How DON’T NOD DNA infuses game creation and company culture.

Moderated by Madina Diabate

“Would you like to help us create a new French video game term… live? The Lexique ludique project, led by the Guild and Affordance Studio, aims to update the French video game terminology. In this presentation, you will learn how a certified terminologist works with our working committee of industry employees and managers as well as members of the general public to propose and revise terminology records. You will also learn how you can participate in this project on the Lexicon of Fun site by voting for the records you like and those you find need revision.”

A presentation of the ways teams can successfully collaborate over timezones with leading studios to create AAA video games.

Too often, certification matters are left to the last minute in game development. This increases risk, team stress, and impacts the developers’ ability to focus on the magical last bit of polish that makes a good game great. We’ll go over how injecting certification awareness and compliance throughout the whole development cycle reduces that effect, as well as when and how to mobilize and leverage QA teams for increased quality. Presented by Deanne Curtis, Quality Assurance Manager at PTW Montreal

Serving as the Chief Technology Officer of D-BOX Technologies for more than 12 years and recently appointed Chairman of the Board and President of the Haptics Industry Forum, Robert Desautels is an industry leader and an accomplished executive with decades of experience in the innovative technology sector. His experience at D-BOX and at other prestigious corporations such as Apple Canada, Quebecor and Transcontinental has given him a vast understanding of how haptics can be used to immerse users, of how to use different types of haptic feedback and has allowed him to help shape the future of haptic technology overall.

Learn more about game development and the work of the team at Beenox on the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

The Latin American chapter of the Games for Change global initiative is celebrating its tenth annual Festival in 2022 with new marketing, networking and pitching opportunities that will expand opportunities for Canadian devs, publishers and researchers. Meet the G4C Latam President, Gilson Schwartz and get ready to expand your products and services reach into one of the leading game markets of the developing world.

“This talk will explore the technical challenges that Alderon Games and its service provider Edgegap faced during the launch of Path of Titans. The ambitious MMO sees up to 200 players take on the role of dinosaurs who must survive and compete with other players for resources and territory.
As with any online game, one of the main challenges was delivering a smooth player experience at launch. Alderon along with Edgegap had to develop a system robust enough to deal with 200 players in every instance while remaining as cost-efficient as possible. “

Open World games production

For players and developers alike, Open World games are known for providing an emotional journey, with plenty to discover and multiple challenges to overcome. Join Phil as he describes how harmony is an essential component in creating an open world game that players will love to explore, and developers will remember as a great experience. Learn key lessons about how to manage the world building process and the game’s systems to create a unique experience for players.

Key Takeways: Open World games creation process, team organization and management tools.

Philippe Fournier

Philippe Fournier is TiMi Montréal’s Lead Producer, where he is responsible for the creation of a new AAA, open world franchise within TiMi’s latest development studio. He has more than 15 years of experience in video game development and produced multiple Far Cry titles at Ubisoft Montréal. Philippe comes from an engineering background and now focuses on managing creative teams and products. Philippe believes in creating memorable experiences for players and developers alike.

This fireside discussion delves into the creative process of acclaimed Subnautica director, Charlie Cleveland of Unknown Worlds. Having just launched their follow-up game, Moonbreaker, the discussion will delve into such wide-ranging topics as effective prototyping, design thinking and iteration, collaborating with creatives from other sectors, world building, and the challenges of designing in a context of live-service games. Come ready to ask your own challenge design questions!

Many of the building blocks of effective creative teamwork are perceived as industry buzzwords: empowerment, diversity, inclusion, trust, confidence, originality, flexibility, agility etc. The talk looks into how to give these notions true meaning and how, when truly understood and skillfully balanced, they can converge into a force-multiplying current.

The Metaverse 

Ubisoft, Atari, Square Enix but also Snoop Dogg, Adidas, Steve Aoki — these are just some of the 400 major brands who have entered The Sandbox open metaverse gaming platform, but what are they doing there more precisely? Sebastien Borget, Co-Founder and COO of The Sandbox will share his definition of the metaverse and how the company he co-founded has evolved over 10 years from a user-generated content mobile game into a decentralized gaming virtual world. He will be covering in his keynote a presentation of What is the open Metaverse, who are the brands and community already present, what sort of games and experiences can be found there already? What makes virtual lands valuable? What are some of the new opportunities for creators, gamers and game companies in the Metaverse? How to get started and participate into this new wave of innovation?

What have we learned about accessibility in games in the last couple of years? And how can we utilize those learnings to be better at including players in this new generation of games? Hear the perspectives of developers and a consultant as they share experiences and lessons that made them grow as accessibility-conscious professionals in the games industry. 

The gaming industry is more competitive than ever, and with many avenues, new and old, to help discoverability – a game trailer remains one of the most efficient ways to communicate your game quickly and concisely. This talk will help you get a
good overall view of the trailer making process, from the dev tools needed,  budgeting, capture and editing process.

The WB Games Montreal’s Gotham Knights team will discuss how they were able to create an original story shaking the status quo and adapting DC famous characters Batgirl, Nightwing Red Hood and Robin in new ways while still being true to the rich mythology of the Batman Universe and its comics. They will dive in their creative process in doing so as well as the challenges that come with transposing already existing characters and story arcs to a different medium.

Diversity, Data-collection, Equity Programs, Funding

In 2021, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) launched an Equity & Inclusion strategy with the purpose of encouraging the entire media industry to be more diverse and inclusive. As part of this strategy, a data collection system called Persona-ID was put in place to track how different groups, including sovereignty and equity-seeking communities, are faring in terms of representation and funding. Today, more and more applicants and their key personnel are self-identifying through this system. So, what are the numbers tell us so far about diversity in the interactive and gaming industry?

Key Takeways:

Overview of the CMF’s Equity & Inclusion Strategy
The objectives and use of Persona-ID
Equity incentives in the CMF’s Experimental Stream programs
Preliminary results of CMF’s data collection

Coffee provided by : Beenox, Behavior, Ludia, Invoke

Coffee provided by : Beenox, Behavior, Ludia, Invoke

External Development Managers are often misunderstood because they do not share the same challenges as their teammates. Very few game companies have Job Matrix that fully comprehends what they contribute and provides the proper track for growth within the company. External Development Managers have a manager they report to but not all have good mentors to guide them in their journey. As result, many managers feel undervalued and underappreciated within their workplace.

In this panel, we will discuss ways to create a more nurturing environment for existing External Development Managers at work. We will also dive into things we can do to bring up the next generation as well as identify potential managers within this industry.

Moderated by Yasmin Regis

We will review the current state of AR technologies for mobile games (eg, AR Foundation, Qualcomm’s Vuforia, Niantic Lightship) along with our own solution for rendering both near and far AR content. Interestingly, there are not many solutions that support bringing AR into the skies around us, and we’ll discuss the affordances of this technique for gameplay and world-building. We’ll touch on the use of maps in conjunction with AR and explain how our sky occlusion system works, as well as the narrative and game design tricks to mitigate edge cases in AR tracking.

Tiktok has become a key tool for game marketing and reaching new audiences. High-performing Tiktok videos have been shown to have a direct connection with an increase in wishlists, followers, and sales. Both indie and AAA games have found their success on Tiktok to eclipse other forms of social media such as Twitter and Instagram. This presentation will outline how to get started with marketing your game on Tiktok and some tips and tricks to develop your brand’s identity on the platform. I will also provide examples of Kitfox’s Tiktok successes and challenges.

A nostalgic look back at the last ten years of LiveOps in mobile games, this talk seeks to draw on Alex’s learnings of starting and scaling multiple LiveOps teams for top-grossing games. This talk will cover subjects such as how to prove LiveOps in a cost-effective way, tooling requirements, various team structures, working cross-functionally, and how to build a strong calendar of events for long-term game health. LiveOps is traditionally the vanguard of your development team, always at the forefront of fighting metric decline and pushing for growth. After this talk, the goal is that you’re better equipped to capitalize on these opportunities for your studio.

Throughout TUNIC’s development, the game’s actual content had been kept secret because TUNIC deals in secrets. This meant that both players and journalists were talking about Tunic in ways that were not accurate to the final game. In this talk, Rebekah will identify early marketing plans and initiatives and then identify how and why the team pivoted to fill in the blanks missing to bridge that gap between what outsiders thought of TUNIC versus what TUNIC actually was. This will include a breakdown of the last 15 months of marketing plans and a discussion of both the plan and the problems the plan was meant to address.

A candid talk with Gotham Knights’ Geoff Ellenor (game director) and Alexis Harvey (accessibility game designer) about their shared experiences as autistic individuals in the game industry. Forget everything you think you know about autism and learn the true power of neurodiversity recounted from firsthand experience.

Lockdown halted film production and meant building a sound studio in my garage then body doubling for foreign actors. It also meant an opportunity to write the world’s first guide to “Performing for Motion Capture” with co-teacher and long-time collaborator, director John Dower. Originally conceived as an actor’s “Handbook”, it became clear that a true guide required voices from experts working at every stage in the pipeline. This talk is a celebration of how, although Mocap Acting demands more of an actor than any other medium, creation is truly cross-discipline. Share the Oscar.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) aiming to build machines that understand text and spoken words as humans can. NLP can assist the work of multiple professionals: community managers, programmers, data scientists, and many more. While NLP has been a research topic for many years, the game industry has only recently started tapping into it, creating a set of tools to work faster and understand better both players’ and their needs. During this conference, we will discover NLP and some of its uses in the industry.

Building a game economy is a delicate balance of moving parts, and balancing it is even a greater task. But for a web3 game projects, it’s not even a Copy paste task but a whole different ballgame with terminology and elements which are foreign for Web2 game designers: Tokens, Staking, Scholarship, drops, NFTs, Utility, and others.

In our talk we would go on a journey to the depths of game economy blocks for Web3 projects and learn the terminology but also the craft of building a basic economy to minimize the risks.

Given the proliferation of consoles, streaming services, digital stores, and devices, getting your game onto as many of those platforms as possible is now more important than ever. This talk is designed to help familiarise people across all game development disciplines with useful techniques and hints for them to prepare their games, ideally early on in the development cycle, for easier, faster, and more cost-efficient platform portability.

The man, the myth, the legend. This session will be a fireside chat with an actual living, breathing angel investor. His name is Eden Chen. Finding early-stage funding for your studio is often one of the trickiest times to raise capital. Often, it is recommended to pitch to angels, but no one has ever seen an angel or knows an angel! Most game developers are unsure if game angels even really exist. By day, Eden is the CEO of Pragma and by night, he is an active angel investor and advisor, having made nearly 60 (!) investments into early-stage companies. This session will explore how angels operate, what they look for, what motivates them to invest, and critically, what gets them to pull out their checkbook.

Moderated by Jason Della Rocca

Publishing options are now more diverse than ever for indie studios. While traditional publishers are always relevant, self-publishing and publishing services are also healthy options, each having different implications relative to funding, marketing, and studio growth. In this panel, self-publishing veterans from Kitfox, Thunder Lotus, and Clever Plays will debate the advantages and disadvantages of their choices. Discussed topics include: How to make the decision to self-publish, what part of the process to outsource, what are the critical mistakes to avoid, and how to budget for self-publishing?

Moderated by: Jason Della Rocca