gundolf S. Freyermuth.

 

Going Indie is a Marathon - Staying Motivated for the Long Run

Around 2008 the "golden age of indies" got kicked-off. Between then and today a lot of people have decided to strike out on their own and just make games. They left the traditional employed jobs at work-for-hire businesses behind and instead focussed on making "their own" games in their own teams under their own rules. The five panelists are part of that crowd - they've been "doing the indie thing" for between two and seven years. As of today, they're still working in their tiny studios on their (not so) tiny games. None of them made it to fame and riches yet. None of them gave up and got a save job in corporate land - even though there have been a lot of hard times for everybody: Times where they did not know how to pay the rent. Days where their biggest deals fell through. Weeks and months where there was no playable game that was any kind of fun. We want to explore the reasons for perseverance: What is it that makes you get up every morning - even when sometimes all the cards seem to be stacked against you? If you're a fellow indie, then your take-aways could be that you're not alone in your struggle. That everybody has bad times somedays. And that there are ways to cope with that fact. We'll show you some of ours. If you're not an indie (yet) then maybe this panel will inspire you to strike out on your own - or forever discourage you from even thinking about it.

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Thomas Bedenk is creative director, managing director and co-founder of Brightside Games. He studied Media Design in Nuremberg and Human Factors in Berlin. He is teaching various game related subjects at game schools and universities. Before focusing on the games industry he was freelance interactive/web designer and developer for about 10 years and worked on special effects in the movie industry for a while. He started his love for games playing Pac-Man against his twin brother on the Atari 800XL and developed his first own games 1996.

Fokus GAME: Computerspiele und deren Akzeptanz in unserem kulturellen Leben

Spiele sind heute im Mittelpunkt unserer Gesellschaft angekommen. Sie sind Gegenstand unseres kulturellen Lebens. Aus medienwissenschaftlicher Sicht sind sie als zeitgemäßes und vielschichtiges Ausdrucksmedien anerkannt. Teile unserer Gesellschaft und Politik haben jedoch eine andere, kritischere Meinung. Dies drückt sich beispielsweise in der Tatsache aus, dass, dass die Bundesregierung die Verantwortung für Computerspiele aus einem Kultur-und Medien-Resort zu einem technischen Ministerium verschoben hat. Das Panel wird diese Entwicklungen und ihre Folgen zu diskutieren. Gehostet und organisiert vom GAME Bundesverband der Games-Branche e.V.

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During his law studies in Bonn and Munich he was an assistant to national MP’s and had various experiences in the media business. Afterwards he studied management de la communication audiovisuelle in Valenciennes, France. He finished his lawyer education in Munich focused on film and entertainment. Then he worked as head of legal & development in Seoul Korea in the animation business. Specialties: Film- and game production, public and international affairs. Besides to his lawyer work Malte has been appointed Profeesor at the BBW Hochschule Berlin - , University of Applied sciences - for management and communication. He also teaches at the Games Academy (Berlin) and at the University of Valenciennes. He has been appointed Prorektor (Vice President Games Academy Hochschule) of the GA Hochschule der digitalen Gesellschaft in Berlin. He published two own books and noumerous articles. He has been invited to talk at more than 250 events, such as international conferences on games and media. He participated in six EU funded research projects (ICT) such es NEM, KEEP, CNG and MobileGameArch. Malte co-initiated and founded the German national association of game developers (GAME) and the European Game Develper Federation (EGDF). He is responsible for many political changes in the last 10 years such as cultural recognition of games and public support initiatives for the games industry.

Speedpitching Session hosted by André Bernhardt Indie Advisor

At this speedpitching session development teams get the chance to present there game concepts or prototypes to the respawn audience as well as a jury of industry veterans who will give useful feedback afterwards. We also invite the press as well as publishers to join us so you have the chance to get even more audience for your project. You are free to do it anyway you like as long as you don´t take longer than 5 minutes. Whether it is powerpoint a prototype or just your charming voice. So use your chance to grow your network, improve your pitching skills and get valuable feedback. If you are interested in participating drop me a message at twitter @Indie_Adivsor or via email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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André Bernhardt has been part of the German games industry for the past 16 years and is very experienced within the online, as well as "offline" and mobile game publishing industry. At the beginning of his career, he was part of the classical boxed console and PC-games industry, with the release of the PlayStation 1 at Sony Computer Entertainment. Afterwards he worked at German publishers, JoWood and Sunflowers, before moving to Cologne. There he joined RTL Games and focused on “next-gen” console publishing (PS3, X360, Wii, DS, etc.). In 2009, he discovered the F2P-revolution a little late and so joined Travian Games in Munich. Since 2012 he is working as a freelance agent called Indie Advisor - supporting developers to find a publisher and vice versa while occasionally teaching at different high schools or giving lectures at games conferences, such as Quo Vadis. Indie Advisor aims to be a reliable interface between small developers and publishers. If you need to hire someone to pitch your title, or if you are just looking for contacts regarding development or publishing deals, or last but not least, if you want to apply for government funding to develop your prototype or concept, then give him a call or drop him an email.

Freelancer – Employee –Trainee / Who am I and why should I be one of the others?

The legal status of a member of a development team is often discussed and many people have a clear mindset what they want. “I only work as a freelancer” or “My own company is hiring me out as a coder” or “I am a trainee and normal labor law does not apply to me” are just some things we have heard when working with development companies and freelancers. However, often the parties involved can not or just to a certain extent actually decide how they want to cooperate and often German and international labor and tax law has quite a distinct opinion on what status that is supposed to be. The talk shall spotlight the possible options and limits for teams creating works protected under copyright when cooperating with freelancers, near-shoring service providers or trainees. This will include a review of the financial risks which can surmount to more than 50% of the agreed service fees as well as criminal charges against the teams management if such decisions are handled wrong. Also we will point out which legal construct will be more favorable for the individual talent, including German “KSK” (Künstlersozialkasse).

 

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Kai Bodensiek is a partner with the media law firm Brehm & v. Moers. Kai is experienced as a long time legal advisor for game publishers and developers, which includes the project funding, drafting and negotiating of development and licensing agreements. Among his clients are multinational corporations as well as local startup companies. In addition Kai is holding lectures on copyright and project management for game producers at Games Academy and for game designer at Media Design Hochschule.

Fokus GAME: Computerspiele und deren Akzeptanz in unserem kulturellen Leben

Spiele sind heute im Mittelpunkt unserer Gesellschaft angekommen. Sie sind Gegenstand unseres kulturellen Lebens. Aus medienwissenschaftlicher Sicht sind sie als zeitgemäßes und vielschichtiges Ausdrucksmedien anerkannt. Teile unserer Gesellschaft und Politik haben jedoch eine andere, kritischere Meinung. Dies drückt sich beispielsweise in der Tatsache aus, dass, dass die Bundesregierung die Verantwortung für Computerspiele aus einem Kultur-und Medien-Resort zu einem technischen Ministerium verschoben hat. Das Panel wird diese Entwicklungen und ihre Folgen zu diskutieren. Gehostet und organisiert vom GAME Bundesverband der Games-Branche e.V..

 

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Prof. Dr. Linda Breitlauch initially studied business studies before she graduated in film and television scriptwriting from the Film & Television Academy (HFF) in Babelsberg. In 2008 she completed a PhD about dramatic composition in computer games. In addition to working as a project manager in the export and publishing sectors she has been the creative producer of several film projects, has written film scripts and game concepts as well as scientific and specialist articles, among other things. In 2007 Linda Breitlauch was appointed Europe’s first female professor of game design at the Media Design University of Applied Sciences. Since July 2013 she is Professor for Game Design and faculty leader at the Games Academy Hochschule in Berlin. She teaches and researches with special focus on the areas of storytelling, serious games, and dramatic composition. Furthermore, she works as an evaluator, and is a consultant in the areas of media didactics, game design and interactive storytelling. Specialties: Interactive Storytelling, Serious Games, Gamification, Transmedia Storytelling, E_Learning, Concepts and Design Documents.

10 Important Do’s and Don’ts in Social Media Marketing for Games

Social media marketing is more successful – and at the same time legally riskier – than ever. Doing marketing for games without using the potential of social media is unimaginable these days. The advantages and the presence of the competition are just to significant. On the other hand, social media platforms do not reside inside a legal vacuum. The same rules and regulations ‘as usual’ apply – it is just oftentimes not as easy to understand how they impact new methods and techniques. This, combined with today’s possibilities to easily monitor incredible amounts of data make marketing in social media a field where legal compliance is no longer ‘nice to have’ – but a major ‘must’.

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Tim Christopher Caesar is a ‘Lawyer, Geek & Gamer’. As to the former, he primarily focusses on information technology, e-commerce, and data protection law – advising nationally and internationally operating businesses, including a large number of gaming companies, regarding all relevant legal aspects from their respective perspective; as a client/user and contractor/provider, as the case may be. Tim Caesar was admitted to the bar in 2009 and joined the IT/IP/Media team of Schulte Riesenkampff in Frankfurt on the Main at the turn of the year 2012/2013. He studied law in Frankfurt on the Main. During his legal traineeship he has already gained substantial practice and industry experience, including while working for an internationally oriented business law firm in New York. Previous to his joining of Schulte Riesenkampff he worked for several years at the Frankfurt office of a major national law firm in the area of IT law.

Spellbound: Asking Questions About Habit Forming Games Design

 

Once upon a time we all thought how charming it was when games had that elusive 'addicitive' quality which delighted players. Now the term addiction has become an accusation labled at apparently unscrupulous FreeToPlay designers who are leveraging the psychology of Operant Conditioning to alegedly extort money from players. Games that delight us often become habit forming but how as designers can we judge the balance between a game as a social good and the manipulation of an audience. This matters commercially as there are huge opportunites if we can build a loyal fanbase of regular, invested players; and huge (potentially legal) risks if we are considered to have overstepped the line into manipulation. In this lecture Oscar will explore the questions of Habit drawing from various psychological works to understand the role of Skinner Boxes, Pavlov's Dogs, etc. and how much they apply to entertainment in games. We will try to uncover whether there is even a problem; and assuming there is how we deal with it responsibly. The session will investigate the forces which affect the creation of habits and how these apply to game design whilse at the same time considering the risks associated with attempting to condition players behaviour. * What Keeps Habits Ticking? * Questions About Operant Conditioning * Risks, Rewards and Responsibilties of Habitual Designs * Are We Really Spellbound?

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Oscar Clark is a consultant and Evangelist for Everyplay from Unity Technologies. He has been a pioneer in online, mobile and console social games services since 1998. He provided ‘vision’ for one of the first Online games communities (Wireplay - British Telecom); was global lead for games at Hutchison Whampoa (3UK) which included (perhaps) the first mobile in-App purchase; and was Home Architect for PlayStation®Home. He is a regular columnist on PocketGamer.Biz and is an outspoken speaker at countless games conferences including GDC, Casual Connect, Game Connection and Develop on Games Design, Discovery and Monetisation. He is a Mentor for accelerator GameFounders and has guest lectured on Social Freemium Games Design for several Universities. He is also currently working on his first book, “Games As A Service - How Free To Play Design Can Make Better Games” which is expected to be released in early 2014.

Fixing Karaoke -- When videogames make things worse (and how to make them better)

 

This is the short story of one man's journey from fearing karaoke to fixing it, via a music festival, countless years of development frustration, a mid-life crisis and a card game. It touches on the problems with singing, governing social situations with digital media and why accuracy isn't always the right answer, but you could also see it as an excuse to talk about how great it feels to sing Britney Spears songs with your best friends.

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Ste Curran is a game developer, consultant and lecturer. Formerly Editor-at-Large at Edge Magazine, he made the transition to videogame creation in 2004 — first at Sony as an external producer, then at British studio Zoë Mode. As Creative Director at one of the largest independent games developers in the world, he worked on countless music and social games across offices in Brighton, London and San Francisco. Ste also ran Zoë’s “Lab”, a small team working on left-field concepts and rapid prototypes, from where 2010’s Chime emerged. He’s co-authored three books on games and the design process, speaks regularly at conferences worldwide, and his games consultancy company, Agency, works with teams across the world to make games better.

Shifting up a Gear: Plot Development for Serial Content

Working on an interactive serial product differs quite a bit from an ordinary production. A true serial stands and falls through its plot. How do you get the player to return week after week? Why should he talk about his experiences with his friends and thereby generate new players? Maybe plot isn’t as dead as some people like to think – at least not in serials and series. On TV the showrunner concept is proof of a growing awareness of the author being the centerpiece of a successful product. But no matter how dead or alive plot is, producing it in a reliable time interval is a challenge in itself. How to get the author to understand what you are trying to do? How to integrate him or her into the pre-production of your game? And how to work successfully on crossmedia products with people from TV or the ebook publishers? The answers might just surprise you.

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Pretty much since ever, Julian has been giving wanted and unwanted advice - some of which occasionally turns out to be helpful. In the past 14 years the Berlin-born know-it-all has been contributing articles to renowned magazines such as Gamers With Jobs and 4Players. Having also worked on the PR and marketing side of things, Julian later decided to laser in on the world project management, workflows and organizational problem solving. He is involved in the indie scene, has been a part of the Independent Games Festival for a while now and also recently supported the extended jury of the A Maze Berlin. Julian was also a founding member of Indie Inside, a blog that ended up being one of the roots of the vibrant Indie Arena.

7 (Business) Habits of Highly Effective Indies

While we often romanticize what it means to be an indie developer, the reality is that some are putting food on their table and many others are still starving. Is commercial success totally about random luck, or are there some business oriented habits that enable indies to succeed on a more consistent basis? This session will explore those habits and give tangible examples of indies that demonstrate them to great effect.

Games Education: where from now?

Talent is core to a killer game, a high potential studio, and a vibrant ecosystem. How do we ensure that up-an-coming talent is prepared for the ever-evolving game industry? This panel will explore expectations of students and the promises of academic institutions, and discuss skill gaps and needs. And, how academic, research, art and industy entities interplay for a healthy ecosystem now and in the future.

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Jason Della Rocca is the co-founder of Executions Labs, a first-of-its kind, hybrid game incubator and go-to-market accelerator that helps independent game developers produce games and bring them to market. Formerly, Jason was a game industry consultant focused on business and cluster development, working with game studios and organizations all over the world. Prior, he served as the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) for nearly nine years, and was honored for his industry building efforts with the inaugural Ambassador Award at the Game Developers Conference. In 2009, Jason was named to Game Developer Magazine’s “Power 50,” a list which profiles 50 of the most important contributors to the state of the game industry. As a sought after expert on the game industry, Jason has lectured at conferences and universities worldwide. He also serves on various advisory boards and volunteer roles, such as co-chairing IGDA-Montreal, as an advisor to the ICT Practice of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada, and serving on the research management committee of the GRAND Network Center of Excellence.

Building Communities by building booths - A dialog between Kelly Wallick (Indie MEGABOOTH) and Oliver Eberlei (Indie Arena)

Indies are notoriously uncompetitive. In fact, Indies are known to lift each other up and open doors for one another to be able to survive the games industry. The Indie MEGABOOTH and the Indie Arena Booth are prime examples of small indies grouping together to make an impact in this blockbuster driven, AAA industry. The Overlord of the Indie MEGABOOTH - Kelly - and the architect of the Indie Arena Booth - Oliver - are sitting down to talk about the challenges and success stories of how these projects infiltrated PAX and gamescom.

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Oliver created his first commercially successful game at the age of 14. Back then, commercially successful meant doubling the monthly allowance. Success was easier that way. He studied Animation & Games at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt and finished his bachelor degree in 2011. Immediately afterwards he created his own development studio "Hammer Labs" which released its first game "Farm for your Life" on Steam in June 2014. He is actively involved in building the German indie community and first organized the Indie Arena Booth at gamescom 2014.

Why do you do first things last?

The first seconds in your game are vital. Despite this public knowledge, most productions encounter massive problems, especially when creating tutorials. This talk is an analysis what key factors lead to the game entry trouble and gives hints how you can focus on a good game start.

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Bernhard Ewers has been developing software since the early days of the Commodore VC 20 and C64 home computers. Ewers acquired his formal vocational background as a registered merchant at business schools in Dortmund. After completing his studies, Ewers took part in the successful establishment of BlueByte Software in Mülheim, Germany starting in 1990. Until 1996, he designed and developed the Battle Isle series for Amiga and PC, which received many awards and remains one of the most renowned game products in Germany. In 1996, he founded TriNodE Systems and remains the owner of the company, which continues operations as Instance Four since 2004. He developed Germany's first genuine interactive television program, Wildall TV. In 2005 Ewers built up the Quality Asurance company in Potsdam, Quality Four GmbH, and led it until establishing service. The extremely successful games “Sacred” and “SacredII” (Ascaron) were build by Ewers' expertise of Multiplayer development. The TinCat multiplayer middleware libraries developed for this project are still in use and being sold to Bertelsmann arvato systems GmbH, where Ewers lead the e.e.i.s department. In 2012 Ewers started a crossplatform mobile strategy game for Flaregames GmbH Karlsruhe, on which he worked until may 2014. Over the past 25 years Ewers produced more than 15 games, helped developing over 30 titles as an Consultant and took part in even more projects.

That Jam we're in - a discussion on potentials and limits of Game Jams

Game Jams are all the rage nowadays. You can hardly call yourself a game developer if you don't have at least a dozen of them under your belt. There's even a documentary on the topic. They are everywhere. The four panelists all bring some experience on game jams with them, both as participants and organizers. Representing both the corporate and the indie side of things we will spend the hour critically discussing the format of Game Jams. If you are interested in looking beyond the hype to find out what game jams do well, and more importantly where they fall short, then come on by.

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Niklas is a backend developer and part of InnoGames since 2012. Creating games is his passion and besides his normal work he organizes the InnoGames Game Jam. With over 120 participants the last Game Jam was the biggest and best so far. Once a year, InnoGames is also hosting the Global Game Jam. This year InnoGames tries another new thing: a Game Jam live on stage at the Gamescom!

Indie past, present and future.... a survival guide to keeping the corporates at bay

Jon Hare draws on all of his experience from 30 years of running games development companies such as Sensible Software and Tower Studios to discuss ways in which the new swathe of indie companies can learn lessons from the past and apply them to the modern era of games business. He will be exploring old business models based on publishing deals, IP ownership, licensing and royalties and compare them to modern methods focussed on VC money, share acquisitions and corporate end game strategies. The focus of the talk is to make sure the structures of your games business and contracts are fit to carry the ambitions and likely scope of your business. Hare will also discuss mitigation of risk during the contract negotiation phase as well as warning against the predatory instincts of corporations and investment funds hungry to exploit the optimism and naivety of many start-ups.

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Jon Hare is one of Europe’s best known creative directors and game designers with over 10 international number one games to his name and nearly 30 years experience in the games industry. He also designed “Sensible World of Soccer” the most influential European developed game of all time according to Stanford University. As an established industry figurehead Jon has enjoyed a high media profile across Europe for almost 30 years. Jon co-founded and managed the legendary 1980s and 90s development company Sensible Software, creating games such as Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder and Wizball to great critical acclaim and commercial success and has also worked in senior posts in the two biggest British games publishers Codemasters and Jagex. Jon’s current company Tower Studios specializes in games on mobile and social formats and has recently enjoyed international success with the releases of Speedball 2 Evolution and Word Explorer for iOS, Mac, PC and other digital platforms. Since 1999 Jon has been one of the top game design and business development consultants in Europe working for many different publishing and development clients. His work in education is also extensive having spoken at numerous universities across Europe and he recently co-founded the BUGS network which helps course leaders and students of 12 universities across the UK to improve their standards and interface with the games industry. As a fully voting BAFTA member since 2004, Jon has served on the games Committee and regularly acts as chairman for BAFTA Games Award juries.

Race to the bottom

All of us know bundles, summer&winter sales or FreeAppOfThe day actions, where we sometimes get top quality and nearly new games for peanuts. Some of us call it "race to the bottom". The term "race to the bottom" is an economic description for competing with each other by cutting wages and living standards for workers and reduce the price to the lowest point. I will speak about the question, if there is a race to the bottom and if yes, what we and everyone of us can do about it.

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Andreas Heldt was born in 1984. In 2001 he developed his first game in his spare time. 2008, he and some of his friends founded Z-Software GmbH. Since that time Andreas is CEO of the company and was responsible for a number of game projects of different genres and for different platforms.

Retro Games are like Picassos

The comeback of retro games and SID music and why they are highly potential

Over the last few years, Sound of Games has been participating successfully on several retro game projects. With games like Cinemaware’s “Wings”, System 3’s “Last Ninja Soundtrack” and Chris Huelsbeck’s “Turrican Anthology” they show how to grow a success with retro games, how future business models match games of the past and what make retro fans the best fan base you can imagine. Special Guest: CINEMAWARE

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2010 – today: Co.-founder & Artist Sound of Games, No.1 in Premium Games Music
2008- today: Founder Gameskoepfe & Official XING Xpert Ambassador, Games Business Network with 5.000+ Games Professionals
2007 - today: Founder Gamesrocker, Germanys largest annual B2C Center Games Event "SpandauSpielt" in coop with Saturn
1996-2007: Freelancer Technical Marketing, Sony Deutschland GmbH

Creating an Indie RPG With a 3-Person Dev Team: Life Lessons on Project Management

Two years ago, we embarked on a development crusade to create an RPG with a team of three fulltime developers. We all had prior game industry experience and we decided on what we thought would be a quite minimalistic concept for an RPG, with a side-scrolling 2D perspective. Over the course of time, harsh reality reared its head; we have had to overcome many difficulties. The most important lessons we learned did not actually pertain to our respective areas of specialization – game design, art or programming – but were management-related issues around avoiding individual and team burnout, ensuring smooth communication between all team members, managing priorities and dependencies, and learning how to efficiently outsource and collaborate with external contractors. All indies working in small teams on complex and/or long projects may benefit from this talk. The focus will be on our ongoing discovery of the importance of the so-called “soft-skills”, writing clear design documentation, communicating smoothly within the team, and planning effectively.

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Currently working on the upcoming indie RPG title Dex, Jan holds the steering wheel for the project and handles game design, writing, and management responsibilities. He is a devoted game developer, with his first freeware game released back in 2004. Since then, he has worked on several game titles and published three books about game development and game design in the Czech language.

Massive Prototyping – A Way of Life

What if you were told you need to produce 25 new games next year? What tools do you have at your disposal to solve this task? What if you also need to support 25 languages in all these games, and ensure that the translations meet high levels of standards? Can your team rise to the occasion? Join in to share some of Net Entertainment’s experiences going through this process, get a bit of insight into the wonderful world of Online Casinos, and maybe find a few surprising areas where prototyping can help to increase the fun of game development.

Attendees will be shown some examples of Net Entertainment’s massively parallel creative process, how rapid prototyping guides the teams throughout the game production cycle, how prototyping enters into every aspect of the Net Entertainment production cycle, and how standardizing the language translation process allows world class Certification and Compliance for a widening and more regulated gaming market.

This talk is targeted towards designers and developers with an interest in increasing the use of rapid prototyping and design principles, and everyone who have ever run into problems with translations of games. No prerequisite knowledge is needed.

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Henrik Jonsson is a Senior Developer and an Ambassador for Net Entertainment. With 20 years of experience as a programmer within game and graphics development, with experience from Live TV Game Show productions to the development of the Ion Storm title Anachronox, he has spent the last 6 years working with iGaming solutions for both land based and online casino entertainment.

Mobile Games Self Publishing - When are you ready to go for it?

Oliver will give an update on the trends in mobile marketing and user acquisition: There are more than 800 service providers in the mobile space. From user acquisition and analytics to monetization and advertising. And each one of them claims that they are the "must work with" company. Who are the ones to really work with? What are the secrets of user acquisition? Am I ready to advertise? In times where games have become a commodity, Oliver shares his experience from helping a number of very successful mobile games start-ups to kickstarting successful marketing programs. Learn about the marketing framework, secrets and requirements for launching and operating a commercially successful game.

 

 

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Oliver has almost 20 years of experience in marketing and advertising and has marketed hundreds of casual, core and MMO games in the online and mobile space. Oliver is a strong leader with experience of all aspects of marketing strategy, strategic planning, user acquisition, community management, monetization and gamer retention. Oliver recently founded Tinyloot to solve some of the key problems in mobile games marketing: Discovery and Engagement. Next to that he provides and has provided monetization, marketing and other advisory expertise to a number of European mobile start-ups, including MAG Interactive (SE), flaregames (DE), Relentless Software, Hutch Games (UK) and XS Software (BU). Previously he was in leadership marketing positions at iQU (an affiliate network for F2P online games), JAGEX (developer of Runescape and Transformers and regarded as one of the leading MMO games companies) and IPlay/Oberon Media.

 

That Jam we're in - a discussion on potentials and limits of Game Jams

Game Jams are all the rage nowadays. You can hardly call yourself a game developer if you don't have at least a dozen of them under your belt. There's even a documentary on the topic. They are everywhere. The four panelists all bring some experience on game jams with them, both as participants and organizers. Representing both the corporate and the indie side of things we will spend the hour critically discussing the format of Game Jams. If you are interested in looking beyond the hype to find out what game jams do well, and more importantly where they fall short, then come on by.

 

 

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Anna Kipnis is a Senior Gameplay Programmer at Double Fine Productions, where she has worked since 2002. At Double Fine, she has contributed to various unreleased and top secret projects as well as Psychonauts (2005), Brütal Legend (2009), Costume Quest (2010), Once Upon a Monster (2011), The Cave (2012), and more recently, Broken Age (2014). She has participated in Double Fine's Amnesia Fortnight game jam since its inception in 2008. She is active in the indie game community and has collaborated with Santa Ragione on Final Candidation (2013), a game about the Italian elections. She is the founding organizer of Molyjam, a game jam inspired by Peter Molyneux and his fake Twitter account, @petermolydeux.

 

The little differences: developing games with international partners

In their 8th year of existence, Chimera Entertainment can look back at a diverse portfolio of games. While they where all developed in Munich, many where developed with and for partners all around the globe – including recently released “Angry Birds Epic” with it’s Finnish roots as well as “Crash UFO” with DeNA’s Japanese touch. Chris will talk about Chimera’s approach to working with international publishers, and share his learnings and anecdotes that pooled up during this time. Cultural differences and divergent development processes are just one thing to keep in mind, but when it comes to the game’s substantial matters, does everyone share the same point of view...?

 

 

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…is one of the co-founders of independent games developer Chimera Entertainment. The company was founded by Christian, Creative Director Alexander Kehr and the production company remote control productions in 2006 in Munich/Germany. Christian acted as project manager for most of Chimeras earlier titles, including their PC debut “Windchaser”. By now the company has specialized in mobile games, but also develops titles for PC and console platforms. Christian and his team have worked on more than fifteen released titles, the most popular being recently released “Angry Birds Epic” with Rovio Entertainment. He regularly speaks at conferences and industry events, and supports educational facilities holding workhops and lectures.

 

Going Indie is a Marathon - Staying Motivated for the Long Run

Around 2008 the "golden age of indies" got kicked-off. Between then and today a lot of people have decided to strike out on their own and just make games. They left the traditional employed jobs at work-for-hire businesses behind and instead focussed on making "their own" games in their own teams under their own rules. The five panelists are part of that crowd - they've been "doing the indie thing" for between two and seven years. As of today, they're still working in their tiny studios on their (not so) tiny games. None of them made it to fame and riches yet. None of them gave up and got a save job in corporate land - even though there have been a lot of hard times for everybody: Times where they did not know how to pay the rent. Days where their biggest deals fell through. Weeks and months where there was no playable game that was any kind of fun. We want to explore the reasons for perseverance: What is it that makes you get up every morning - even when sometimes all the cards seem to be stacked against you? If you're a fellow indie, then your take-aways could be that you're not alone in your struggle. That everybody has bad times somedays. And that there are ways to cope with that fact. We'll show you some of ours. If you're not an indie (yet) then maybe this panel will inspire you to strike out on your own - or forever discourage you from even thinking about it.

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He started his game career early by creating a browsergame with friends at school to see if that was possible. At that time he was responsible for graphics and layout. Despite of unofficially running it on a school server until someone found out, he was able to finish school and went out to do digital things and more. After a year of working in webdesign and event management, he ended up studying Gamedesign in Munich. After receiving his bachelor's degree at the Mediadesign Hochschule Munich, he partly founded Klonk Games. It is a small game studio from Munich, working on their own titles as well as doing contract work for various clients. The team is at the moment working on Mercury Shift 3D, a couch coop platformer for two.

Your Rocket is ready sir. Building multi-platform independent games on Google App Engine.

Once upon a time, a young team wanted to become space cowboys in the wide online gaming space. They had already an idea that would attract many species out there, but they had still a little problem. No one of them really knew how to build a rocket which would be safe, stable and able to bring them as far as their imagination could reach. This is a story about Devspire Studios. Robert from Devspire used Google App Engine as a backend for his web based game Campokickers. After enough tuning, nearly 2 years, thousands of users he is happy how he tuned his rocket and lately found a publisher to scale his game to outer space. Robert will share his experience with Google App Engine and how it allows Devspire to focus just on the game development instead of the infrastructure. Jens from the Google Cloud Platform Team will also give a glimpse on how you can use App Engine to power mobile games as well and will give a glimpse on what's new and coming soon in App Engine and Cloud Platform.

 

 

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Jens is a solutions engineer for Google’s Cloud Platform, helping customers and prospects finding the products and systems which fulfill their needs and allow them scale efficiently. Jens has over 6 years of experience working in Google. He started as a Network Engineer working on Google’s global production infrastructure and spent 2 years as a Technical Program Manager on infrastructure projects in Emerging Markets at Google Ghana. Before working for Google, Jens worked in technical teams at the United Nations and at 1&1 Internet.

 

 

Games Education: where from now?

Talent is core to a killer game, a high potential studio, and a vibrant ecosystem. How do we ensure that up-an-coming talent is prepared for the ever-evolving game industry? This panel will explore expectations of students and the promises of academic institutions, and discuss skill gaps and needs. And, how academic, research, art and industy entities interplay for a healthy ecosystem now and in the future.

 

 

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Old enough to remember the times when 4MB of RAM accounted for a high end gaming rig, Prof. Sylvius Lack entered the game industry in 1995. Since then he filled various creative, technical and administrative roles in game development before becoming a full-time lecturer for game design and development. Currently, he is acting rector of the GA Hochschule (university of applied sciences) www.ga-hochschule.de in Berlin.

 

 

Going Indie is a Marathon - Staying Motivated for the Long Run

Around 2008 the "golden age of indies" got kicked-off. Between then and today a lot of people have decided to strike out on their own and just make games. They left the traditional employed jobs at work-for-hire businesses behind and instead focussed on making "their own" games in their own teams under their own rules. The five panelists are part of that crowd - they've been "doing the indie thing" for between two and seven years. As of today, they're still working in their tiny studios on their (not so) tiny games. None of them made it to fame and riches yet. None of them gave up and got a save job in corporate land - even though there have been a lot of hard times for everybody: Times where they did not know how to pay the rent. Days where their biggest deals fell through. Weeks and months where there was no playable game that was any kind of fun. We want to explore the reasons for perseverance: What is it that makes you get up every morning - even when sometimes all the cards seem to be stacked against you? If you're a fellow indie, then your take-aways could be that you're not alone in your struggle. That everybody has bad times somedays. And that there are ways to cope with that fact. We'll show you some of ours. If you're not an indie (yet) then maybe this panel will inspire you to strike out on your own - or forever discourage you from even thinking about it.

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Wolf has been a German for 29 years now and considers himself an Indie-Developer. After receiving a diploma in design, being an ambulance car driver and a construction site worker, Wolf co-founded the university start-up THREAKS in 2010. Apart from being Co-CEO of the company, Wolf is responsible for the marketing, business development and cooking at THREAKS. Furthermore Wolf loves to network! You will find him pretty much at any major game event around the world.

Taking advantage of the way indiegogo helps you with community funding, feedback and involvement to grow your gaming business

The rise of Crowdfunding as an empowernment and funding possibility has made community reachouts a viable solution for developers and publishers of games. In this session we will cover key best practices and methods to optimize your indiegogo campaign for success. Crowdfunding can be used for all stages of a game development, marketing and sales if you know how to engage your community and let the fun live within it.

 

 

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Konrad Lauten spend the last 20 years in multiple mainly entrepreneural positions in the food, event, catering, music and crowdfunding industries. Starting 2014 he is the marketing and community manager for indiegogo.com, an international online funding, empowernment and community building platform.

 

Blue Byte and online games, a love affair

With more than 25 years of experience Ubisoft’s Blue Byte studio has always been at the heart of today’s trends. However since 2010 the German developer has gone through the biggest changes in their long-lasting history. From a 50+ people developing studio to a 300+ people developer and operator of online games which are available around the globe. Today Blue Byte is the online specialist inside the Ubisoft group. In her talk Odile Limpach, Managing Director at Blue Byte, details how those changes were managed and what are the key learnings of last year’s changes. How can such a fast growth be handled? How does the daily work changes when working and operating on online games? Which business model fits best?

• Handling the growth of a developing studio

• Transformation from a pure developing studio to an online specialist

• Operating and marketing online games around the globe

 

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Odile Limpach is managing director at the venerable German entertainment software studio Blue Byte. She graduated from business school in France and completed her MBA at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in the USA. Odile Limpach began her career in the gaming industry when she went to work for Ubisoft Group in 1996. In the German branch, she started out as a product manager, became a marketing director, and finally managing director in 2000. In this position, she established Ubisoft GmbH as a leading publisher in the German market. In 2007, she switched as managing director to Ubisoft Studio Blue Byte GmbH. The German studio, which is based in Düsseldorf, produces among other things the latest editions of game classics such as THE SETTLERS® and ANNO®. Under her leadership, Blue Byte has experienced enormous growth, with new offices in Mainz and a Blue Byte team in Bucharest. Within the Ubisoft Group, Blue Byte has become a competence centre for the development and operation of online games. Odile Limpach is also involved as a volunteer in the areas of vocational training and media development. Furthermore, she acts as an advisor (CCEF) for the French Agency for International Business Development.

Games Education: where from now?

 

 

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Henrike Lode is CEO and founder of the Copenhagen-based independent game studio Lohika. With her team she is currently developing the award-winning puzzle adventure Machineers. Henrike received her M.Sc. in Game Design from the IT University in 2012 and is now teaching other Game Design students in User Experience and Prototyping as well as Game Development. She is furthermore executive board member at IGDA Denmark and as such, co-organising the Nordic Game Jam.

The Social Battlefield

Videogames today are about as much marketing as it is production. The Marketing landscape has however changed to involve more actors and most importantly, the community. Social Media Platforms have become the new advertising menu and communication with ads isn’t the only way forward these days. With Battlefield 3 we took a deliberate step in this direction and continued onwards to work closer with the community while producing amazing content.

 

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Growing up in an international environment with my parents being from different parts of the world and spending some time abroad to study more languages, I've always found myself to be a curious person. So curious in fact, that I still explore places that are traditionally not tourist destinations, explore new possibilities to be creative such as filming documentaries as well as studying classes after work just to learn new things! As a videogame Producer which is my current occupation, I am expected to come up with creative ideas, follow through with a budget proposal as well as a plan of action. I am also expected to represent the studio in external meetings and press briefings. My personal projects involve traveling around the world whether it is for charity or not, I am an explorer and that is when I am creative to the maximum.

Studio Fizbin & the Quest for the HUNAKEL!

During this workshop-lecture mix you’ll experience the basic understandings of awesome Character-Design exclusively certified by Dr. Fresenius! We’ll clarify, how important intrinsic values really are as well as how they correlate with outer values. We uncover in a very investigative way what special requirements are needed for your own creature to act in a game and its game world. It’s our rock-solid claim, there’s a talented character-designer in all of us and we don’t even need to be a skilled drawer or writer… though this could be helpful sometimes. And at the end, we’ll find the HUNAKEL! Promise!

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At the age of 13, Sebastian created his first self-published magazine "the viking". 14 years later he earned his B.A. in “media production” and his diploma in media conception at the Institute of Animation, a sector of the well-known “Filmakademie” Baden-Wuerttemberg. In 2011, he co‐founded Studio Fizbin and leads the interactive content development of the company as Creative and Game Director. The point & click adventure game “The Inner World” was Sebastian’s diploma project and also his very first full scale videogame, which he evolved from concept phase to final release in 2013. The award-winning game is very well received for its creative world, bizarre characters as well as the humorous and lovely story. Currently Sebastian works as Creative Director on Studio Fizbin’s new project “Beyond The Mountains”, a survival-adventure based on the famous stories of H.P. Lovecraft.

Don't stop believin - How even the shittiest setbacks as a startup can offer a window of opportunity

Making a good game sadly isn't enough to prosper as a game studio. This is the tale and learned lessons of how we experienced every possible bad thing that can happen while running a game startup, but managed to come out alive. This talk will mostly cover various tips and tricks on pr marketing, management, company culture and also offer both valuable sales data and user analytics.

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At the start of 2014, Vlad has joined up-and-coming Finnish free-to-play mobile game developer Critical Force Entertainment as their new head of studio. He is now responsible for the studio's two main franchises Critical Strike Portable (16+ million downloads on Google Play with 300.000 DAU) and their newest title Company of Tanks that after a 'soft-launch' on Google Play with 300.000 downloads is still in development. Starting out as a game industry journalist, he has written for both various print and online media for over six years and originally created the online version of game industry trade magazine Gamesauce.org in 2010. He spent most of 2012 teaching himself what it was like to run a development team while helping his boss set up Thailand-based mobile game studio, Arkavis Siam co., Ltd. He joined Dutch start-up Gramble in 2013 to rediscover himself as a PR manager and now leverages that experience to offer support on the topics of PR & Marketing. With his own company VGVisionary, Vlad likes to travel the world to speak at events, meet with game developers and offer advice, contacts and support to whoever needs it. He acts as an advisor and mentor for various game companies in the areas of content production, pr & marketing, branding, game analytics, management and business development. You can watch his previous talks and lectures at www.youtube.com/vgvisionary.

That Jam we're in - a discussion on potentials and limits of Game Jams

Game Jams are all the rage nowadays. You can hardly call yourself a game developer if you don't have at least a dozen of them under your belt. There's even a documentary on the topic. They are everywhere. The four panelists all bring some experience on game jams with them, both as participants and organizers. Representing both the corporate and the indie side of things we will spend the hour critically discussing the format of Game Jams. If you are interested in looking beyond the hype to find out what game jams do well, and more importantly where they fall short, then come on by.

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A New Zealander currently living in Germany, Lucy is a game artist, journalist and indie developer. She currently runs the German NRW Developer group, now at 200 strong, and organizes community initiatives like Asylum Jam, a game jam in 2013 that aimed to created horror games without negative mental health stereotypes, Women in Games NZ and more.

Games Education: where from now?

Talent is core to a killer game, a high potential studio, and a vibrant ecosystem. How do we ensure that up-an-coming talent is prepared for the ever-evolving game industry? This panel will explore expectations of students and the promises of academic institutions, and discuss skill gaps and needs. And, how academic, research, art and industy entities interplay for a healthy ecosystem now and in the future.

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Focus on GAME: Digital Games and it’s acceptance as part of our cultural life

Games are the subject of cultural life. It’s importance as a contemporary and complex media of expression is undisputed among gamers. Parts of our society and politics, however, have a different, more critical opinion. This is reflected for example in the fact that, that the German government has moved the responsibility for games from the culture and media resort to a technical ministry. The panel will discuss these developments and its consequences. facility. It discusses why the social recognition of digital games is that slow and would like to add momentum to change this fact. The session is hosted and organized by GAME Bundesverband der Games-Branche e.V..

since 2008 Joerg is professor at the University of Paderborn. His chair is for Media Economics as well as Media Management. Also he is vice dean. One of his main research focusses is the computer and video game industry. But he is not only working theoretically but also he has one of the largest gameslabs at a German University. Joerg earned his PhD in economics and worked at chairs for management, organization and human resources as well as communication science. He also helds a degree in physical eduction and worked for several years as professional sports coach. With this background there is a natural and strong interest in exports since 2005. His latest publication was about the question how much sports is really in digital games.

Fokus GAME: Computerspiele und deren Akzeptanz in unserem kulturellen Leben

Spiele sind heute im Mittelpunkt unserer Gesellschaft angekommen. Sie sind Gegenstand unseres kulturellen Lebens. Aus medienwissenschaftlicher Sicht sind sie als zeitgemäßes und vielschichtiges Ausdrucksmedien anerkannt. Teile unserer Gesellschaft und Politik haben jedoch eine andere, kritischere Meinung. Dies drückt sich beispielsweise in der Tatsache aus, dass, dass die Bundesregierung die Verantwortung für Computerspiele aus einem Kultur-und Medien-Resort zu einem technischen Ministerium verschoben hat. Das Panel wird diese Entwicklungen und ihre Folgen zu diskutieren. Gehostet und organisiert vom GAME Bundesverband der Games-Branche e.V..

Jan Müller-Michaelis, better known as Poki in the gaming industry, is Creative Director and co-founder of Daedalic Entertainment. During his studies of Media Technology at the HAW Hamburg he developed the point & click adventure “Edna – The Breakout” as part of his diploma thesis, which was released in 2008 and has won several prices. As author and game designer of games like The Whispered World, A New Beginning and Harvey´s New Eyes, Poki achieved to revive the point & click adventure genre. The Deponia-trilogy counts as one of the most successful adventure games of the past years and finally catapulted Daedalic Entertainment into the first league of adventure developers.

That Jam we're in - a discussion on potentials and limits of Game Jams

Game Jams are all the rage nowadays. You can hardly call yourself a game developer if you don't have at least a dozen of them under your belt. There's even a documentary on the topic. They are everywhere. The four panelists all bring some experience on game jams with them, both as participants and organizers. Representing both the corporate and the indie side of things we will spend the hour critically discussing the format of Game Jams. If you are interested in looking beyond the hype to find out what game jams do well, and more importantly where they fall short, then come on by.

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Martin somehow managed to combine his passion for video games with his architecture degree. Currently he lives a double live as a freelance game and interaction designer by day and independent game developer by night. He's also co-founder of the German Indie Developer community Indie Arena and the Game Culture Club discussion group.

Turning Mobile Game Distribution Into Child’s Play

The competition among games in the most popular Android application stores is nightmarish leaving almost no chance for indie developers to have their games discovered. This is why publishing in alternative application stores could be quite an advantageous strategy for those who don’t have massive budgets for their game promotion. Yet the Android ecosystem is rather fragmented: each store has its own publishing rules and SDKs for in-app purchases which makes uploading a game to multiple stores time-consuming and complicated. In their session Vladimir and Anastasia will describe how the open source tools of One Platform Foundation will make a cross-store game publishing a breeze and show some coding techniques for fast and easy in-app purchase API integration.

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A graduate of St. Petersburg State University’s Mathematics & Mechanics Faculty, Vladimir worked at SPB Software from its foundation, developing user applications for smartphones. Since 2011 he has been working at Yandex, where he is developing projects for Yandex.Shell, Yandex.Browser and Yandex.Store. He is also a strong supporter or the One Platform Foundation project.

Shifting up a Gear: Plot Development for Serial Content

Working on an interactive serial product differs quite a bit from an ordinary production. A true serial stands and falls through its plot. How do you get the player to return week after week? Why should he talk about his experiences with his friends and thereby generate new players? Maybe plot isn’t as dead as some people like to think – at least not in serials and series. On TV the showrunner concept is proof of a growing awareness of the author being the centerpiece of a successful product. But no matter how dead or alive plot is, producing it in a reliable time interval is a challenge in itself. How to get the author to understand what you are trying to do? How to integrate him or her into the pre-production of your game? And how to work successfully on crossmedia products with people from TV or the ebook publishers? The answers might just surprise you.

 

 

 

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Nico Nowarra has been working for fifteen years as a freelance journalist and author. He has written numerous scripts for audio and computer games and regularly publishes articles in the magazine “c’t” from Heise publishing. He also co-authored the “Diary of an Egomaniac” and participated in its conversion to audio book. He currently works as a lecturer in the subjects of storytelling, level and world design and as project manager at a number of universities in Berlin and Brandenburg. Nico Nowarra has extensive experience both in the conception of stories and the design of gameplay sequences.

Harri's main responsibilities in The Supernauts includes graphics and AI technology, and he has spent countless work hours on making the game look as good as possible and squeezing maximum graphics and CPU performance out of iOS.

He has worked years with game technology from lowest-end mobile(Tiki Towers mobile, Marble Mixer, Bad Air Day) to the modern console platforms such as in Trials Evolution.

Studio Fizbin & the Quest for the HUNAKEL!

During this workshop-lecture mix you’ll experience the basic understandings of awesome Character-Design exclusively certified by Dr. Fresenius! We’ll clarify, how important intrinsic values really are as well as how they correlate with outer values. We uncover in a very investigative way what special requirements are needed for your own creature to act in a game and its game world. It’s our rock-solid claim, there’s a talented character-designer in all of us and we don’t even need to be a skilled drawer or writer… though this could be helpful sometimes. And at the end, we’ll find the HUNAKEL! Promise!

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Mareike was born in 1983 in Lemgo, to the surprise of her parents, with a pencil in her right hand. Hence her career options were quite narrow. After an apprenticeship as Technical Design Assistant she studied Graphic and Communication Design for 2 semesters. In 2007 she got her B.A. in Media Production, followed by a diploma in Motion Design in 2011 at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. While working in London at the animation studio “Mainframe” she had the chance to work for numerous international clients and gained lots of experience as illustrator and animator Mareike is responsible for Art Direction and Character Design at Studio Fizbin, which she co-founded in 2011. The pencil in her right hand luckily never disappeared.

Interactive Sound Design using FMOD

Audio feedback using sound effects is an important aspect of a well-rounded audiovisual gaming experience. But launching those .wavs is only the beginning. Sound design can play along with the player, react to them, guide them and mess with their heads. An audio middleware solution like FMOD starts an exciting dialogue between sound designer and player, and opens up a whole new playground for ever-changing, smart soundscapes and effects. Together with Daniel Pharos, who has worked on 120 games so far, the audience will look at a few examples of increasing complexity and weirdness (taken from shipped PC and Xbox 360 titles he has worked on), to then see how an example sound object is built from scratch and implemented.

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Daniel Pharos is active gamer since 1984 and musician since 1994. Before starting the Knights of Soundtrack, he has worked for the publisher TLC/Mattel Interactive Germany as QA Lead and Product Management Assistent for Warlords Battlecry, Myst 3 Exile, Panzer General IV and others. As a freelancer, he has worked on 120 games so far, providing music, sound design, translations or voice recordings. Those games include Elder Scrolls Online, Risen 2, DARK, Dungeons & Forge of Empires. Daniel is lecturer for Media Composition (FH) at the School of Entertainment & Technology and a lecturer at the SAE. www.KnightsofSoundtrack.com.

Fluid Football - 5.5 million users; the truth about launching and maintaining a mobile game

This is a session all about the successes and failures of developing and publishing Fluid Football on iOS and Android over the past two years. This post-mortem will be brutally honest about every area - design, development, launch, marketing, social media and metrics. The emphasis will be on the development of the game and how the other areas fed-back and influenced the on-going development of the game. This session will be organized into lessons with real examples from Fluid Football and will be useful for anyone involved in managing mobile teams or designers of mobile games.

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Simon has worked in the games industry for 26 years. Before founding Fluid Games he held the following key roles: Executive Producer at Codemasters, Head of Development at Empire Interactive, Head of Development at Black Bean Games, CEO/founder of Chromativity and CEO/founder of Lightning Fish Games. Responsible for several million-selling franchises including Fluid Football, LMA Manager, Flatout, Ford Racing, Taito Legends and Club Football, Simon’s fifty plus published games cover every major platform and every genre. A deep understanding of both publishing and development has culminated in the recent success with Fluid Football titles, which achieved over 5.5 million downloads in the first 18 months on iOS and Android. Fluid Football allows gamers to drag and draw to control all their football players in this tactical football game, where each level only takes a few seconds to play - ideal for mobile devices. Fluid Games have also recently finished an RTS called Stronghold 3: The Campaigns on iPad plus a god game called Idol Hands for Steam PC. Simon has built and led many teams in developing quality titles and has a proven track record in nurturing successful game franchises from first concepts. He has also worked with many global brands including most recently Intel and Adidas. Well connected and known throughout the games industry, Simon was a founder and board member of the digital publisher AppyNation and has been on the advisory board for GameHorizon since it began in 2006.

The stigma of boredom and why we love it – Elaborating games with a global visual-language

This best-practice talk is about the obvious discrepancy of recycling clichés against fresh and innovative concepts. Why does the industry circle around old, yet working, visual-concepts and to which degree does the audience allow us game-creators to deliver new and unused ideas? How do specific genres have to look like, and how big is the sandbox that is left to us artist to do the magic in?

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Alexander Raphelt is the Head of Art of InnoGames, currently leading a team of 35+ Artists. Alongside a very talented and dedicated team he shapes the strategic vision of InnoGames Art Dpt.He collaborated to InnoGames last Blockbuster Games like Tribal Wars II and Rising Generals as well as many sophisticated TBA IP´s. Before joining forces with InnoGames, Alexander founded Flow Studios in 2009, an award-winning game-art-studio in Berlin; creating art for AAA developers like EA, Codemasters and DeNa, between others. He is a renowned lecturer at privately held schools and regular universities like S4G, Games-Academy or Hochschule Potsdam, where he teaches Concept-Art, Art-Direction and does Art-Reviews with students. Finally, Alexander is Author of “Mythos Mappenprüfung” and “Characterdesign – Zeichnen und Gestalten”, German Books about Art-School-Madness and Character-Design..

Stones of Time! How kunst-stoff kicked off a Transmedia Project with a Broadcaster!

„Stones of Time“ by kunst-stoff is right now in development as a transmedia-format together with Tellux-Film / Exec.Producer Franziska an der Gassen and the German broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk. The format consists of TV, gaming, ARG and online segments and is supposed to generate for its users an entertaining as well as an educating experience on multiple platforms. It is going to enthuse user groups, whose had been highly divergent until now, for different forms of media. Probably older TV-viewer are planed to be attracted by online-applications and mobile games. Younger online and mobile affine people are supposed to be (re-)introduced to the reception of TV- resp. mediatheque-content. This should create an audience flow, which increases the overall audience for the primary medium TV/mediatheque . Parallel to this the effects of the convergences are going to be used to elevate the medium television in to the new area of media.

Patrick Rau (kunst-stoff) and Philipp Schall (Tellux Next) will talk about the genesis of the project and what challenges the “Stones of Time”-team had and will have to overcome: • How to live up to the demands / expectations of a TV-broadcaster and film production company? • How to set up a feasible legal frame work? • How to transform this construct incl. a public broadcaster into a satisfying business model?

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Patrick is the managing director and the creative head of kunst-stoff and the owner of the company. His work is characterized by visionary thinking, accuracy, high aesthetic demand and social entrepreneurial values. Patrick visualizes his role in the game industry primarily as a designer, game-designer, author and producer. Patrick is active in a broad range of areas, creating projects for commercial, cultural, educational, social and artistic contexts; he is also interested in the educational capacity of research projects and has held extensive talks and workshops as a guest lecturer. • born 1976 • studied Communication Design (FH), holds an M.A. (2001) • spent 1,5 years working in San Francisco (tree-axis, 2001-2002) • background as designer, media artist and game designer • founder of kunst-stoff (2005, GmbH since 2008) • 15+ years of professional experience in the interactive media/game industry • Patrick speaks english fluently.

 

 

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As a freelancing graphics designer, Tassilo has been responsible for almost 400 game cover artworks, countless ingame assets and several videos for the games business. Studied philosophy, graphics design and communications beforehand and wrote his first games back in 1985. In 2012 he entered the next level by founding the decentralized game-development team bumblebee. To create the games he'd love to play.

 

Going Indie is a Marathon - Staying Motivated for the Long Run

Around 2008 the "golden age of indies" got kicked-off. Between then and today a lot of people have decided to strike out on their own and just make games. They left the traditional employed jobs at work-for-hire businesses behind and instead focussed on making "their own" games in their own teams under their own rules. The five panelists are part of that crowd - they've been "doing the indie thing" for between two and seven years. As of today, they're still working in their tiny studios on their (not so) tiny games. None of them made it to fame and riches yet. None of them gave up and got a save job in corporate land - even though there have been a lot of hard times for everybody: Times where they did not know how to pay the rent. Days where their biggest deals fell through. Weeks and months where there was no playable game that was any kind of fun. We want to explore the reasons for perseverance: What is it that makes you get up every morning - even when sometimes all the cards seem to be stacked against you? If you're a fellow indie, then your take-aways could be that you're not alone in your struggle. That everybody has bad times somedays. And that there are ways to cope with that fact. We'll show you some of ours. If you're not an indie (yet) then maybe this panel will inspire you to strike out on your own - or forever discourage you from even thinking about it.

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Jana Reinhardt is a game designer and graphic artist. Together with Friedrich Hanisch she founded the independent game studio Rat King Entertainment in Halle, Germany. Her mission is to enable the player to be creative or at least more empowered than just walking through tubes. She is also an observer of the German indie scene, hoping to see the little plant grow to a multi-coloured, extra-fruity and long-living tree. Her current game is the first-person exploration puzzler TRI.

Gender (and Diversity) design in video games – “totally!” or “…not again…”?

The (mis-)representation of perceived gender norms have been a topic in games for the last couple of years. Even if some may think that the discussion is unnecessary, it is important to reach a dialog and find a way to mitigate the issues without necessarily losing the fun. Four seasoned industry representatives will tackle just this and talk about their perspectives, try to answer your questions from the audience and build some pointers to consider for your future game and character designs.

Look at your own biases and get some perspective on the current discussions as well as underlying real issues. Learn about how the topic influenced how other developers work and how they design their games with gender in mind.

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Wanting to be a singer, a journalist, an author, a coder, a game designer, and several other things little girls dream of I studied way too long and ended up as being none of it: a project assistant / media scientist. So I spend most of my days hopping between work at Stiftung Digitale Spielekultur, the University (hoping to finally get my Bachelor's Degree), and the Computerspielesammlung Potsdam teaching other students the secrets and mysteries of Game Studies. As an industry newcomer I can finally start to do what I learend in all my years of studying: getting people's shit done.

 

Cross-platform games for Core gamers. Designing, launching and running a true gamer's game on all devices.

With the bold vision to re-unite gamers of all platforms with a highly challenging multiplayer game on the one hand, while offering easy approachability and short session times at the same time, Cliffhanger Productions created Ærena – Clash of Champions. With this competitive PvP game that attempts to enter the world of e-sports from both PC and Tablets, a lot of ideas and approaches had to be iterated. After months of paper prototyping, a mobile alpha on Android and an insightful Steam Early Access phase, Ærena has not ceased to be developed and iterated further towards its goal to become speed chess on steroids for the smart masses. This talk not only covers our insights about closing the gap between hardcore and casual and the Challenges of 2014’s crowded marketplaces, it also gives an outlook on how we plan to tackle some yet unresolved hurdles within the next months.

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Jonathan Riedler is the Product Manager for Ærena – Clash of Champions, a self-published cross-platform competitive multiplayer online game for PC, Mac, iOS and Android. He studied Media Technology and Design at the Univerity of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg where he discovered his interest in game development with various smaller projects as animator, artist and programmer. After university he focused on project management for web design and multimedia projects until he decided to do a Master’s in Project Management with a Minor in Game Design. After the first bigger game project Sidelives and a master’s thesis about the gamification of work, he was hired as QA manger by Cliffhanger Productions in Vienna.

Gender (and Diversity) design in video games – “totally!” or “…not again…”?

The (mis-)representation of perceived gender norms have been a topic in games for the last couple of years. Even if some may think that the discussion is unnecessary, it is important to reach a dialog and find a way to mitigate the issues without necessarily losing the fun. Four seasoned industry representatives will tackle just this and talk about their perspectives, try to answer your questions from the audience and build some pointers to consider for your future game and character designs.

Look at your own biases and get some perspective on the current discussions as well as underlying real issues. Learn about how the topic influenced how other developers work and how they design their games with gender in mind.

Lift your games to the cloud – casual puzzles and blockbuster titles alike!

Let’s take a closer look at “the cloud”. Forza makes use of it, Halo does and multiplayer game Titanfall also successfully launched with the cloud. But it’s not all about these blockbuster titles! The range of services that Microsoft Azure holds available also offers great value for small developers just starting out. We will walk through a couple of real life scenarios like the ones mentioned above to show possible parallels to your own game projects, big or small.

Workshop: My first game with Unity – from start to finish!

Creating your first video game doesn’t need to be difficult. We will walk through creating your first little video game for Windows Phone 8 using Unity and Visual Studio – which are excellent tools for your first steps as well as for use in highly professional environments. We will also look at how you can then publish your games to the Windows Phone Store.

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For more than 20 years, video gaming, team organization and computer science have played a major part in Kristina Rothe’s life. Consequently, the former Square Enix and Travian employee who now works as Game Development Evangelist at Microsoft Germany, has a distinct background in games as well as project & team management and IT. Kristina started her career in the games industry as a freelance writer for the popular German online magazine Gameswelt. Eager to become more deeply involved in the actual game development process, she then moved on to join Square Enix Ldt. as Project Coordinator and Travian Games GmbH as Senior Project Lead on the multi-award-winning browser game Remanum. In addition, she also played a key role in building up [KR1] the Munich, Germany-based company’s mobile development team. Having been an avid believer in quality, variety and rich cross-platform experiences for many years, she ultimately left Travian in late 2012 in order to take over the position of Game Development Evangelist at Microsoft Germany. In that capacity, she now aids ambitious hobbyists and aspiring development teams alike in bringing new and innovative gaming experiences to Microsoft’s various gaming platforms, such as Windows Phone 8 and Windows Azure. .

Weaponizing Storytelling

Life is hard for an indie developer. They lack resources, technology and manpower to produce the game of their dreams. They need every tool in the box and every weapon they can get. This session aims to explain in detail why a story for your game is not a bonus feature. The story not only makes the game more interesting but also helps you develop a better game. And the best thing about it is that you don't need a super expensive engine to do it. Developers who realized these facts often use the story to great effect. This sessions will not only explain how they achieve this but also give examples from indie games throughout the history of gaming.

 

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Besides being a game designer, Dr. Fasih Sayin is also a lawyer specializing in criminology and forensics, an award-winning author of short stories and poems, and the vocalist of a local heavy metal band. But his career in law and video games started as a criminal, for he was raised by software pirates in the heartland of Turkey. He's now on a quest for redemption, trying to buy every single game he once played without paying. He's been working freelance for a number of board game and video game companies as a game design consultant. He joined Crytek formally in 2012 as a game designer and is now working on Warface. Sayin is a Turkish guy who graduated from what's technically a catholic high school, followed by the Marmara University Faculty of Law. He then studied cinema at Plato Academy of Cinema, finished his M.A. thesis on interactive narrative structures and his Ph.D. thesis on the role of the audience in interactive narratives. He used to and still occasionally teaches advanced narratology, at several universities in Turkey.

Iterating Creativity

- „Stones of Time“ by kunst-stoff is right now in development as a transmedia-format together with Tellux-Film / Exec.Producer Franziska an der Gassen and the German broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk. The format consists of TV, gaming, ARG and online segments and is supposed to generate for its users an entertaining as well as an educating experience on multiple platforms. It is going to enthuse user groups, whose had been highly divergent until now, for different forms of media. Probably older TV-viewer are planed to be attracted by online-applications and mobile games. Younger online and mobile affine people are supposed to be (re-)introduced to the reception of TV- resp. mediatheque-content. This should create an audience flow, which increases the overall audience for the primary medium TV/mediatheque . Parallel to this the effects of the convergences are going to be used to elevate the medium television in to the new area of media.

Patrick Rau (kunst-stoff) and Philipp Schall (Tellux Next) will talk about the genesis of the project and what challenges the “Stones of Time”-team had and will have to overcome: • How to live up to the demands / expectations of a TV-broadcaster and film production company? • How to set up a feasible legal frame work? • How to transform this construct incl. a public broadcaster into a satisfying business model?

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Philipp Schall is managing director of Tellux Next GmbH. After completing his studies at the University of Television and Film Munich HFF, he pursued different projects within the film and television industry before becoming an independent film producer. In addition to his international movie-producing activities he started to work on game-story-development with screen writers from the film industry. Philipp Schall has co-hosted the Transmedia Days 2013 & 2014, initiated by Creative Europe Desk Munich as deputy chairman of the “Transmedia Bayern e.V.” – association. He is as well curating the Games³-Special of the Filmfest Munich.

Big Projects, small teams: Create more with less

Indie developers and small teams always face the same task. They play on the same field as the key players, but with less manpower. This talk will cover the possibilities for small development studios to optimize their game (-concept) and their production to make seemingly big projects possible. Based on experiences with our own projects, like “FreeSkies”, “Caravan” and "TRISTOY" we'll explore what we did to optimize our output and also have a look at other games and their optimizations.

Covering the wide range of project phases, this talk should inspire the audience to think about how much they can achieve with small teams if they really set their mind to it. They may rethink their approach on planning and executing projects or even just pick up good planning examples from other games. Either way, they will compare the presented approaches with their own and may find helpful suggestions on how to improve their project, depending on which phase of development they are currently in and which position they hold. An artist may rethink their ways of content creation, a programmer may be inspired about the possibilities of automation and a producer may find ways to optimize their project, even if it's in the early stages.

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Manuel Scherer is a German game developer, author and teacher for games. He has worked in the fields of games, as well as visual computing in general, including works for the Fraunhofer Institute. Apart from working on games, he has been teaching game development and interactive Design in Germany and is continually writing about major events like GDC-Europe for the German press. In 2011 he authored a book about game development. Around one year after that, he decided the time to be right for setting up his own studio, UNIWORLDS, where he is currently working as the head of the studio. During its first year of activity, UNIWORLDS has already been named one of Develop’s most promising start-ups in Europe in 2013 and was funded by the federal government of Germany and the European Union for their combination of innovative technology and games.

Fokus GAME: Computerspiele und deren Akzeptanz in unserem kulturellen Leben

Spiele sind heute im Mittelpunkt unserer Gesellschaft angekommen. Sie sind Gegenstand unseres kulturellen Lebens. Aus medienwissenschaftlicher Sicht sind sie als zeitgemäßes und vielschichtiges Ausdrucksmedien anerkannt. Teile unserer Gesellschaft und Politik haben jedoch eine andere, kritischere Meinung. Dies drückt sich beispielsweise in der Tatsache aus, dass, dass die Bundesregierung die Verantwortung für Computerspiele aus einem Kultur-und Medien-Resort zu einem technischen Ministerium verschoben hat. Das Panel wird diese Entwicklungen und ihre Folgen zu diskutieren. Gehostet und organisiert vom GAME Bundesverband der Games-Branche e.V..

 

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Christian Schiffer arbeitet als Autor, Journalist und Moderator für den Bayerischen Rundfunk. Für seine Arbeit wurde er 2012 mit dem Kurt-Magnus-Preis ausgezeichnet. Ausserdem ist er Gründer und Herausgeber der "WASD", einem Bookazine, dass sich um Gameskultur dreht.

Your Rocket is ready sir. Building multi-platform independent games on Google App Engine.

Once upon a time, a young team wanted to become space cowboys in the wide online gaming space. They had already an idea that would attract many species out there, but they had still a little problem. No one of them really knew how to build a rocket which would be safe, stable and able to bring them as far as their imagination could reach. This is a story about Devspire Studios. Robert from Devspire used Google App Engine as a backend for his web based game Campokickers. After enough tuning, nearly 2 years, thousands of users he is happy how he tuned his rocket and lately found a publisher to scale his game to outer space. Robert will share his experience with Google App Engine and how it allows Devspire to focus just on the game development instead of the infrastructure. Jens from the Google Cloud Platform Team will also give a glimpse on how you can use App Engine to power mobile games as well and will give a glimpse on what's new and coming soon in App Engine and Cloud Platform..

 

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Founder and CEO of Devspire studios with offices in Dortmund (Germany) and Racibórz (Poland). He started his professional career as a consultant at Accenture Technology Solutions within the energy sector, followed by working as a freelancer software developer. The entrepreneurial soul paired with passion for gaming brought him finally to found 2012 Devspire together with his friends.

Iterating Creativity

Being Creative as a professional means being able to activate your creativity as needed, based on client schedules. But is there a way to make your results special and their outcome predictable at the same time? How does an iterative process affect the quality level of your work? Which are the benefits of chaos, and where should a workflow be more structured? How does a good briefing affect the creative output of an artist? Oswin has worked as an Artist, Art Director, Supervisor and Project Manager. He will have several viewports in mind while giving the talk, and the thoughts presented are brought up for discussion in the end.

This talk is about creative processes, how to get predictable results up to a certain quality level, staying “fresh” as an artist, keeping yourself interested in your own work, and improving your work as a constant goal.

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Oswin has worked on games, commercials and movies within the entertainment industry for 8 years. He has been responsible for more than 7000 animations so far, working on games like "The Settlers" 6 and 7, "Risen 2", "Sacred 3", “Blackguards”, as well as on several TV-spots and shortfilms. His client list includes Innogames, Bigpoint, Daedalic Entertainment, Ubisoft/Blue Byte, Keen Games, Piranha Bytes, Flare Games, Upjers, King Art, VW and RTL. Before going freelance as an Animator and Illustrator he has worked as Head of Game Department at Pixable Studios in Dresden for 3,5 years. Earlier, he was Lead Animator and Outsourcing Manager at Ubisoft / Blue Byte in Düsseldorf for 4 years.

Retro Games are like Picassos

The comeback of retro games and SID music and why they are highly potential

Over the last few years, Sound of Games has been participating successfully on several retro game projects. With games like Cinemaware’s “Wings”, System 3’s “Last Ninja Soundtrack” and Chris Huelsbeck’s “Turrican Anthology” they show how to grow a success with retro games, how future business models match games of the past and what make retro fans the best fan base you can imagine. Special Guest: CINEMAWARE

 

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2010 – today „Sound of Games“, No.1 in Premium Games Music with Filipp Issa
2000 – 2010 Composer and Producer of 700+ Film, TV, Advertising Music and Recording Artist Productions

Communicating Game Design

Communicating the “design” of a game is always one of the biggest pitfalls in development. The talk will be about the challenges communicating ideas, concepts and mechanics. Andreas will show some approaches and tools from his past. Some of them worked, some of them did not He will use examples from games he worked on. It will be a hands-on presentation and might be interesting for all professions and levels.

 

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Andreas started his career more than 14 years ago at Blue Byte and worked in different positions. As Tester, Data Wizard and Level Designer he had the chance to work on products like Battle Isle and Settlers 4. Settlers 5 and Settlers 6 he attended as Lead Game Designer. As Creative Director he worked on ANNO for Wii and DS and on My Fitness Coach for the PS3 with Move Controls. Besides the larger projects he had the chance to spend time in research, development methods and smaller games like ANNO for the iPhone. Working on such titles gave birth to the idea to make own steps on this market. With Klaas Kersting, Matthias Schindler and Georg Broxtermann he co-founded flaregames in the role of the Creative Director. The Start-Up is developing and publishing successful mobile f2p games on all relevant mobile platforms. Since 2013 Andreas works as a freelancer and helps companies developing and publishing games and applications. His works spans from Creative Direction to Level Design (e.g. Level Design for Battle World: Kronos) to strategic consulting (e.g rondomedia). In July 2014 he followed his heart and went back to game development and founded Daedalic Studio West as a Creative Director to develop games with a high quality. Games he was working on won awards like the Red Dot Design Award, the TOMMI and several German Game Developer Awards. With titles like Bravesmart and Royal Revolt (with keenflare) his team mates and he could prove that you can be successfull on the fast growing mobile market with high quality, efficient development methods and appropriate monetization.

A hardcore crash course in adjusting to the new world of mobile and starting up

The gaming industry is moving an astounding pace, and switching from one platform and business model to another requires an open mind, and willingness to re-learn at a high pace. Jørgen has worked with games for over 20 years (Funcom, Artplant), and been part of shaping the MMO industry. In 2012 they founded Megapop, a new company focusing on mobile Free 2 Play. Their first game Trolls vs Vikings was featured by Apple and Microsoft, and is now launching on Amazon and Google. Listen to Jørgen has he honestly goes through the lessons, failures and insights they have gained on going mobile, indie and Free 2 Play. The talk covers development, marketing, PR, launching a game, platforms, starting up a company and more. It also takes a look at what may still work on mobile compared to the old world of retail gaming, and what doesn’t.

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Jørgen Tharaldsen work as the CEO of Megapop, an Oslo based start-up company made up of a group of industry veterans. They just launched Trolls vs. Vikings, their first ever mobile game. It was instantly featured by Apple and Microsoft as one of the best new games, and are now launching on Android devices. Jørgen has worked with games for more than 20 years, including as the Product Director in Funcom (Age Of Conan, Anarchy Online, Dreamfall - IPO 2005) and as a Producer in Artplant (Battlestar Galactica Online). He has also been a games journalist, and worked with games retail and distribution. He co-founded the Norwegian Games producers association in 2003, and have since worked politically with games. Jørgen has three kids, and is passionate about traveling, snowboarding, music and photography.

Cross-platform games for Core gamers. Designing, launching and running a true gamer's game on all devices.

With the bold vision to re-unite gamers of all platforms with a highly challenging multiplayer game on the one hand, while offering easy approachability and short session times at the same time, Cliffhanger Productions created Ærena – Clash of Champions. With this competitive PvP game that attempts to enter the world of e-sports from both PC and Tablets, a lot of ideas and approaches had to be iterated. After months of paper prototyping, a mobile alpha on Android and an insightful Steam Early Access phase, Ærena has not ceased to be developed and iterated further towards its goal to become speed chess on steroids for the smart masses. This talk not only covers our insights about closing the gap between hardcore and casual and the Challenges of 2014’s crowded marketplaces, it also gives an outlook on how we plan to tackle some yet unresolved hurdles within the next months.

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Michael had taken the exemplary entry point into a gaming career by applying for job as a Tester at Cliffhanger-Productions. After half a year he answered the call to become a designer. Together with a small team of developers he is about to complete his biggest task yet: Create a tactical multiplayer cross-platform game from scratch. Before all that crazy gaming stuff Michael was working as a programmer after graduating from a polytechnic, which also makes him think he is competent enough to build his own robot.

“More than Word” –Tools for Storytellers

Writing a story for a game is way different from just writing a script, a novel or a piece. Where the latter are linear ways of telling a story, games are told in a non-linear way. That means that besides the usual and well-known narrative methods of words, dialogues, sounds and pictures we have to work with a fourth narrative method no other art form needs, knows about or is capable to create: gameplay. Different ends demand different means. Where the usual narrative methods might all be a nail that can be driven in by the same hammer, gameplay is a different thing to handle. Where Word might be good enough to write a story in linear fiction it clearly hits a wall when writing for a complex non-linear piece of art. This talk will discuss the process needed to write for a non-linear medium – and some of the not so obvious tools that can help the author on the way. Wolfgang Walk is an experienced game writer and game producer, thus combining two angles of the development process. The focus of his talk will be rather on the side of process than creativity, but he wants to emphasize, that lack of process will strangle any creativity down the road.

The talk reaches out to authors as well as everyone else in need to understand how it feels standing in the shoes of an author, namely producers and game designers. If you fall in any of these groups there’s no obvious upper limit of experience that would make this talk invalid for you. Audience members should get a deeper understanding about what it means to be an author of an interactive story, where the not so obvious problems lie – and which tools an author needs before he can deliver his best work.

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They pay me for my work in the games industry since 1995. Before that day I worked on hobby projects for like four years. 1995-2000 as an internal producer and author, 2001-2005 as an internal producer at Massive Development I have been a freelancing producer, author, director and designer for numerous clients ever since. 2006 I also started teaching in this fields at a number of universities all over Germany. In 20114 Michael Hengst and I founded the consulting firm “Grumpy Old Men”

Building Communities by building booths - A dialog between Kelly Wallick (Indie MEGABOOTH) and Oliver Eberlei (Indie Arena)

Indies are notoriously uncompetitive. In fact, Indies are known to lift each other up and open doors for one another to be able to survive the games industry. The Indie MEGABOOTH and the Indie Arena Booth are prime examples of small indies grouping together to make an impact in this blockbuster driven, AAA industry. The Overlord of the Indie MEGABOOTH - Kelly - and the architect of the Indie Arena Booth - Oliver - are sitting down to talk about the challenges and success stories of how these projects infiltrated PAX and gamescom.

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Kelly is the founder of Indie MEGABOOTH, a showcase that brings indie games into the heart of conferences previously dominated by AAA budgets and works to create support networks for small development teams. She’s involved in local community building along with creating cross community networks and acts as an advocate for indie developers with platform holders, distributors, publishers and press. The MEGABOOTH’s current focus is on expanding community support efforts and addressing discoverability issues for indie games.

Past and present: your lifetime chance!

The industry is in constant flux - one of the reasons it is the most fascinating to work in. In the past developing and selling a game was vastly different then today. In this talk the past and present is compared and shows with the difficulties of the past why the present is a chance of a lifetime for anyone who want to develop games - and sheds light on the fact that this window of opportunity is closing.

 

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Teut Weidemann has been working in the professional gaming Industry since 1987. He already started working with computer games as a hobbyist on Commodore Pet 2001 in 1981, selling his first creations on cassette tape in school. As a development director for Softgold and Rainbow Arts during the golden Home Computer age, he shipped over 40 titles on the now classic platforms. His career took him through consulting a Nobel prize winner and Microsoft Games in Seattle until he finally founded his own Development Studio Wings Simulations in 1996. For 10 years he has led the studio, and successfully sold it to a publisher. His milestones were being one of the first German developers with a world wide publishing contract and the products Panzer Elite and Söldner - Secret Wars. He also showed how successful community building can support an online product. In 2005 Teut was hired as CTO for the public listed CDV AG, one of the oldest German publishers, where he was in charge of development, marketing and technology. Since June 2007 Teut has been consulting various companies in their efforts entering the new gaming platform: the Internet. Sind 2011 he has been hired by Ubisoft/Bluebyte as an online game specialist after he has assisted Ubisoft in publishing the highly successful browsergame “Die Siedler Online”, which won the “Browsergame of the year 2011” award. Further he assisted Ubisoft in creating and publishing the online games Silent Hunter Online, Anno Online, Might & Magic Heroes Online, Panzer General Online and also was involved in the post launch monetizsation of Assassins Creed IV Black Flag.

A link to the past - How to benefit from classic game design

Technology is moving rapidly. From the large-scale computers that could barely do simple calculations in the 70s, to everybody having supercomputers of the size of a credit card in their pockets today. In this session we will see how classic games can be used to inspire and help create new game concepts and ideas. We're going to look at a few successful copies of classic games, and then I'll show you how to take advantage of these classics and discover a wealth of great ideas in places you might have never thought of.

 

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Martijn Wenting is a veteran game developer with more than 20 years of experience in creating video games. He got into programming at the age of 7 and, starting from the demoscene in the early 90's, has developed games for many classic systems and home computers such as the Commodore, MSX, Sinclair, Colecovision, Gameboy, Dreamcast and many more, under his Revival Studios label. Martijn currently runs a indie studio called Bitstorm Games making games for PC, Consoles and Mobile.

Gender (and Diversity) design in video games – “totally!” or “…not again…”?

The (mis-)representation of perceived gender norms have been a topic in games for the last couple of years. Even if some may think that the discussion is unnecessary, it is important to reach a dialog and find a way to mitigate the issues without necessarily losing the fun. Four seasoned industry representatives will tackle just this and talk about their perspectives, try to answer your questions from the audience and build some pointers to consider for your future game and character designs.

Look at your own biases and get some perspective on the current discussions as well as underlying real issues. Learn about how the topic influenced how other developers work and how they design their games with gender in mind.

Going Indie is a Marathon - Staying Motivated for the Long Run

Around 2008 the "golden age of indies" got kicked-off. Between then and today a lot of people have decided to strike out on their own and just make games. They left the traditional employed jobs at work-for-hire businesses behind and instead focussed on making "their own" games in their own teams under their own rules. The five panelists are part of that crowd - they've been "doing the indie thing" for between two and seven years. As of today, they're still working in their tiny studios on their (not so) tiny games. None of them made it to fame and riches yet. None of them gave up and got a save job in corporate land - even though there have been a lot of hard times for everybody: Times where they did not know how to pay the rent. Days where their biggest deals fell through. Weeks and months where there was no playable game that was any kind of fun. We want to explore the reasons for perseverance: What is it that makes you get up every morning - even when sometimes all the cards seem to be stacked against you? If you're a fellow indie, then your take-aways could be that you're not alone in your struggle. That everybody has bad times somedays. And that there are ways to cope with that fact. We'll show you some of ours. If you're not an indie (yet) then maybe this panel will inspire you to strike out on your own - or forever discourage you from even thinking about it.

That Jam we're in - a discussion on potentials and limits of Game Jams

Game Jams are all the rage nowadays. You can hardly call yourself a game developer if you don't have at least a dozen of them under your belt. There's even a documentary on the topic. They are everywhere. The four panelists all bring some experience on game jams with them, both as participants and organizers. Representing both the corporate and the indie side of things we will spend the hour critically discussing the format of Game Jams. If you are interested in looking beyond the hype to find out what game jams do well, and more importantly where they fall short, then come on by.

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Alexander Zacherl is a game designer and entrepreneur. He was once 100% sure that he was going to start a communication agency after graduation. So in grade 11 he decided to study Media Management — and he did. But then he started working in the industry and found out that it was actually less fun than he had imagined. So he pivoted and started an independent game development studio instead. Over the last four years he has both launched “Games of the Week” on the AppStore and co-created “Games that no one will ever play” during game jams and game-dev contests. He got side-tracked a lot during these times: By teaching game design at local universities. By giving talks at developer conferences. By running multiple game-development events (GameCamp, Global Game Jam, Game Design Dojo, Unity Usergroup, Game Audio Forum …). Right now he’s in the formative phase of his second games startup working on a way-too-ambitious “Player-versus-Player Sandbox Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing-Game”. And he’s serious about focusing on creating games instead of talking about the process. As you can see here, this didn’t work out very well …