Search Results
- Speaker:Grzegorz Wątroba (Soft Crunch Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Speaker shares an example-driven leadership toolset for leads, producers, and studio heads managing the uniquely diverse teams of game development, drawing on sixteen years and more than twenty shipped projects. He argues that leadership is service rather than authority, and shows how a servant-leadership posture raises both performance and happiness. He covers the essential qualities of an effective leader, how to introduce change by starting with why and moving gradually, and why team building is an infinite game with no finish line. He introduces antifragility (building teams that grow stronger from challenges through blameless retrospectives, knowledge overlap, and a barbell strategy) and completion urgency, where "almost done is not done." Throughout, he draws on real situations from his own career as both leader and team member, offering practical techniques attendees can apply immediately. - Speaker:Lauranne Cauduro (The Game Bakers)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: MarketingAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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In this session, Lauranne will go through the successes and challenges of Cairn's marketing campaign, and highlight how the team planned, executed and measured each marketing beat to achieve their wishlist and visibility goals.
It will cover the tools they built for planning & tracking, how they invested their marketing budget, and key learnings from the demo & full launches. - Speaker:Thomas Reisenegger (Future Friends Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Marketing, Independent DevelopmentAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Two developers. Twelve months of development. Five million players. This session presents the publishing and marketing postmortem of CloverPit. The session walks through the complete campaig, from discovering the game with only 20 retweets to reaching 1.6 million Steam sales, millions of Game Pass players and hundreds of thousands of mobile sales, all with approximately $20,000 of direct marketing spend. Using real metrics, insights into very carefully planned campaign assets and also an post-launch analysis, the talk explores Steam page optimisation, demos, influencer strategy, organic social media, showcases , launch timing, and reacting to unexpected events such as the Hollow Knight: Silksong release announcement that let to a last mintue game delay while being on a train back from a conference lol. The talk shows an honest look of what worked what didn't and explains the decision making behind all the marketing and publishing moves around the game. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Audio, ProgrammingAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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In Gears of War: E-Day, every footstep tells a story. From distant gunfire echoing through broken streets to rubble shifting under your boots, we wanted the world to sound as detailed and reactive as it looks. Our goal was to build the most ambitious environmental audio detail The Coalition has ever attempted, where every space and tiny interaction helps make the world feel immersive. We also needed to do it at scale without compromising frame rate or memory budgets. This session breaks down the two core systems that made that possible. The first is our high-density procedural ambience solution; the second is our voxel-based material response override system. - Speaker:Yoshihiko Wada (Capcom Co., Ltd.)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Audio, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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For over two decades, Capcom has pushed the boundaries of cinematic survival horror, balancing world-class in-house audio infrastructure with strategic Hollywood co-production. Yet in an era defined by shifting economic realities and ubiquitous commercial sound libraries that risk homogenizing modern soundscapes, how do AAA studios justify—and successfully execute—international collaboration?
In this session, Yoshihiko Wada, Senior Sound Designer and Audio Lead at Capcom, pulls back the curtain on twenty years of cross-cultural co-production across the Resident Evil franchise, culminating in Resident Evil Requiem. Moving beyond a typical "victory lap," Wada candidly examines frontline trials—from the original RE4 CRT monitor disconnect to overcoming team-wide "temp-love." Featuring behind-the-scenes footage and candid reflections from veteran Hollywood sound partners, this session demonstrates why individual artisan DNA matters far more than corporate studio logos. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Audio, Independent DevelopmentAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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After the success with the music for Metal: Hellsinger, a new challenge approaches: A fully interactive score, recorded with a live orchestra, but this time, instead of metal music, a whimsically soft soundtrack for the game Witchspire, a game that reminded us of the magical lands of Studio Ghibli and Disney.
From soaring through the skies on a broom to epic battles with your wand, the score will follow you every step of the way!
Come to a talk on Interactive music done with a live orchestra by Two Feathers (Elvira Björkman, Nicklas Hjertberg), the multi-award-winning composer duo behind music from games like Metal: Hellsinger, Aragami, League of Legends, Vermintide 2, Hammerwatch, and Angry Birds 2.
They will touch upon preparing scores, approaches before and during recordings for an interactive score that doesn't rely on layering sessions, as well as showcasing some of the in-engine magic. - Speaker:Noor Amin (Riot Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: CareerAudience Level: AllFormat: Microtalks
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How does a marginalized game developer not only survive, but thrive? In this session, senior game designer Noor Amin examines the gap between common career advice and the realities faced by ambitious developers from underrepresented backgrounds. Drawing on her own journey—from studying neuroscience to joining Riot Games as an associate to becoming the youngest senior game designer at the company—she shares practical strategies for building credibility, finding mentors without existing networks, navigating early career growth, and transitioning into leadership. Noor offers an honest look at ambition and marginalization within the games industry alongside candid reflections on the obstacles she encountered. Attendees will leave with greater awareness of the challenges faced by marginalized game developers in the workplace and actionable advice for taking greater ownership of their careers. - Speaker:Amanda Farough (Causeway Studios)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Career, Independent DevelopmentAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Game development has traditionally been a specialist's dream — find your discipline, grow within it, climb the ranks, be the best. But as the number of those jobs shrink, we need to explore new avenues of our careers. We must not only grow within our core disciplines, but deepen our understanding across each of them. Amanda Farough's career in games has spanned nearly two decades, weaving together a tapestry of threads pulled from journalism, business, production, programming, narrative, and design — the foundation of a Multiclassing game development career. It's time to embrace a career of "and" instead of "or." - Speaker:Rory McGuire (Blackbird Interactive)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Business StrategyAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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For over a decade, Blackbird Interactive (Starfield: Free Lanes & Terran Armada, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Escape the Backrooms, Minecraft Legends) followed a tried-and-true strategy of using full-game external development to fund its own original IP. But when the post-COVID bust hit and that funding evaporated, BBI was forced to adapt that model to work for co-development.
BBI's president and CCO, Rory McGuire, explores how BBI built a co-development lifeline in a storm of cancelled projects and layoffs. He details the organizational restructuring necessary to make co-dev work, the precious stability it created, and how the studio is continuing to identify and defend against unexpected silent killers of a hybrid studio like fragmenting culture, eroding institutional knowledge, and the strain of juggling a dozen separate projects with their own needs and challenges. - Speaker:Cisco Maldonado (Midwest Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Business Strategy, MarketingAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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At month two, it's a question. At month eighteen, it's a problem
Studios often wait until there is a game to market before asking the publishing questions that determine whether the game can work commercially.
Cisco Maldonado shows how teams can surface commercial uncertainty earlier before creative, financial, and organizational decisions become expensive to change.
Using five practical questions addressing the market, the business, and the evidence, Cisco will teach teams how to critically examine who the game is really for, why players will choose it in a crowded marketplace, what must be true commercially about their project, what is facts are known versus assumed, and how a team can/should change if those assumptions are wrong.
The session reframes publishing as more than late-stage marketing. Whether the function is owned internally or supported by an external publishing partner, someone needs to own these questions alongside development. - Speaker:Florian Jensen (Ubisoft Düsseldorf)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Audio, DesignAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Anno 117: Pax Romana is a city builder in the Roman setting where the player frames a trade empire with archipelago metropoles starting from a single branch office. It is exemplary for the acoustic challenges you face in the Empire Builder genre; Listener Position, Zoom Detail, Sandbox Clustering.
With the use of Wwise from Audiokinetic, and custom tools for the proprietary Empire Engine, we were able to solve these challenges and achieve a smooth Audio Experience for three unique starting regions, hundreds of building variants, sea and land units, plus user interface feedback breathing new life into the growing cities of the Players to enjoy for hours.
Learn from the Genre Primus how to build and scale the audio to cater for an empire builder. Be inspired by the approach and execution of the Anno 117: Pax Romana Audio Production. - Speaker:Gina Hope (Riot Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Luminaries Speaker SeriesFormat: Lecture
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Having great skills is no guarantee you will get ahead. You may not get a chance to make your case. You may need to navigate the unknown without a playbook. The most rewarding challenges may be the ones no one asked you to take on. Gina Hope shares what she's learned about overcoming all these challenges and more.
Gina is the Head of Technology for Teamfight Tactics at Riot Games. Gina's path to that position, from studying sociology to putting family first, was far from conventional. From learning hard leadership lessons firsthand at Activision, to taking on a live-game engine migration six weeks into her new role at Riot Games, Gina knows the benefits and risks of charging into new challenges without a roadmap.
Along the winding path to respected leadership, Gina discovered strong technical skills do not necessarily translate to recognition and doing the right thing does not guarantee success. The people around you can matter as much or more than the work itself.
This candid Luminaries session delves into the experiences that have shaped her career and leadership philosophy. Gina shares her thoughts of success, ambition, compassion and leadership, exploring how to earn influence, navigate setbacks and embrace uncertainty to build the team culture she wishes she had earlier in her career.
Attendees learn how the best leaders lean into their humanity to inspire great results from their teams. - Speaker:Garry Schyman (Garry Schyman Productions)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Audio, Business StrategyAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Independent game composers rarely build sustainable careers from commissioning fees alone. This presentation offers a practical overview of the royalties and ancillary revenue streams that may be available to composers, including frequently overlooked domestic and international sources.
Attendees will learn how performance royalties are beginning to play a larger role in game music, what determines whether a composer can participate in these and other income streams, and how contracts, registrations, territories, platforms, and music usage can affect payment.
Drawing on my experience teaching at USC, leading the Music Rights Committee of the Society of Composers & Lyricists, and collecting royalties throughout my own career, I will translate a complex system into an actionable framework. Composers will leave better equipped to identify potential revenue, ask informed questions during contract negotiations, and develop the multiple income streams necessary for a sustainable full-time career. - Speaker:Books Schwartz (Microfun)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Narrative & Performance, DesignAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Casual mobile games like Gossip Harbor, Gardenscapes, and Matchington Mansion continually dominate the revenue charts. The secret sauce that distinguishes them from other casual titles? Great storytelling that delights players and keeps them hooked for years. Mobile games have historically been overlooked by the rest of the industry, but while the console and PC sections of the industry struggle, mobile is going strong and still growing. Come hear the secrets of how to design and write compelling stories for casual games from someone who's worked on some of the world's biggest titles. Learn about what makes writing for casual games unique, how to structure live stories that can run for years, and common mistakes to avoid at every step of the process. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Design, Visual ArtAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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In this session, Grayson Scantlebury (Lead Designer) and Zach Bohn (Principal UI Technical Designer) will provide a deep look into the iterative development of the core of our 'Strategic gameplay' within Star Wars: Zero Company, the Holotable.
This talk will showcase early design concepts, Figma Wireframes, and in-game prototypes for the three design pivots that shaped the Holotable experience. We'll discuss how in-game time (Cycles) behaved and led to the core player loop between tactical and strategy, the original design behind the galaxy spanning Influence system and how by cutting it new more refined systems arose and finally how Operations evolved over the course of ZCOM's development. - Speakers:Becky Allen (Halo Studios, Microsoft), Karina Pardus (GameSoundCon, Game Audio Network Guild, Music Creators Academy)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Audio, Culture & SustainabilityAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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Mentorship is one of the clearest ways into this industry, but almost nobody writes down what a good mentorship relationship actually looks like. What are fair communication boundaries? What happens when a mentee doesn't feel safe, and the only person to go to address that fact is the mentor? This session brings mentors, mentees, and program leads together to build real, adoptable answers, creating practices that work whether you're running a formal studio program or just mentoring one person in your own time. Come ready to share what's worked, what hasn't, and help shape standards that protect everyone on their path to a sustainable career in game audio development. - Speaker:Bronislav Sviglo (Wargaming)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Business Hall Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: ProgrammingAudience Level: AdvancedFormat: Lecture
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This session shows how Wargaming built its new engine from scratch. World of Tanks: HEAT is the pilot project — it shipped day-one on PC, Steam Deck, PlayStation 5 (including PS5 Pro), and Xbox Series X|S, and the same engine will power the company's future titles. The session walks through the engine's three pillars: what each one gave the team, and what it cost. First, a small core: everything else, including the game itself, is a plugin. One codebase covers client, editor, and dedicated server; gameplay is modern C++, no scripting. Second, ECS is the skeleton of the whole engine: 1000+ systems, from physics to UI, run in one auto-parallel frame graph. There is no classic render thread: rendering is ECS too. Third, the editor is the king: part of the core, fully WYSIWYG, built on ECS and ImGui, extended by plugins. Every edit goes through one universal command system, with a whole set of features built on top of it. - Speaker:Nikita Bychkov (Wargaming)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Business Hall Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: MarketingAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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CRM marketing — segmented messaging, predictive churn intervention, lifecycle-triggered win-back — is a mobile free-to-play staple that rarely appears in PC and console live-service games. This session presents a case study from World of Warships, where Wargaming's marketing communications team runs CRM-style retention and reactivation campaigns reaching millions of players across Europe, North America, and Asia. The speaker breaks down three working pillars: measuring CRM-attributable reactivation, which drives a 5-7% lift over organic return — translating into tens of thousands of activated players and a meaningful improvement in marketing ROI; a data-based pre-churn model that has produced up to a 4.1 percentage-point retention lift in its best-performing player segments; and audience segmentation as the primary driver of message performance. The talk closes with what it takes to run this function day to day. - Speaker:Atsushi Ueno (Lasengle Inc.)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Production & Team Leadership, ProgrammingAudience Level: AdvancedFormat: Lecture
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This session walks through the decisions often required of the operation team of a live service game title. Drawing from the experience of the decade-long operation of Fate/Grand Order, the presentation details what the team abandoned and what it gained across three instances: engine and infrastructure updates, device support, and anti-datamining measures for shipped assets. These three retreat decisions reveal the exact same underlying question: "how much do we make the player pay?" The session highlights how retreating breeds new judgment calls, and shares the design principles for the guardrails the team placed to manage new judgment calls. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Career, Narrative & PerformanceAudience Level: Entry-LevelFormat: Lecture
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Breaking in is only half the battle. Once you're in, where do you go from here? How do you keep yourself from getting stuck in a junior role with no idea how to move up and pursue your long-term goals? In this session, narrative designers Luca Azenaro-Acero and Zoe Calamar discuss actionable strategies for breaking out of junior jail, covering both the skills that mid-level talent should have and how to demonstrate those skills to your lead. Though this lecture is coming from the perspective of two writers, much of the advice given is applicable to any discipline, giving junior talent from all across the industry a crash-course in getting that first big promotion. - Speaker:Aaron Price (Owlchemy Labs)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Five years ago, if a producer needed an internal tool, we filed a ticket and waited our turn. Now we just build it. Last spring, five Owlchemy producers spent a month using agentic coding to ship nearly a dozen tools that wire Slack, Jira, Notion, Miro, and more together, and got back dozens of people-hours every month. This talk is the full confession: what we built, where we failed (and learned), and the playbook we wish someone had handed us on day one. - Speaker:Kristie Fisher (Sony Interactive Entertainment)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Career, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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Having a new game idea or seeing organizational opportunities at your studio that no one else sees is a superpower.
However, that superpower is wasted if you can't build support for your vision and drive it into reality. How to do that is a key element of leadership that no one teaches you, especially in the games industry where formal leadership & management training are often lacking as you progress in your career.
Building from my popular 2025 GDC Talk Three Mindset Shifts to Lead World-Class Teams, this talk will provide practical guidance for driving change at your organization, whether related to creative direction, business strategy, policy, culture, or process. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Audio, Visual ArtAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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For twenty years, identical twins Nick and Nate LaMartina have followed remarkably different but parallel paths through game development. One as a sound designer, building interactive audio systems with Wwise and C# in Unity, and the other an artist, crafting shaders and rendering technology in HLSL and Blueprints in Unreal. Along the way, they discovered something unexpected, that despite working in different disciplines, they kept solving the same problems with the same underlying ideas.
This session explores the shared mental models behind audio and graphics and the systems of thinking that drive modern game development. Through personal stories, technical demonstrations, and side-by-side comparisons, it will be shown how exploring beyond one's own discipline makes us better creators, engineers, and collaborators. Whether you're an artist, designer, programmer, or audio professional, you'll leave with a new perspective on creative problem solving, and why the most valuable ideas often exist beyond the boundaries of your job title. - Speaker:Drew Vande Guchte (Riot Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Business Strategy, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: Entry-LevelFormat: Lecture
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Did a new battle pass actually improve long-term retention? Does a new game mode create incremental engagement or simply cannibalize other parts of the game? When A/B testing isn't possible, game teams increasingly turn to non-experimental causal inference—but methods like Propensity Score Matching and Double Machine Learning can often feel like statistical black boxes. This session pulls back the curtain on these techniques through intuitive live-service game examples, building conceptual mental models without requiring advanced mathematics. Product managers, designers, and analysts will gain a shared understanding of how these methods work, where they work best, and how to evaluate causal claims through assumptions, limitations, and validation. Attendees across product and analytics will leave with practical frameworks for selecting and interpreting causal methods, understanding their tradeoffs, asking better questions, and collaborating more effectively to make stronger product decisions. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Audio, DesignAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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In Arena Breakout: Infinite, sound does not simply support combat; it helps define the tactical game. Every action produces information. Moving, reloading, searching, healing, and firing can reveal a player's position, while equipment, timing, environment, and deliberate noise can change who hears what and when. This session examines how the audio team builds that exchange of information into a playable system. It covers the relationship between listening and exposure, tactical headsets as equipment that changes information access, gunfire as a tool for reading engagements across the map, and ambience, masking, and sound traps as ways to conceal or manipulate player activity. Using shipped examples and live listening comparisons, the talk shows how audio drives positioning, equipment choices, risk assessment, deception, and the moment-to-moment contest for information that sits at the heart of every raid. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Business Strategy, Culture & SustainabilityAudience Level: AllFormat: Workshop
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The game industry is an engine of economic opportunity. Success can come from anywhere! Governments around the world are eager to encourage the creation of game-related jobs, businesses and IP. This workshop will explore how governments, economic development agencies, and industry associations can work together to support the growth of their local industry and set investment policies and strategies that make a true, lasting impact.
The workshop will be conducted in a hands-on format, with a focus on interactive group sessions to maximize knowledge sharing and exchange between participants. Specific granular topics will be proposed and prioritized as part of the workshop format, determined by the most pressing needs of those in the room… from how best to nurture talent pipelines to incubating new startups, from investment and tax credit regimes to migration policies and FDI, and so on. All will be rooted in data-driven analysis of what actually leads to studio success. - Speaker:Emmett Nahil (Perfect Garbage Studios)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Narrative & Performance, DesignAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Fear is a universal experience, but finding fun in fear through horror gaming isn't always so universal. How did murder-mystery farming simulator Grave Seasons incorporate horrific, supernatural, serial killers into a genre seemingly solely prepared for coziness and predictability? In this talk, learn how Narrative Director Emmett Nahil eased audiences into the deep emotional core implicit to horror stories, and, through thematic depth and detail, brought a wide cast of characters to life in an often intimidating genre. Dig into how Perfect Garbage Studios analyzed their own fears and horror preferences to create the core themes for each supernatural killer, how they analyzed their audience's underserved investment in darker themes, and how they implemented empathy to drive player investment in Grave Seasons. - Speaker:Margarita Grubina (Respeecher)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Business Strategy, AudioAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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AI voice is in game production pipelines across budget levels, but most teams are navigating the compliance, union, and communication decisions that determine whether it goes smoothly without a clear framework. This session examines what triggers backlash around AI voice in games versus what protected shipped AAA titles that went through the hardest version of this process without incident, including Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and God of War Ragnarök. The session covers what legally using AI voice requires in practice: compensation structures for union and non-union projects, the Four C's framework, and what the current SAG-AFTRA interactive agreement requires. It closes with a six-item pre-ship checklist applicable to any title with AI voice in the pipeline. - Speaker:Scott Crabtree (Happy Brain Science)Pass Types: Festival Pass, Game Changer PassTracks: Production & Team Leadership, Culture & SustainabilityAudience Level: AllFormat: Workshop
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Research identifies psychological safety ("Felt permission for candor", as Harvard Business School Professor Dr. Amy Edmondson puts it) as the most important factor in team performance, above talent, experience, or resources. Silence on game development teams doesn't mean alignment. It often means fear, and organizations pay for it with mistakes, missed opportunities, and disengaged employees. Most leaders never see what's missing: the ideas, concerns, and honest conversations that never surface. This science-backed session shows leaders what a genuine "circle of safety" looks like and feels like, and gives them a practical toolkit for building it. This hands on workshop will get people using new tools to build trust, reward thoughtful risk-taking, and model the vulnerability that unlocks others, all so game development teams can make their best games ever. - Speaker:Solomon Sliwinski (Insomniac Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Programming, DesignAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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This talk presents a detailed overview of the camera systems used by Marvel's Wolverine developed by Insomniac Games. It covers the techniques worked on during production, including both what was successful, and what was ultimately not used. This presentation provides a detailed overview of both the mathematics and code behind these techniques, as well as design philosophies that were applied throughout development. In addition, it describes important internal tools and workflows that allowed programmers, artists, and designers to develop the overall camera experience. It also highlights different strategies that were used to effectively manage and specialize camera data across the entire game. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Marketing, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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After more than 35 years and seven mainline games, players have strong ideas about what makes Civilization work, and Firaxis has always valued that perspective as part of its studio vision of making the best strategy games possible. With Civilization VII, the team wanted to take that relationship a step further.
In this session, Firaxis invites you into the world of the Firaxis Feature Workshop, a player testing program designed to bring the community directly into the development process. More than 4,000 players have participated across multiple rounds, providing feedback on significant changes to Civilization VII and helping the team refine those features ahead of release.
Firaxis' will discuss how the Workshop was built, how development and community teams worked together to make it effective, and what Firaxis learned from opening up the development process to thousands of Civ players. - Speaker:Lindsay Thacker (Riot Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Production & Team Leadership, Culture & SustainabilityAudience Level: AllFormat: Workshop
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Onboarding doesn't have to be confusing, inconsistent, or quietly miserable; but too often, it is. We've all experienced that moment as a new hire: sitting alone, unsure of what to do next, and wondering if anyone even knows we started.
Now expanded to two hours with new research and examples for 2027, this proven session introduces a practical framework called the Six Pillars of Impactful Onboarding, then shifts into a deeper, collaborative, hands-on workshop. Attendees will reflect on their own onboarding practices, swap insights with peers, and build a realistic strategy to take back to their team or studio.
Whether you're a lead, director, or passionate teammate who wants to improve how new hires get started, you'll leave with something you can actually use and maybe even a few new connections, too! - Speaker:Ben Sunshine-Hill (Havok)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: ProgrammingAudience Level: AdvancedFormat: Lecture
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Pathfinding for characters running around a game world is a well-known and well-covered problem, but what about flying characters? Three dimensional navigation is far more difficult, with data for large, detailed worlds consuming hundreds of gigabytes and requiring millions of iterations to find a single path. In this talk, Ben Sunshine-Hill will describe Havok's recent research work on 3D navigation. First, a way to compress 3D navigation data to a tiny fraction of its raw size, loosely inspired by sparse voxel octrees, while still allowing for realtime queries and traversals. Second, an improved heuristic for A* pathfinding, used in high-performance GIS but largely unknown in game development, which stops A* from wasting time exploring dead ends. - Speaker:Stef Wu (ArenaNet)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Business Strategy, DesignAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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We've come a long way since horse armor. Customization gives players a way to express their identity, creativity, and connection. But delivering that freedom at scale while balancing player expectations around price with the economics of operating a live-service game remains a complex challenge. In this session, Guild Wars 2 Head of Monetization Stef Wu examines how teams can maintain commercial success while maintaining player-friendly monetization. Using examples from Guild Wars 2, she explores proven methods on how maintain strong monetization while putting players at the forefront of feature development and decision making. - Speaker:Rez Graham (Independent)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Programming, DesignAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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The Game AI Roundtable is organized into three sessions, with each session having its own focus.
Session 1 focuses on machine learning and generative AI, including LLMs. Discussion will cover current uses, challenges, ethics, and the evolving role of these technologies in games. The focus will be on tools for game development or integrating these technologies into the games themselves.
Session 2 centers on traditional, non-ML game AI. Topics include behavior trees, utility systems, navigation, tools, and other established techniques. This session avoids machine learning (which is covered on day 1) to keep the conversation targeted towards current mainstream game AI.
Session 3 closes the conference with a fast-paced Q&A session aimed at all experience levels. Designers, students, programmers, animators, producers, and anyone else curious about game AI are encouraged to bring questions. The goal is to answer as many questions as possible and cover a broad range of topics rather than dive deeply into any single one. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Programming, AudioAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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Audio Programming Roundtable Day 1: Game Integration
This roundtable session will focus on tools and techniques for integrating with game engines. Topics will center around technology choices, game audio engine design, and tool design. Newbies and experts are welcome to come and share their wisdom.
Audio Programming Roundtable Day 2: Low-Level Topics
This roundtable session will focus on low-level topics such as DSPs, mixing, and acoustics. Topics will center around algorithms, interesting effects to implement, and integrating those effects into workflows. Newbies and experts are welcome to come and share their wisdom.
Audio Programming Roundtable Day 3: Free-for-all
In this roundtable session we will not have any particular focus. Any and all topics related to game audio programming are encouraged. Newbies and experts are welcome to come and share their wisdom. - Speaker:Brett Norton (Oxide Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: DesignAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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Ashes of the Singularity 2 is a real-time strategy games with over 100 unique units and buildings, each with over 25 possible unique data points. The problem: there was only one person available to wrangle this massive data pool, and they were doing that job only part-time. This presentation is a dive on what AI tools were used to facilitate the systems design data workflow, what failed (balance sheets), and what worked (data entry and tooling). - Speaker:Eric Zimmerman (NYU Game Center)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Design, TabletopAudience Level: AllFormat: Workshop
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How do we tell a story that could ONLY happen in a game? What would it mean to approach narrative design from a systemic point of view? Too many approaches to narrative treat games like films or literature - emphasizing how to write player choices, script character dialog, or do traditional world-building. In contrast, this hands-on workshop is based on the fact that games are dynamic, interactive systems. Through playing, modding, and designing, we will run through a series of exercises that systematically break down narrative game designs so that we can analyze, understand, and design them. Along the way, we'll be discussing and utilizing game design concepts like procedural representation, bottom-up content generation, and emergent storytelling. Please come to this session prepared to play and design with the other participants. - Speaker:Brie Chin-Deyerle (Exigent Hope)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Career, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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Has it been a few years since your last promotion? Do you feel stuck? Does it seem like some of your peers are blazing past you, and others are far behind? Does it feel like the rules are all made up and you're not sure how to move your career forward? This talk is intended for you! We'll talk through a framework for you to evaluate where you're at in your career, how to think about your career journey over time, and some techniques you can try in your next performance review to try and help get out of the rut you're in. - Speaker:Ezra Goss (Naughty Dog)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Independent Development, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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Godot is an open source game engine that has seen growing adoption among hobbyists and professionals over the last many years.
In these roundtables we will discuss and share both professional and hobby experiences in the Godot game engine. For many this may be their first time hearing anything in depth about the engine and for others it may be the first industry venue available for them to share best practices they've learned in production.
Example Topics:
- What are the big drawbacks with Godot adoption for a commercial production today?
- What support ecosystems exist that can help publishers feel safer greenlighting a game made in Godot?
- What does/could enterprise support look like for an OSS consumer engine? Does W4 Games fill that role?
- Is there a reason to choose C# over GDScript or vice versa?
- How does one get involved with Godot contributions? Are there beginner friendly tickets?
- Is the asset store sufficient?
- What are the strengths of Godot as a prototyping engine vs a production engine?
- How would people approach console ports since proprietary console SDKs can't be distributed under Godot's licenses? - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Luminaries Speaker SeriesAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Hatch Dragons launched globally in March 2026, reaching number one in Simulation in the US, and Top 10 in over ten countries across Simulation, Casual and Top Free Games. Hatch Dragons paid off its development cost in the first three days, exceeded its yearly budget target in its first week, and has continued with sustained growth. This talk is about the deliberate strategy, built on a decade of learnings across ten mobile F2P games, that led to this success. Runaway Play CEO Zoe Hobson and Creative Director Emma Johansson show how commercial and creative decisions reinforced each other at every stage. From identifying a market gap to world-building grounded in Nordic folklore, to using Meta ad testing as part of the creative process. This is a genuine behind-the-scenes account of a successful independent game, covering the specific commercial targets, creative frameworks, and production decisions that shaped it. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Narrative & Performance, Business StrategyAudience Level: AllFormat: Ask Me Anything
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A process presentation with a checklist designed to help devs work with SAG-AFTRA from the decision to use professional actors through to shipping their game.
This will be a joint presentation with the CEO of IronRoot games who is developing a video game on one of SAG-AFTRA's Tiered Budget contracts.
Should you use union actors.. why or why not?
How do you start the process?
Where do you find performers?
When and how to talk to the Union, the agents, or casting directors; or how to reach actors directly.
What resources and tools exist to help you find, hire, and work with actors?
The session includes an "AMA" for devs to ask questions about the available Union contracts and get tips and tools to work successfully with the union and actors.
With the Chair of Video Games at SAG-AFTRA taking part, this will also be a useful session for SAG-AFTRA to solicit feedback and make adjustments to it's procedures, policies, and contracts to become more accessible to game devs. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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What does it take to build and nurture a hybrid or remote working environment? What are the challenges of working with and coordinating teams across the globe? How can we foster a sense of belonging and inclusion across cultures and timezones? What are the challenges to hiring for and leading a hybrid or remote team?
Many companies are beginning to consciously offer hybrid or remote work environments. With globalization leading to faster and more reliable access to internet, these development environments are becoming more feasible with each passing year. Yet they present their own unique challenges.
Engage with other industry professionals on the topic of hybrid working arrangements—including hiring, team leadership, accountability, company events, IT solutions, and more. Challenge the status quo of working a 9-to-5 office job with this collaborative and innovative approach development. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Narrative & Performance, AudioAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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A focused presentation on how the Insomniac team managed to record over 65 voices internationally, primarily in Japan and Malaysia, for Marvel's Wolverine (non-localized, primary SKU). Why the team wanted to do it, how they got started, and the workflows they eventually honed and managed.
The work required extra planning, organization, meetings across time zones, travel, and new responsibilities and solutions. In the end, this collaboration between different departments, partners, and vendors led to an incredibly authentic multi-language dialogue experience that brought the game's world to life in an exciting way! - Speakers:Toiya Kristen Finley (Schnoodle Media, LLC), Michelle Clough (Talespinners Studio), Jennifer Allaway (Independent), Matthew Weise (Freelance), Zaire Lanier (Independent)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Narrative & Performance, CareerAudience Level: Entry-LevelFormat: Forum
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How do newer writers fit into game design and narrative design teams? Do writers coming from the worlds of film and comics have advantages getting work over prose writers? Is it easier to be a freelancer or employee? Do you have the skills to be a writer in this industry? How do you know when you've "made it"? How do you put a writing team together? Especially for individuals with little experience and those looking to break in, this session encourages participants to ask veteran writers and narrative designers questions without definitive answers. Anyone working with writers is also encouraged to attend. Whether it's finding the right job, leading writers and improving team dynamics, or establishing rates, no question about the business of game writing is off limits. - Speaker:Laia Bee (Pincer Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Culture & SustainabilityAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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The LATAM Video Games Federation Roundtable will host a space for the 15 Latin American associations.
This space will serve the countries of LATAM to connect with each other in person, in a moderated format where the leaders of each association will be present.
A place to present ideas and discuss future opportunities for Latin American countries - Speakers:Grant Shonkwiler (Shonkventures LLC), Veronica Peshterianu (System Era), Justin Anderson (Magic Tavern), Kasey Mulot (37Degrees Studio), Benjamin Schwartz (Microfun)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: AllFormat: Microtalks
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There is a critical facet of game development that needs exploring: the emotional and elusive feel of being a great leader. In order to maintain the health of a project the leader must have their finger firmly on the pulse of the team and be able to diagnose situations that often call for drastically different solutions. In this session we will investigate multiple facets of leadership skills and share specific situations that we have encountered throughout our careers and how leaders skills have saved the team and shipped awesome games. This years focus is on learnings from other jobs including: Camp Counselor, Guild Leader, Submariner, and Pilot. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Career, Culture & SustainabilityAudience Level: AdvancedFormat: Forum
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Building on the conversation begun at GDC 2026, this participatory roundtable will explore the many ways experienced game professionals can shape what comes next: sustaining a current path, pivoting into something new, or even preparing for retirement.
Together, we'll discuss practical and personal questions around energy, health, purpose, financial realities, visibility, ageism, and staying connected in an industry that continues to change. We'll also look beyond individual career decisions to consider how professionals in their 50s and beyond can create forums to share advice with colleagues in their 40s and help make longer, more sustainable careers possible.
The session will also introduce the idea of an online community where these conversations, connections, and support can continue beyond GDC. Participants will help identify the needs, topics, and principles that could shape this ongoing online community. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Audio, Narrative & PerformanceAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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This session explores the evolution of audio commentary in EA SPORTS™ NHL over the past year, documenting the transition from a traditional, legacy production pipeline to an AI-native one. It examines the technical, creative, and production challenges involved in using AI at scale without compromising the authenticity and quality expected of broadcast talent.
Throughout that transformation, one principle remains constant: AI is only valuable if the result meets the same creative bar as traditionally produced content. The session explores what it takes to build toward that standard while simultaneously shipping a game, how new tools reshape established production workflows, and how the bottlenecks move once content creation itself is no longer the primary constraint. Attendees will see both what AI unlocks and the new quality, production, and scalability challenges it creates. - Speakers:Michael Lee (Bit Bridge / Another Axiom), Coby West (22nd Century Toys), Daniel Lin (Bit Bridge / Schell Games / Ludoko Studios), Tim Cullings (Seattle Indies)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Culture & Sustainability, Independent DevelopmentAudience Level: AllFormat: Forum
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The Local Game Community Organizers Forum is for people who are currently organizing events and communities in their areas for independent or professional game developers or people who are looking to start a game developer community. Organizing events and meetups for your local game development community can be a fun and rewarding experience that creates lasting friendships and memories for both organizers and participants. In building those communities, the organizers can often find themselves without a community of their own to lean on for knowledge and support. This forum invites games industry community organizers of all experience levels to come together, meet one another, learn from each other's experience in building and growing their respective communities and forming the basis for a support network for organizers around the world. In this forum, we will poll the group on topics that they are interested in discussing and then break into smaller groups based around those topics to have deeper discussions with the chance to switch groups to discuss different topics and make new connections. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Audio
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This session examines how dialogue and sound design work together to make combat in Marvel's Wolverine feel reactive, readable, and alive. It traces the process from early source exploration and palette previs through implementation, iteration, and final review, showing how Logan, allies, bosses, and enemy archetypes receive distinct yet cohesive sonic identities.
Anthony & Evan detail their shared combat language that aligns teams across character types, the reactive systems that support meaningful moment-to-moment feedback, and the production structures that protect craft at scale, including development support, external collaboration, and focused director reviews in isolated combat environments. The session also explores how dialogue and sound effects interweave to create believable responses, reinforce character, and preserve clarity during dense encounters, while carrying quality from early milestones into the final game. - Speaker:Sebastoan Long (Player Research)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Production & Team Leadership, Business StrategyAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Roundtable
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The role of player feedback in game development can be divisive and complex. Some studios totally embrace players' engagement in design through early access, open development, routine user research, and community engagement. Other studios limit player feedback to just post-launch, or perhaps dismiss feedback completely.
How can teams use the 'voice of the player' rationally, effectively and deliberately?
Are there challenges you face that player feedback could overcome?
Can you make a greater success of the feedback and data you already have?
How does the 'voice' of player data change through development?
These three roundtables present a valuable opportunity to surface your challenges, viewpoints and experience on the use of player feedback to inform game design. Learn from the experiences of fellow designers, researchers, data scientists, community and player champions, and take away new perspectives on the value of the players' voice in decision-making.
This roundtable covers Production. What routines and habits are worthwhile forming to support iterative and ongoing development? How can teams ensure secrecy, pace, and insight quality, sprint-to-sprint? Bring your challenges, questions and experiences to this roundtable focusing on player data strategy for mid-production and pre-launch. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Narrative & Performance, DesignAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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REVISED:
Making a game with romance or sex in it? Want to talk about love, lust, and intimacy in game design? Then come join fellow developers for a two-day roundtable discussion on romantic and sexual game content, touching on everything from the state of the industry to the potential future of intimacy in games! Attendees can share their thoughts on our prepared discussion topics, or bring their own questions to put to the group!
Roundtable Day 1: Romance in Games
This session focuses on game romance and relationships on a variety of levels such as narrative, design, and even marketing.
Roundtable Day 2: Sex in Games
This session focuses on sex in games - discussing the craft, cultural significance, and unique challenges that come with developing, releasing, and selling games with sexual content. - Speaker:Ashwin Vasan (Scopely)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: ProgrammingAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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On July 9, 2026, more than 1,000 Pokémon GO players joined the same local Mega Mewtwo Y raid during a synchronized live event in Times Square. This wasn't a typical traffic spike that could be spread across separate matches. Every player was part of one authoritative battle, sharing the same timeline and racing against the same highly visible deadline.
This postmortem tells the story of how the Pokémon GO team took an unstable 1,000+ player battle and built a system capable of handling significantly higher concurrency. We'll walk through the investigation, from realistic player simulations and sudden latency cliffs to overloaded lobby entities, blocked request threads, replay persistence, client rendering bottlenecks, and coordinated recovery tools. - Speaker:Marcelo Sequeira (GamerSafer)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Independent Development, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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Most trust & safety advice assumes that every studio has a dedicated team, a legal department, and a real budget. Small studios often have none of those, but they still need a plan before they ship chat, matchmaking, or any form of user-generated content. What they should be aiming for is a "minimum viable trust and safety stack" - the smallest set of policy, tooling, and escalation practices a three-to-thirty-person team needs. This session walks through how the small team at Minehut, a Minecraft server network with roughly 15 million user-generated servers, rolled out trust & safety features, and in what order they were shipped. Attendees leave with a realistic checklist and a sense of what to build vs. what to buy, not just an aspirational framework. - Speaker:Shannon Cha (Red Spring Studio)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Business StrategyAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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As more and more developers are taking their first steps in indie game development, many are turning to crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter for financing. But building a campaign from scratch is a difficult task. And, given the current state of the industry, many developers might not be able to afford to hire professional Kickstarter consultants, campaign managers, or marketing support. Creating a campaign on a budget can feel daunting, but it's not impossible.
This session will provide developers with clear insight and guidance into the process of building a Kickstarter campaign from the ground up. The lessons provided will draw from the experience of experienced developers and their research and conversations with teams who have found success funding their games via Kickstarter. Attendees will learn how to approach building campaigns and supporting them so their projects can find the backers they need to succeed. - Speaker:John French (Arm)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Independent DevelopmentAudience Level: Entry-LevelFormat: Lecture
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Porting a game to mobile can seem like an easy way to expand the reach of a project, introducing it to new markets, new revenue streams, and a global audience of gamers.
But, the reality for many developers, especially when releasing a game on mobile for the first time, is that it can be a surprisingly frustrating and difficult experience.
In this session, John French from Arm's Performance Education team provides an overview of some of the biggest challenges you're likely to face when porting your game to mobile for the first time, practical advice for overcoming them and, importantly, why it's worth the effort.
Whether you're trying to bring your finished game to new audiences, or if you're planning for a mobile release from day one, this session gives you a head start on dealing with some of the biggest technical challenges you're likely to run into along the way. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Narrative & Performance, DesignAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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When a tool or a workflow process falls short, narrative designers are often left needing to react creatively to solve difficult, bespoke problems in order to get their story content actually into the game and shipped. Join Alexa Ray Corriea, Jolie Menzel, and Kaitlin Tremblay as they share insights into some of their best (and worst) war stories of implementing story content for the games they've worked on. They will share specific examples of creative solutions for implementing story content (what worked and what didn't), and what problems in workflows give rise to narrative designers having to commit "narrative crimes" in the first place. - Speakers:Anna C. Webster (Independent), Alexa Ray Corriea (Lead Writer and Narrative Designer), Ashley Poprik (Independent), Adam Dolin (Turtle Rock Studios), Lis Moberly (The Walt Disney Company, 20th Century Games), Alice Camp (Microfun), Emma Kidwell (Independent), Stephen Rhodes (Electronic Arts), Kelsie Mhoon (Obsidian Entertainment), Sam Winkler (Geartbox Software), Sam Maggs (Critical Role), Aysha U (Independent), Nessa Cannon (Independent), Benjamin Schwartz (Microfun), April MacArthur (Gearbox Entertainment)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Narrative & PerformanceAudience Level: AllFormat: Portfolio Review
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Back for a second year! As a game writer or narrative designer, your portfolio is one of the most critical tools for getting hired... So bring yours here! Whether you're an industry hopeful or a veteran writer or narrative designer looking to spruce up your samples, this portfolio workshop will provide individualized feedback on your materials from Senior and Lead-level narrative industry peers. Please bring a printed copy of your portfolio or have it digitally accessible via your laptop or tablet. As you will be meeting 1:1 with a reviewer, spots are very limited.
Please be aware we will not review samples produced by or with AI. Our reviewers are additionally allowed to use their personal discretion for declining samples if found to be in violation of this policy. - Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Programming, AudioAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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This talk presents a neural spatial audio system designed for real-time game deployment. Unlike existing geometric acoustics approaches that impose ray-tracing costs or demand extensive manual authoring of rooms, portals, and propagation nodes, this system uses lightweight GPU neural networks to infer direct-sound and indirect-sound parameters from the listener's position. A bus-based decomposition makes rendering cost independent of active source count. Manual volume placement and region tagging are eliminated entirely: a one-click GPU cloud bake converts offline ray-traced simulation into compact neural weights loaded directly at runtime. Performance measurements show under 100 microseconds per listener update on desktop GPUs and under 200 microseconds on iPhone 14. Perceptual evaluation confirms near-just-noticeable-difference error across key room-acoustic metrics. The session covers the core architecture, production deployment challenges, and validation data from a shipped implementation. - Speaker:Robin-Yann Storm (RYStorm Consulting)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Programming, Visual ArtAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Roundtable
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USD stands for 'Universal Scene Description', and it is a 3D file format Pixar created over a span of many years and movies, and was released open source to the public in 2016. Although technically it is more of an API than a file format, which is an ongoing discussion into the terminology and use of USD.
In this session, attendees can gather to talk about USD. Come and meet, discuss, and find out what everyone has been doing with USD.
Questions can be submitted during the roundtable. For example, these may include topics such as:
1. What are issues you have bumped into when implementing USD into your pipeline?
2. What would be required for USD to be more widely adopted?
3. How can studios, and vendors, best share Schemas?
Questions can be oriented towards technical issues, design, and artistic workflows, with one day having a larger focus on artistic workflows, and the other having a larger focus on technical issues. - Speakers:Sam Maggs (Critical Role), Alexa Ray Corriea (Gearbox), Judy Alice Lee (Independent), Briana White (Independent), Khris Brown (Khris Brown Voice), Amanda Rose Smit (Independent)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Narrative & PerformanceAudience Level: AllFormat: Panel
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How does a game script go from words on the page to the emotional performance you play through on-screen? Join our team of veteran writers, audio techs, voice directors, and voice-over artists to watch the full-process in real-time.
This Page to Booth Live Demo is an expansion of 2026's excellently-rated Page to Booth panel, which served as a baseline educational session, walking attendees through each step of the process from writing to recording, with a brief live performance at the end. This year's panel is meant as a full expansion, going from deck to dev, with nearly the full time dedicated to Live Demonstration. With our moderator to walk us through the steps, we'll watch a full table-read of a 10-minute script, including notes and feedback. Then, we'll get a full audio recording session, including on-screen demonstration of the audio tech process, voice direction, and voice acting, with notes from the writer.
Join us as we demonstrate a live "beta test" of a script collaboratively, utilizing the entire pipeline of writers, actors, directors and developers, followed by a full live performance recording demo, including visualized tech recording and voice direction on-stage with professional voice actors you love! - Speaker:Ekaterina Strakhova (Owlcat Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: DesignFormat: Lecture
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There are a lot of retrospective explanations like "our audience loves challenges" or "players are lazy", but these say little about the root causes of behavior. What can actually be revealed about a player by their in-game behavior and what are generalizations, cognitive biases, and widespread myths?
The lecture explores the gap between everyday concepts and scientific terminology, why labels like "anxious", "aggressive", or "narcissistic" are not the same as scientific constructs and could lead to bad design choices.
Based on empirical research, the lecture demonstrates which personality traits can and cannot be identified by in-game behavior.
A case study of the Expanse beta test highlights the limitations of behavioral label segmentations and shows benefits of understanding real reasons for in-game behavior.
The lecture also debunks myths about "masochistic" Soulsborne fans, players' desire to unlock all platinums and collect all loot, and offers ways to design motivation for psychological diversity among players. - Speaker:Hannah Mackintosh (Saltworks Entertainment)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Marketing, Visual ArtAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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How can you get the perfect shot for your next gameplay trailer when your camera only exists in a digital space? It starts with a game plan!
In this talk, Hannah will walk you through how their team approaches footage capture from start to finish at Saltworks Entertainment for studios such as Black Salt Games (DREDGE), Disc 2 Games (Canvas City) and Team Trifold (Nothing Lost). Each game has its own strengths and limitations depending on its theme, genre and gameplay complexity so building your footage plan around those will be key to showing off your game from its best angle!
Whether it is your first time diving into footage capture or you're already a pro, attendees will walk away with new ideas and suggestions about how to approach the process BEFORE, DURING and AFTER getting the shot - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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There are countless ways to produce a game. The Game Production Roundtable aims to move the industry forward by creating space for producers of all levels to come together to share their experiences, discuss challenges they're facing, and build relationships with their peers.
Each day, we'll cover topics across the spectrum of production, loosely following the themes of People, Process, and Career. Potential topics include: Supporting team motivation and fulfillment through production, identifying when a process isn't working, using scope and schedule as tools to make a better product, navigating changes to scope, cultivating team buy-in and ownership of processes, crunch, empowering the team, scheduling, advice for first-time producers, and how to continue developing your production skills.
Another component of the roundtable will be focused on supporting the next generation of producers by allowing newcomers to ask questions that help prepare them for their production careers. - Speaker:Mateusz Kałuża (Testronic)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Production & Team Leadership, Business StrategyAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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QA teams generate far more than bug reports. Throughout development, they collect valuable information about production health, delivery risk and feature readiness, yet much of this insight never influences the decisions that shape a game's success. Drawing on experience across hundreds of game development projects, Mateusz Kałuża demonstrates how QA can evolve from a reactive testing function into a strategic source of production intelligence. The session explores practical ways to transform QA observations into actionable insight that supports planning, prioritization, resource allocation, and release confidence. Attendees will discover how better use of QA data strengthens collaboration between production, programming and leadership while helping studios make faster, more informed decisions throughout development. - Speaker:Bernard Rodrigue (Audiokinetic Inc.)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: AudioAudience Level: AdvancedFormat: Lecture
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With agentic workflows becoming a reality in game studios, developers are looking to expose their engines and tools to Model Context Protocol (MCP) wrappers. However, exposing massive, complex, legacy codebases to LLMs often leads to high token usage, slow performance, and hallucinations.
When we attempted to expose our own editor API to an LLM, we discovered that AI agents fail at using our tools for the exact same reasons human developers do: the information is fragmented, difficult to find, and the API is too complex.
In this session, attendees will learn concrete techniques to retrofit proprietary engines and tools for AI agents. Sharing specific failures and pivots, we will detail how we optimized token usage via dynamic tool discovery, handled massive projects using sandboxed Lua execution, and benchmarked our MCP within our CI test environment. Ultimately, optimizing an API for agents fundamentally improves the human developer experience. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Culture & Sustainability, DesignAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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For nearly a decade, the Serious Games Roundtable has been GDC's annual gathering place for developers, researchers, educators, healthcare professionals, students, and others interested in games that create real-world impact. Unlike a traditional presentation, this interactive session is driven by the interests and experiences of the attendees, providing an opportunity to exchange ideas, share challenges, and build connections across disciplines.
This year, attendees will break into small groups to explore three questions that cut across the rapidly changing serious games landscape: How do we fund, sustain, and scale serious games? How do we demonstrate and communicate that serious games work? And how is the field changing, and how do we adapt? Following the breakout discussions, the groups will reconvene to share their insights, giving everyone an opportunity to learn from conversations beyond their own.
Whether you're an experienced practitioner, considering a career in serious games, or simply curious about the field, come prepared to share your experiences, hear perspectives from across the community, and examine some of the challenges shaping the future of serious games. - Speaker:Ryan Fontenot (Independent Game Developer)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Career, Culture & SustainabilityAudience Level: AllFormat: Workshop
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Shared EXP: creates a new way for game developers to connect, learn, and build relationships across the industry. This interactive career session brings aspiring developers, students, indie creators, and experienced professionals together through structured networking rounds designed to make meaningful conversations easier and more accessible.
Attendees rotate between tables hosted by industry veterans from AAA studios and beyond, gaining valuable insight into career paths, studio experiences, and the realities of working in game development. By replacing traditional networking pressure with a guided, welcoming format, this session helps attendees create connections they may not have made otherwise. Whether attending GDC for the first time or looking to expand their professional network, attendees leave with new perspective, advice, and industry connections. - Speaker:Hans van Brakel (Azura Interactive)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Business Strategy, MarketingAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Many games do not underperform because nobody sees them, but because interest leaks away between a Steam impression, a store page visit and a purchase. In this session, Hans van Brakel, founder of Azura Interactive and former Director of Sales & Marketing at Thunderful, shows how a few FREE improvements multiply without a bigger marketing budget. - Speaker:Camille Kanensley (Epic Games)Tracks: Visual Art, CareerAudience Level: Entry-LevelFormat: Lecture
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How do I become a Technical Artist? What even IS a Tech Artist? How do they fit into a team? If I want to be one, which skills are most important? What should I include in my portfolio? What types of jobs are out there? How do I learn this stuff? How do I connect with other Tech Artists?
If that sounds like what you've been wondering, this talk is for you! Technical Artists sometimes happen by accident, sometimes by design, and grow into all sorts of different archetypes. We'll go through what it means to be a Technical Artist, core advice pulled from roundtables and lived experiences, and resources that can set you on your way to becoming a Tech Artist. - Speakers:Akash Thakkar (Mobius Digital), Ryan Ike (Independent), Charlie Harper (Ironwood Studios / Co-op Kitchen / Lucky Tree Studios), Jess Erion (Hampshire College), Ziyad Duron (Magic Soup Games / Co-op Kitchen)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Production & Team Leadership, Culture & SustainabilityAudience Level: AdvancedFormat: Microtalks
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Game development promotes people for craft excellence, hands them a team, and provides roughly zero training for what comes next. This series of candid microtalks is for everyone who got the title before they got the manual.
Five developers share their first leadership roles, the mistakes they made, and the practices that eventually worked: separating impostor feelings from the real new job of leading, delegating when doing it yourself would be faster, directing collaborators who don't report to you, calibrating how much uncertainty to show a team that needs stability, and shielding people from chaos above without burning out.
Alongside hard-won stories, each speaker shares concrete frameworks and one practice inherited from a great lead in their own career. For new leads, reluctant seniors, and everyone who suspects nobody ever feels ready to lead. - Speaker:Jaclyn Seto (Respawn Entertainment)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Narrative & PerformanceAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Most games have a beginning, middle, and end, but things aren't so clear-cut in live-service games where the demand for new content is both frequent and never-ending. This session discusses how to approach storytelling in live-service games, or ongoing games that have no defined ending, through the lens of Apex Legends, a live-service first-person hero shooter. I will demonstrate how games can use strong, well-developed characters to create compelling storylines and how this can get players emotionally invested in the narrative. I will also discuss how we approach integrating upcoming design changes into an ongoing narrative to fulfill a more cohesive vision. - Speaker:Andrea Toyias (Self / formerly Blizzard Entertainment)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Audio, Narrative & PerformanceAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Memorable video game performances don't begin in the recording booth. They begin when a team starts building their worlds and when they start piecing together the characters that will bring their world to life. Drawing from 20 years as the Senior Casting & Voice Director at Blizzard Entertainment, Andrea will take attendees behind the scenes on the recording process that brought games like World of WarCraft, Diablo and Overwatch to life. She will focus on how early brainstorming, thoughtful character development and strategic planning can turn even a two-line script into a memorable moment. - Speaker:Jason Della Rocca (Execution Labs)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Business Strategy, Independent DevelopmentAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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Moving beyond a project-by-project mindset, this lecture will explore long-term studio sustainability and the necessary shift to an audience-first framing of business efforts. Studios are competing in the attention economy and need to embrace the implications of fighting for fans. This leads us down the path of self-publishing as the most viable approach for value creation and studio success. This puts into question how we approach game design, audience definition, marketing and community building efforts... and how we score funding and the right partnerships for long-term success. New funding models and support structures are emerging to feed this new logic. - Speakers:Michelle Clough (Talespinners), Aubrey Isaacman (Independent), Souha Al-Samkari (Truant Pixel), Susan Lau (Freelance), Dev Presbury (Red Spring Studio), Dani Dee (Split Fate Studios), Danielle Lalonders (Veritable Joy Studios), JiaLing Pan (Crunchyroll (Games Vault)), Arden Ripley (Independent), Ashley Ruhl (Broadsword Online Games), Adanna Nedd (Independent)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Design, Narrative & PerformanceAudience Level: AllFormat: Microtalks
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Once more, with feelings! The successful series of microtalks returns to dig into the art of making games about love, sex, and intimacy through the lens of a diverse panel of experts and game developers. Speakers each have 5 minutes to share their expertise and discuss a different aspect of creating romance and sex in games, from the technical to the creative to the interpersonal. Come learn first-hand about the challenges, best practices, and new ideas that our experts have to share! - Speaker:Jeff Hanna (NVIDIA)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Visual Art, ProgrammingAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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The role of a technical artists has grown from a clean-up artist and data wrangler to someone who is in charge of complex content creation pipelines and asset tracking systems. Increasingly, the lines between programmer and artist are blurring for technical artists. Tool creation, scripting, shader creation, working with both programmers and artists, and managing workflow are all skills required of a modern technical artist. This roundtable brings together technical artists from across the industry to share their knowledge, experiences, and tips for being the best at their jobs. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Marketing, Culture & SustainabilityAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Development teams are constantly asking themselves big questions: How does a studio build a lasting, engaged player base in mobile gaming, one of the industry's busiest verticals? How do they speak to culture without chasing trends? And most importantly, where is their time, energy, and care best placed?
The answer might just be hidden in a small Danish word: omhu.
For Subway Surfers, community work has grown over time through a hands-on approach guided by omhu, which speaks to care, thoughtfulness, and attention to detail in how something is made.
That philosophy has defined timely social content and creator collaborations, inspired long-term programs like Creator Club and Craft-A-Character, and encouraged the team to meet players where they already are through moments across platforms and real-world spaces. With omhu, both speeds matter. Audiences will learn how they enable Subway Surfers and its community to shape the game's future together. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Narrative & Performance, CareerAudience Level: AllFormat: Fireside Chat
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In The Art of Being Anyone, acclaimed actor and performance-capture artist Debra Wilson joins moderator Jesse Marciniak for an intimate conversation about identity, transformation, and the emotional core of game performance. Wilson reflects on how an actor reaches beyond voice, appearance, and archetype to discover the truth of someone entirely different. Through stories from across her career, she explores the instincts, physical choices, imagination, and personal connection that allow a character to feel fully alive. At its heart, the session explores the paradox of acting: the more completely a performer becomes someone else, the more deeply human the performance can feel. - Speakers:Carl Varnado (Rancho Solano Preparatory School), Pamela Iluore (Sony Playstation), Jarory DeJesus (Coquito Games), Evan Narcisse (Brass Lion Entertainment), Jabari Ali (Plus Arcade), Kim Belair (Sweet Baby Inc)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Culture & Sustainability, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: AllFormat: Panel
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The Black Designer's Dilemma" is a scenario-based panel that explores the real challenges Black game developers face navigating the intersection of creativity, culture, and professional survival. Drawing on lived industry experience, panelists work through realistic situations that arise in studios and on development teams every day examining not just what these moments feel like, but what skilled practitioners actually do when they encounter them. The session is structured to be honest, specific, and immediately applicable, that has historically generated some of the most substantive conversation in the room. This is a session for anyone who makes games or works alongside the people who do. - Speaker:Warren Davis (none)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Design, ProgrammingAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Williams/Bally/Midway made a name for themselves in the arcade world with their unparalleled use of photo-realistic digitized imagery starting with NARC in 1988 thru WWF Wrestlemania in 1995. Games like Hi-Impact Football, Trog, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Terminator 2, and Revolution X featuring Aerosmith featured graphics that set them apart from most other games released during that period. Warren Davis, the developer of the digitization system used for all of those games tells the story of the development of digitized graphics at W/B/M from the exploratory days to the creation of their first 256 color system and its evolution and improvement over the years. - Speaker:Kenny Shea Dinkin (CitizenKenny Consulting)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Design, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Microtalks
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There are many game design topics that don't require an hour to discuss, but can be useful, especially for experienced game designers, as quick deep dives or punchy bits of food for thought. The Game Designer's Notebook asks seasoned game designers to open up a few pages from their notebook, and share insights and explorations into contemporary design issues in game design. Part microtalk, part design review, the GDN is the session at the GDC where game designers get to jump in, go deep and jump out. - Speaker:Carla Rylance (XDS Spark)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Business Strategy, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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Co-development has become an essential part of modern game development, but many of its greatest challenges remain hidden until they begin affecting schedules, budgets and product quality. Drawing on years of industry research from XDS, alongside two decades of experience leading external development across multiple AAA studios, Carla Rylance explores the hidden operational costs that quietly undermine successful partnerships. From onboarding and communication debt to knowledge loss, short-term decision making and transactional relationships, this session examines the risks that often go unnoticed until they become expensive production problems. Rather than focusing on vendor selection or contract negotiation, the presentation provides practical, evidence-backed insights into how studios can build healthier, more resilient co-development partnerships that reduce operational risk and improve long-term delivery. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: CareerAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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GDC 2026 featured Part 2 of our series on Working in Japan, which focused on practical advice on preparing portfolios and applying to Japanese game companies. Our next lecture will compile experiences and anecdotes from international staff currently working in Japan. How did they get their jobs? How has it shaped their career? Was it difficult to adapt to a new culture and workstyle? These are some of the questions we will analyze.
We will look to present a wide range of examples, including those who came to Japan first as students, those who came to Japan after newly graduating from university, and those who worked as a professional first in their home country before coming to Japan. There are many ways to get into the Japanese game industry, and we will cover as much ground as possible through interviews with current staff. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: AdvancedFormat: Lecture
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The economics of the video game industry have changed drastically in the last five years, and more seasoned developers are in the job market than ever before. It's natural to consider starting your own studio to finally make the games *you* want to make. But there's more to owning your own business than the fun, creative work. In this talk, you'll learn about the hidden challenges of founding your own studio, get practical and actionable knowledge about how to keep your production moving forward healthily and sustainably, and learn a framework for making decisions you're less likely to second-guess. - Speaker:Elizabeth Kilmer (Take This)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Culture & Sustainability, CareerAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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We're back with new data about mental health and burnout in the games industry. This talk will share findings from the 2026 Mental Health in the Game Industry study, debuting at GDC 2027. Last year we found that 94% of developers we surveyed were experiencing at least one symptom of burnout - this year we're back with a larger sample size, information about what's driving stressors in the industry, and what solutions individuals have found that actually help. Dr. Kilmer will share findings from the study, break down the data, and offer practical, no-fluff recommendations for developers looking to improve the long-term sustainability of their work and the work of their teams. - Speaker:Matthew Strasser (Insomniac Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Audio, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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To fulfill the Ultimate Wolverine Fantasy and deliver on the brutal, visceral nature of Wolverine, our Dialogue team needed to evolve the way we worked. As the game demanded more dynamic, visceral, and responsive dialogue, our systems and workflows needed to grow alongside that ambition.
But one of the hardest challenges in game development is continuing to innovate and transform while still maintaining tight schedules and deadlines. How is it possible to do both?
Through years of replacing and evolving dialogue systems on Marvel's Wolverine, we discovered that our biggest transformations consistently moved through three phases: Expansion, Stabilization, and Simplification.
Expansion drives bold new possibilities and exciting future outcomes, stabilization maintains execution and output as complexity grows, and simplification applies 80/20 thinking to scale systems sustainably across projects, reducing burnout and unnecessary late nights.
This talk explores how managing systems across these three phases can help teams prioritize effectively, reduce overwhelm, improve cross-department collaboration, and continuously raise the quality bar while doing more with less. While rooted in dialogue development, this framework applies broadly across audio innovation and game development as a whole. - Speakers:Christopher Vallarta (Doron Precision Systems), Mary Haley (Bad Ideas Productions), Holly Allen (Canfield Scientific Inc.), Aster Sun (Beep Beep Fish Accident), Josh Ingeneri (Sweet Justice Sound Group)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Career, EducatorsAudience Level: Entry-LevelFormat: Microtalks
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POV: It's a beautiful day at GDC and you're a nervous Game Dev Student (;w;)
As a student, how ARE you supposed to get into the industry, or even find ANY job, when you graduate?
This series of microtalks presents practical advice from recent graduates about their experiences landing jobs in the current games landscape. Covering a variety of disciplines, universities, and backgrounds, our five presenters delve into stories and lessons learned from college and post-graduation life. From advice that'll apply to everyone, to highlighting niche (and entertaining) circumstances, there'll be something to learn for anybody trying to break into the game dev industry.
Wondering how to maximize your time? Unsure how to network? Ever considered selling your hair for a plane ticket to your internship?
If you're John Game Dev Student and you need to get a job, come to our talk. ( ˙w˙ )b - Speaker:Stan Minasov (AppMagic (a Sensor Tower company))Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Business Strategy, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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D2C is becoming a major part of mobile game monetization, but there is still no consistent data on the market. Which genres are moving fastest? Which games generate the most revenue on the web? And what do players actually buy there?
Using a unique dataset that combines Sensor Tower's Webstore Revenue estimates with SKU-level iAP Revenue Distribution, this session shows how D2C adoption, revenue share, and growth differ across top games and genres. It breaks down how leading titles bring players to their webshops, encourage them to purchase, and bring them back again. It also reveals which offers are bought most often and which generate the most revenue.
Attendees leave with clear market benchmarks and practical ideas for improving conversion and choosing what to sell. - Speaker:Robin-Yann Storm (RYStorm Consulting)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Design, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Roundtable
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For Day 1:
This Tool Design roundtable is about the UX of in-house and external toolsets. Come and meet, discuss, and find out what everyone has been doing with Tool Design in the last year.
Examples of topics discussed in previous years are:
1. What user experience techniques have you seen best fit for your toolsets?
2. Is classical UX applicable in tools, or is it very different?
3. What differences, if any, have tool service companies seen with their tool designs?
This years' questions may be different, or similar! Feel free to join, and ask.
For day 2:
This Tool Design roundtable is about the UX of in-house and external toolsets. Come and meet, discuss, and find out what everyone has been doing with Tool Design in the last year.
Examples of topics discussed in previous years are:
1. What communication channels do you use to inform users about new tool features? E-mail? Meetings? Videos? Gifs?
2. What is a ticketing request pipeline that works really well for you?
3. In what size team did your tool request/ticket pipeline work best?
This years' questions may be different, or similar! Feel free to join, and ask.
For day 3:
This Tool Design roundtable is about the UX of in-house and external toolsets. Come and meet, discuss, and find out what everyone has been doing with Tool Design in the last year.
Examples of topics are:
1. What user research methods do you use?
2. Do you have a dedicated user researcher on your team?
3. What surprises has your research uncovered in the last year?
This years' questions may be different, or similar! Feel free to join, and ask. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: ProgrammingAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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These roundtable sessions focus on discussion of best practices, novel techniques, and technical trade-offs for building game development tools and services. Game development tools are constantly evolving, so come to share what works (and what doesn't) at your studio, and listen to others' take on how to keep their creative teams producing awesome games.
"Engineering", focuses on tools programming, testing, deployment, frameworks, scripting, automation, extensibility, diagnostics, and telemetry.
"Assets" focuses on export/import, interchange, persistence, collaboration, search and organization, development models (branching and/or trunking), revision control, and outsourcing.
"Build" focuses on processing assets through to the game in all its forms: build systems, caching, distribution, scalability, optimization, disc mastering and patching. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: Visual ArtAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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The tools and techniques of Real Time VFX have changed dramatically over the past few years. There are now extraordinarily powerful desktop GPUs, rapidly advancing mobile GPUs, compute shaders, complex particle sims, mesh-based effect techniques, and advanced post processing and compositing tools. The new consoles have matured and are showing what they're capable of, and VR/AR/XR continues to impact the industry. It's an incredible time in Real Time VFX.
Join this roundtable to hear from other VFX artists, learn about their successes and failures, compare pie-in-the-sky ideas, and share your favorite tricks.
Day 1: General topics and revisiting ground broken in the VFX Summit earlier in the week. (Jason Keyser and dj Johnson)
Day 2: VFX through an Artistic Lens, focusing on attendee questions about the artistic aspects of VFX. This may include art education (as students or veterans), art direction, and more. (Jason Keyser)
Day 3: The Technical Lens for creating VFX, guiding the conversation through such as fluid simulation, external Simulations, performance and optimization, HDR authoring. (dj Johnson) - Speaker:Victoria Prentice (Playground Games)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTrack: AudioAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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In Fable, your choices change the world. And in this talk, Fable's Dialogue Lead Victoria Prentice will take you through the process of bringing that complex and reactive open world to life though dialogue. How do you design a fully voiced population in an open world game with 1000 hand crafted NPCs? A game where any action you take can completely change those NPCs' perception of you? And how do you balance this complexity against scope and budget?
Focussing on Fable's "Living Population", Victoria will provide insight on dialogue design decisions made throughout the production process, the tools built to support Fable's complex dialogue systems, and the importance of cross discipline collaboration to the project. - Speaker:Robin-Yann Storm (RYStorm Consulting)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Visual Art, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: Entry-LevelFormat: Lecture
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OpenUSD (USD) keeps getting mentioned at conferences, but most explanations of what it is, and does, are very technical and nature, and hard to understand. This talk explains USD in a simple way, showing how its workflows can be important for non-technical artists, and designers, in the game industry. - Speakers:Phil Salvador (Video Game History Foundation), Laine Nooney (New York University), Kendra Albert (Albert Sellars LLP)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Culture & Sustainability, EducatorsAudience Level: AllFormat: Panel
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What's New in Game History returns for its fourth year with an annual survey of the most important developments in game history, preservation, and archival practice. Through four concise, fast-paced presentations, experts from academia, preservation, law, and community initiatives highlight the year's most significant books, research, legal developments, institutions, and grassroots projects shaping how games are documented, interpreted, and preserved. Rather than treating game history as nostalgia, the panel examines how questions of ownership, access, digital preservation, and cultural memory increasingly affect the industry's future. Designed for developers, researchers, and anyone interested in the long-term life of games, the session translates a rapidly evolving landscape into an accessible overview filled with practical resources, recommended reading, organizations, and initiatives attendees can explore long after GDC concludes. - Speaker:Chris Zukowski (HowToMarketAGame.com)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Marketing, Business StrategyAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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What happened to Steam in 2027? Chris Zukowski will be looking at the year in Steam bringing you his observations of trends, new features that can help you market your game, and what out-of-date tactics to avoid. - Speaker:Anton Johnsson (King)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Design, Business StrategyAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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For years, Farm Heroes Saga relied on a trusted difficulty metric: Attempts Per Success (APS). The team saw no reason to doubt it - the data looked right - yet the player experience was quietly and significantly worsening.
This session will explore how the relationship between level and reward balancing created a vicious cycle that obscured the player experience from the team. By the time the problem surfaced, it had contributed to lower engagement, retention, and monetisation across thousands of levels for several years.
The talk walks through how the team at King uncovered the issue, why APS failed to reflect the real player experience, and how Farm Heroes Saga rebuilt its approach to measuring and balancing difficulty. Attendees will see how using new metrics, combined with large-scale level tuning, helped break the cycle and created a more reliable foundation for one of mobile gaming's longest-running live service titles. - Speaker:Roc Lee (Clean Cuts Interactive)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Audio, ProgrammingAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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Where does AI actually fit in a game production pipeline? In this talk we walk through:
How to identify places in your workflow or pipeline that could benefit from tools that would be costly to build without AI. How to treat AI like a programming language and get quality output. How we can learn from computer science and good programming principles to structure what comes out of AI. And how do we keep in mind client privacy and security when working with AI?
Roc will demonstrate eight specific techniques drawn from proven projects that have helped clients and colleagues deal with production timelines and challenges. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Culture & Sustainability, MarketingAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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What makes fans go absolutely feral for a videogame character? This short lecture presents research about fandom obsessions that make games and characters go viral. The core idea is that attraction is expressed through sexual content, romantic content, and content about collective desire. While no one can predict with absolute certainty how fans will react to a game or character, this presentation summarizes narrative and character inclusive design strategies that can inspire 'feral' fans to make viral social media content. While all genders and sexualities are represented in this talk, a particular emphasis is placed on queer interpretations as they are often underrepresented in the games themselves. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Independent Development, MarketingAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Lecture
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China accounts for roughly a third of Steam's active user base. During Chinese New Year 2025, Simplified Chinese briefly crossed 50% of Steam's language share. At that scale, 0.1% of Chinese Steam users is 42,000 players.
The question is almost never whether an audience exists in China. The question is whether a game is being positioned to reach them.
This session draws on three shipped campaigns to examine how Chinese player communities actually organize, and why genre-first thinking tends to produce the wrong answers. Cairn (The Game Bakers) found its largest organic coverage not through indie game channels but through mountaineering content creators and narrative essay videos, reaching 997,000 views on a single post 50 days after launch. Manor Lords had global #1 wishlist status and still needed explicit trust-building before Chinese players converted from awareness to purchase. Everything is Crab discovered its most effective positioning frame not from the campaign team but from players themselves, who began describing it as a Spore successor within the first week.
Each case illustrates a different challenge in how Western developers typically approach China, and a concrete alternative. The session is intended to be useful for indie developers and publishers who are new to the market and working without a dedicated China team. - Speaker:Euna Park (Skydance New Media)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Visual Art, Culture & SustainabilityAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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The Animation Roundtable aims to bring all disciplines together under a common cause- how to best implement and improve the field of animation in game development. The following questions are among those that will be addressed:
Who should be directing the animation in a game? Who owns each part of the animation pipeline after export? How can all disciplines work together better, to bring the best looking and feeling animation to their game? What workflow frustrations have been experienced and how were they resolved? What new technologies are available or coming online that can help animators excel at their jobs, and what challenges will those technologies bring? What is your best tip or trick that you think everyone needs to hear? What mistakes have you made that you think others can learn from? How can we all give and take feedback better, from all disciplines?
In addition, these roundtable discussions will focus on helping newcomers by dedicating the last part of each session to them, encouraging questions to help them get prepared (or jump-started!) in their animation careers. - Speaker:Andrew Fray (Automated AF)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Programming, Production & Team LeadershipAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
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Day 1: Process
Automated testing provides a team with stability across development, allowing early feedback, fast iteration and empowering QA. Yet investing in automation has a bad reputation in the industry, where just-ship-it is the mantra. Maybe, as the market becomes increasingly competitive, its time has finally come.
On Day 1 we prefer to discuss the people that write the tests and the workflows used to reinforce them. How does the process work in your studio? Are the engineers responsible for automated tests, or QA? Are QA silo'd or integrated? What could be better? What doesn't work?
These roundtables bring together people of all experience levels and budgets to discuss how they currently, or would like to, use automated testing of any form. See atig.dev/gdc for more details and to join our discord!
Day 2: Legacy
Automated testing provides a team with stability across development, allowing early feedback, fast iteration and empowering QA. Yet investing in automation has a bad reputation in the industry, where just-ship-it is the mantra. Maybe, as the market becomes increasingly competitive, its time has finally come.
On Day 2 we prefer to talk about introducing automated testing to an organisation. Do you have a culture or a codebase that doesn't currently embrace automated testing? Are you having trouble getting people on-board, or maybe it was very easy and you can share why? Grand failures are just as interesting as successes!
These roundtables bring together people of all experience levels and budgets to discuss how they currently, or would like to, use automated testing of any form. See atig.dev/gdc for more details and to join our discord!
Day 3: Implementation
Automated testing provides a team with stability across development, allowing early feedback, fast iteration and empowering QA. Yet investing in automation has a bad reputation in the industry, where just-ship-it is the mantra. Maybe, as the market becomes increasingly competitive, its time has finally come.
On Day 3 we prefer to discuss the many faces of automation, from locally-run functional and unit tests, to server-driven continuous integration, and even external device farms. How do you do automated testing in your team? What works well for you? More interestingly, what didn't work and why?
These roundtables bring together people of all experience levels and budgets to discuss how they currently, or would like to, use automated testing of any form. See atig.dev/gdc for more details and to join our discord! - Speaker:Scott Crabtree (Happy Brain Science)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Production & Team Leadership, Culture & SustainabilityAudience Level: AllFormat: Workshop
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AI is transforming how we work faster than most videogame teams can absorb. This research-grounded, hands-on workshop will cut through the hype to deliver what leaders need: practical, neuroscience-based tools for leading through change with confidence, and for harnessing human and AI strengths together to achieve what neither can do alone. The session will work through themes such as:
* Evolve your leadership identity--because how leaders think of themselves and their role needs to change in the age of AI.
* Foster emotional safety and trust--how emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and more can help people feel better, so they can work better in this time of uncertainty and change
* Orchestrate humans and AIs--everyone on your team is a manager now, because they are managing AIs. Work through how you can get the best from both humans and AIs. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Business Strategy, MarketingAudience Level: AllFormat: Lecture
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Have a Steam page that isn't getting clicks? We have the cure. The marketing trauma team of Derek Lieu and Chris Zukowski are here to give you direct but encouraging feedback on how to fix your Steam Page and present your game in a better way. - Speakers:Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Design, Culture & SustainabilityAudience Level: IntermediateFormat: Forum
Matches Found in Session Description:
Many game developers care about creating games that are ethical and respectful of players, but they don't necessarily know what this means, or how to do it. Especially when the time comes to monetize the game and hopefully make it profitable. This interactive forum introduces a tool developed by academic researchers (based on evidence instead of moral panics) precisely to help game developers assess their game systems and separate what serves their art and the gameplay from what can be exploitative for players (and thus potentially unethical). This experimental session will allow participants to discover the tool, try it out in small groups (workshop-style), and provide feedback to improve it.
- Speaker:Katy Kellenberg (Constellation Creative)Pass Types: Academic Pass, Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass, Indie Pass, Start-Up PassTracks: Narrative & Performance, CareerAudience Level: AllFormat: Roundtable
Matches Found in Session Description:
The Game Narrative Roundtables are a two-day discussion series where narrative designers, game writers, and quest designers come together as a community to share best practices, compare notes, and talk shop in a structured, professional setting. Each day focuses on different career stages: Day 1: Early Career explores topics like portfolio development, breaking into the industry, and the skills aspiring narrative developers should be building, while Day 2: Mid-level/Senior centers on the challenges of working in the industry, narrative advocacy, and the future of the discipline. Developers of all experience levels are welcome to attend either session, as are professionals from other disciplines interested in narrative.