Tracks

Click on the desired track to review the list of solicited topics:

• Business & Marketing
• Game Design
• Production
• Programming
• Visual Arts

Summits

Click on the desired summit to review the list of solicited topics:

• Independent Games Summit
• Social Games Summit
• Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit

• Community Management Summit
  

Criteria

Successful submissions will answer the following questions:

• What expertise and insight do you bring to this topic?
• How many shipped titles (products) you have produced, project-managed or directed? Over how many years?
• What is the largest team you've personally managed/directed?
• What is the largest development budget you have personally controlled?
• Are you sharing a current best practice or proposing a future solution?
• What professional training or experience have you received in project management?
• How many units did your best-selling game sell to consumers?
• Who would benefit most from your talk?
• What was the best-rated game you produced or directed?
• Do you personally manage content creators?
• What sort of visuals and examples will back up the ideas?
  

Business & Marketing

To succeed, game developers need both broad-ranging business knowledge about the industry and in-depth financial and management experience to apply to their current project.

Suggested Topics

• State of The Games Market:
  
  • 2010 Data and demographics
  • Trends 2011 ff. (AAA Games, Console Games, Casual Games)
  • 2011 and beyond Forecast
• The Future of AAA Games, Console Games, Casual Games
• Kinect; Move – developments and changes
• European studios doing AAA games
• Steam; Unreal, Infernal Engine, CryEngine, etc.
• Developer self-publishing business models: case studies, results
• Pitching developers dos and don’ts
• Pitching your company for work-for-hire projects
• Pitching your original-IP game
• Understanding the financial model; Advert gaming; Transmedia projects
• Cases from U.S. companies doing business with European companies – what works and what doesn’t (i.e. cultural issues)
• Free-to-play case studies about hard-core audiences in addition to social gaming and browser based gaming
• Case studies from companies that have made successful transition from console markets to social games (large companies to smaller studios)

Studio Positioning: in the increasingly competitive marketplace it is important for a studio to be seen as one of the top studios in its field and have a unique offering, but it is not always easy to find the right positioning for a studio to be successful. Case studies on how studios can work to properly define their value offering so that it resonates with the market are of interest.

(back to top)

Game Design

The goal of the game design track is to inspire, demystify, educate and reveal the most interesting and important aspects a leading designer will be faced with today and in the coming years.

Suggested Topics

A nuts and bolts breakdown of the compulsion and viral mechanics of a popular social networking game

• The ideal talk would use specific examples from one or two games to provide a taxonomy of the compulsion and viral mechanics that it takes for one of these games to be successful from a gameplay point of view. (We are not interested in the business model except as it affects the actual game design, nor are we interested in a "general overview" of these game mechanics).
• Rationale: People who never considered themselves gamers are flocking to social media games, and game designers are scrambling to understand the underlying mechanics that drive a game such as Farmville to have over 60 Million users.

XBLA and PSN: Designing Console Games for Downloadable Distribution

• Rationale: Designing for XBLA and PSN is not like designing for the 360 and PS3. The audiences are looking for something different, the games are smaller, the prices are lower and the schedules are shorter. How does a designer adapt to this specialized corner of the console business?
• The ideal talk will present hands-on examples of how a designer used different approaches, strategies etc. to produce a successful game for these downloadable console systems.

Designing for Gestural Interfaces: Unique Opportunities on Wii, Kinect and Move, 3DS

• Rationale: Designing games where players use their whole bodies to play is different than designing games where people use a hand controller. What can we learn from the best current games that will help us design great new games with these exciting interfaces?
• The ideal talk will present will present concrete examples of game mechanics and design aesthetics that work well with gestural interfaces.
• Rationale: Most consumers imagine that the Wii detects far more about their position and movement than the Wiimote actually captures. How does a designer take advantage of this new kind of "willing suspension of disbelief" to make the most immersive possible games?
• The ideal talk will present concrete examples of a designer's work, and what did and did not work when trying to create unique new games for the Wii.
• Creating games for 3DS

Design for the Bus Stop

• Rationale: The PSP, the DS and the iPhone have given us the ability to play games any time we have even a tiny window of free time. Flash and social media games bring the same short game sessions into the home or office. What kinds of game experiences are satisfying in 5-minutes of play?
• The ideal talk will demonstrate several short-gameplay-session games and explain the design principles that make them compelling.

Story construction in non-traditional games

• Rationale: Games are branching out in many different directions. Some categories like RPG's and action-adventure have always been based on story, but now we see more story development in less obvious categories.
• The ideal talk will present examples of story or narrative elements included in several categories new games, and will answer the question, "Is the story window-dressing or a core part of the game design? How does the story make this game even more fun to play?"

New gameplay mechanics from the indie scene

• Rationale: The return of small teams has caused an explosion of new gameplay mechanics on the indie front. What are the most interesting examples?
• The ideal talk will present four or five games in succession, playing each of them live, sufficiently to demonstrate an innovative gameplay mechanic

Open-ended game design

• Rationale: Traditional games come to an end. Social games and MMOs are designed to go on forever. How do you design an apparently-infinite succession of challenges?
• The ideal talk will examine how designers implement game features to retain players at the "high end" so they keep playing indefinitely.

Breaking into the Browser: Designing for Browser Based Games

• Rationale: The growth of browser-based games has been driven by instant gratification: with no waiting for a download players can have fun without delay and without the worries of installing something new on their machines. What challenges and opportunities do browser-based games offer?
• The ideal talk will present hands-on experiences from a designer who has shipped multiple products in this space, and will share personal lessons on what kinds of approaches work and what design strategies lead to dead ends.

Game prototyping tools and the Power of Iteration

• Rationale: Successful games go through several rapid cycles of prototyping and incremental design during pre-production. What tools can designers use to do this?
• The ideal talk will present several prototyping tools and demonstrate portions of them live to show off their benefits.
• Rationale: Ask the prominent designers in the history of games how they took a game from good to great, and one word will almost always appear in their answers: iteration. But with budget pressures, large teams and tight schedules how can designers get those iterative cycles to tune the gameplay of their titles?
• The ideal talk will present hands-on designer experiences with recent titles where their teams were successfully able to iterate on a design to produce a successful game.

Game Design as a Team Sport

• Rationale: Large console games have many designers, each working on a separate area of the game. Much smaller online games might have one designer in Singapore and another in London. How do the best teams make this kind of cooperation work to produce commendable designs instead of design by committee?
• The ideal talk will present concrete examples of multiple designer successfully creating and implementing innovative game designs in successful titles.

Standing Out from the Crowd: Designing iPhone Games that Stand Out

• Rationale: There are over 20,000 iPhone games in the App Store, but only a few make significant money. What kinds of designs make a game stand out in this crowded world?
• The ideal talk will present concrete examples of a designer's successful and unsuccessful approaches to iPhone game design.

Metrics in Serious Game design

• Rationale: One of the largest obstacles to the use of games for training is the lack of hard proof that they are more effective than traditional training methods.
• The ideal talk will present examples of serious games that have incorporated measurements of effectiveness (assessment) into the design of the game itself.

Educational Game Design

• Rationale: We know that games came be powerful tools in education, but the educational market actually generates less revenue than it did a generation ago. What do we need to do to bring back commercially successful large-scale educational games?
• The ideal talk will cite examples of educational games that are having commercial success in schools or at retail. If there are rules for the design of such games, what are they?

Game Design Basics – From Game Design Student to Professional Game Designer: What They Never Taught You in College or Grad School

• Rationale: More and more schools around the world, public, non-profit and for-profit, continue to teach game design, but employers continue to say, "When we hire them we still have lots of training to really make them professionals." Students need help just to get that first professional job, and knowing what else they need to learn "to turn pro" can help them get the best positions.
• The ideal talk will be presented by a hiring manager and/or an industry designer who majored in some aspect of game development and then entered the profession. The talk will cover the things that students typically have to learn in their first jobs in order to be valuable members of a game development team.
• Rationale: New people are coming into the field every year seeking careers in game design. They're game players, but have never designed a title. What do they need to know?
• The ideal talk will cover the basic rules of game design, including the fun/difficulty curve, balancing, feedback, handling the moment-to-moment experience, etc.

Game Design Basics – Making the Jump from AP for Testing to Design

• Rationale: Testers and AP's know a great deal about games, but sometimes don't have a clear vision of all the issues a designer has to think about when constructing levels or game mechanics.
• The ideal talk will be presented by someone who made this transition himself or herself. Rather than a personal story of how the speaker did it, we're looking for the perspectives on design issues that AP's and Testers may miss, but that Designers must master in order to successfully practice their craft.
• Adventure Game Market
• Designer talking about core game elements that are the same in the social space as in the console or pc games market
• Connected Gaming and Designing for Asynchronous Multiplayer: with the continued rise of an ever more platform agnostic gaming audience it is becoming more and more relevant to design games that can be experienced by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Game developers and publishers want to be able to reach players on as many devices and in as many locations as possible. Lectures on successful designs for connected gaming as well as well as asynchronous multiplayer which allow players on different platforms to contribute and enrich each other’s experience in a meaningful way are of interest.
• Game Design for Specific Target Groups.

(back to top)

Production

Suggested Topics

• Communication and knowledge distribution: Both within teams and between development teams and customers (end consumers or publishers)
• Agile for online
• Cross media gaming in a successful way
• Postmortems on AAA game titles, successes and failures
• User achievements data analysis
• Data analysis on XBLA/PSN/WiiWare
  • AAA going XBLA/PSN: a case study on this type of transition and how they have repurposed their production methodologies to work for this smaller format
• Case studies from companies that have made successful transition from console markets to social games (large companies to smaller studios)

(back to top)

Programming

Suggested Topics

Technology for social network games

• Rationale: Social Networks use entirely different technology than used in traditional PC and console game development. Developers face new challenges dealing with social network sites and managing their game databases. What kinds of approaches have proven to work and which haven’t?
• The ideal talk will give insight into situations where technology challenges in social networking games have been successfully overcome.
  • Interfacing with social networking portals
  • Database design and development pitfalls
  • Flash / Actionscript programming
  • MMOG technology post mortems
  • Metrics, key performance indicators

Technology for MMOGs

• Rationale: MMOGS require particularly robust technology and different development approaches on the technology side. Developers face persistent game worlds, deterministic game codes, client/server synchronization issues and many more challenging objectives.
• The ideal talk will give insight into experiences gained working with the following and related topics, and we are interested in both large subscription based games as well as casual free-to-play MMOs:
  • Robust network communication / Network security
  • Programming methodology and team discipline to maintain game/build stability
  • Client/Server synchronization
  • Server architecture, instancing
  • Scalability
  • Metrics, key performance indicators
  • Real time multiplayer technology
  • Content creation, pipeline and team collaboration tools
  • Major game updates, minor patches and content updates
• Additionally, we are also interested in lectures covering additional topics specific to browser based MMOs
  • Browser graphics programming
    • Flash 2D/3D
    • Java 2D/3D
    • Plugin based programming (e.g. Unity, WebVision, etc.)
  • User interface programming
  • Communications
  • 3D programming

Technology for Game Consoles / High-End PCs

• Rationale: The bar for graphical and animation quality, immersion, artificial intelligence, game controls and camera management increases every year. Developers are required to push their technology to the hardware limits in order to be competitive.
• The ideal talk will give insight into experiences gained working with the following and related topics:
  • High end graphics rendering approaches on PS3, Xbox360, PC (e.g. DX 11)
  • AI approaches for various game genres
  • Physics programming
  • Data management (incl. preparing for DLC), data streaming for large game environments
  • Content management, pipeline and team collaboration tools
  • Camera programming and design
  • Audio programming
• We are asking for a particular focus on animation systems for AAA games. Which strategies are used to successfully create believable player and AI animation, and which technology approaches drive successful systems.

Technology for digitally distributed console games

• Rationale: Digitally distributed console games are becoming a larger sector every year. Developers deal with smaller file sizes, downloadable content and different genres than in traditional boxed games.
• The ideal talk will cover topics such as data compression, challenges in rendering or gameplay programming for downloadable console games, programming and data architecture for DLC, or provide an overall technology post mortem of a successful game for Xbox Live, PSN or WiiWare.

Technology for iPhone, iPad, Android or similar handheld devices

• Rationale: Modern smartphones, particularly the iPhone, have proven to be significant contenders in the portable gaming sector.
• The ideal talk will cover topics such as iPhone development strategies, graphical rendering and art pipelines, gameplay programming (e.g. innovative accelerometer usage, multitouch), as well as connectivity (multiplayer, achievements, social networking, appstore pitfalls etc.)
•  Optimizing mobile games (i. e. battery life)

(back to top)

Visual Arts

Suggested Topics

Concept and Discovery:

• What methods did you use to convey the vision of your game to the rest of your team?
• What is your studio process for concept and discovery?
• How did you achieve a successful vision?
• Share your abandoned concepts and tell us why they were abandoned.

Show us your Best of:

• Modeling
• Animation and mocap
• Concept
• Lighting, particles, visual FX
• Optimization and shaders
• Rigging and skinning
• Cinematics
  

Prototyping:

• What were your tools for success?
• How did you capitalize on outsourcing to get ahead?
• How did you define your quality bar?
• How did art and programming collaborate to achieve the visual goal?
• How did you make your world compelling?
• What was so great about your process?
• How did your concept translate into a real game.
  

Production:

• How did you polish your game?
• How did you motivate your team during production?
• What is the future of production?
• How has film influenced your methods?
• What was your favorite middleware?
• How would you sabotage your competitors production?

How artists can surive the commoditization of the visual arts in games

(back to top)

Independent Games Summit

The Independent Games Summit represents the voice of the independent game developer. It features lectures and postmortems from some of the most notable independent game creators. The Independent Games Summit seeks to highlight the brightest and the best of indie development, with discussions ranging from game design philosophy, distribution, business, marketing, and much more.

• Indie Business - how to make money, manage teams, and run a company without going insane
• Promotion & Marketing - how to get noticed when the “Marketing Department” = you
• Design and Philosophy - deep dive into design techniques, for example: rapid prototyping, limitations, and the future of indie
• Case Studies and Postmortems - inspirational talks that demonstrate what worked, what didn't, what surprised you and made you wiser

(back to top)

Social Games Summit

The market for interactive entertainment on social web platforms has matured rapidly, and now the features and tropes of connected gaming are catching on across the gaming landscape -- encompassing Facebook gaming, web-based online games, downloadable persistent MMOs and beyond. New best practices are being discovered at a rapid pace, and we are seeing more high-quality entertainment experiences on social networks than ever before.
At the same time, the business landscape is shifting, and questions are buzzing in everyone’s mind: what is the fate of Facebook-dependent shops? What does mobile mean to social gaming? Is there any life left in the old virtual world model? Do you have to go international to be successful? And are we back to “the old boss” of large marketing budgets and big IPs being necessary for success? The Social Games Summit gathers the industry’s established leaders and up-and-coming rebels for a series of illuminating sessions about the technology, design, business, marketing, and future of social games.

Topics of interest:

• Cross platform experiences
• Facebook Applications vs Connect vs Open Graph
• Game as a Service Strategies
• Beyond the single player "social" game: async game mechanics that work
• Multiplayer game success stories
• How to squeeze as much as possible from Flash
• Egalitarian Microtransactions in emerging markets
• Best practices in a/b testing, and how to do it, such as cohort sizes, how many splits, how to handle merges, when to roll out, etc
• Best practices in metrics, phoning home, error logs, how to do statistical analysis
• Culture sift in social games towards gaming biz
• Brands onto Facebook, how do they help or not, and what comes next
• Geolocation, and other such trends in async social games
• Every time there's a new platform there's a redefinition of 'rules' and a reset of complexity. When, how and what will it take for quality to catch up?
• Is there a market for real social gameplay, or is the practice of 16-dialogs-per-second the peak of optimal design for the mass market?
• What will the future hold for social games?

(back to top)

Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit

The Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit brings together top game developers to share ideas, introduce best practices and discuss the future of gaming on established and emerging smartphone platforms, including iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry and more. This program will highlight the nuts and bolts of great game design and reveal successful business strategies behind this new breed of popular smartphones.

Marketing:

• Tips on how to get your app noticed
• Guerilla marketing for indies-innovative approaches to reach wider audiences and present data to back up your research

Best Business Models:

• Is Free to Play the future? (Downloads vs Ads vs IAP)
• Reversing the Race to the Bottom-Is it possible for developers to fight against the downward pricing trajectory on open volume platforms like the App Store?
• Creating a sustainable phenomenon on the iPhone-Fresh ideas that go beyond "do frequent updates” with supportive data that demonstrates what brought people back to their game over time.

Role of Publishers:

• Self Publish vs Using Publishers

Connected Games on Smartphones:

• Social Games, MMOs, etc
• Future of Social Networks

Design /Art /Production:

• Effective design techniques, common gestures and inputs, non-intrusive on-screen UI, example cases for well-done, innovative touch controls
• Designing for a 3.5" screen
• Designing for multi-touch
• Unique design perspectives
• Lightweight Social Mechanics to Connect Players - how one designs simple systems to leverage existing technologies
• Stronger Art Direction For Faster Production - how simplifying and focusing your artistic vision can result in more efficient production AND help you stand out from the crowd.

Technology:

• Effective Profiling for the iOS
• Hardcore 3D on the iPhone
• How to Use Free Technology to Get Ahead
• Porting from iPhone to Android

(back to top)

Community Management Summit

The games market is steadily growing and it becomes more and more difficult to attract interest for a new studio or title, especially when dealing with a small budget. The Community Management Summit will deal with some of the major drivers of attention and fandom for your games, including official forums, the use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, the importance of facilitating information exchange between developers and fans, contest, fan rewards, and even physical events involving your game community.

Suggested topics:

• What are the legal facts? How to handle it? Copyright issues, EULAs, bans, item selling, free shards, internet liability or freedom of speech
• Community Management at a global level working with different target groups
• How to handle with different communities (i. e. cultural aspects, time zone difference)
• Psychology in Community Management
• Explore how experience in Community Management can be applied to other areas within the games / Global Brand industry
• How to generate market data and with community management tools (Leads to get the most out of social media)
• Mass Driving: from Moderation to Management
• Community Management as the center of Communication- and Brand Management (SEO, SEA)
• To make interfacing community management und marketing

(back to top)