Tired of devs burning out while trying to “save” the project? This talk is your reality check and your recovery plan. We’ll roast the hero complex, drop the cape, and show you how sustainable teams actually ship better games, with fewer tears and more brain cells intact.

Gathering information from playtests is a crucial part of the game design work - ideally, before the game ships and you read about everything that's broken on Reddit. There are tons of ways to do it, from high-end lab setups with eye-tracking and heart rate monitors, to just grabbing someone in the hallway and asking, "Hey, can you play this real quick?"

In this talk, Jens walks through where they used, didn't use, and used but ignored playtesting to shape Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and how those insights played a big role in making it MachineGames' most polished and accessible game to date.

How can developers keep their creativity and communities thriving in the face of ‘anti-woke’ backlash? This panel, led by Pernilla Alexandersson, explores the challenges of inclusive game development today – from online hate to internal hesitation – and shares practical strategies for moving forward with courage, resilience, and creativity.

At Embark we use a wide variety of machine learning and AI tools. In this session I will go over how we think about their use, what it unlocks for us, and where we'd like to go in the future.

As artificial intelligence becomes an ever-present collaborator, the question is how we, as humans, can remain authentic in our own creativity. In this talk, Fawzi Mesmar uses his framework of creative sobriety: a method for cutting through noise, reclaiming originality, and cultivating ideas in ways no machine can.
He will also explore our responsibility as creators: to ourselves, to our industry, and to the audiences we serve while confronting the creative dilemma: the truth that creativity demands vulnerability, and the courage to move forward in spite of fear.

In a world where AI is everywhere, and existential threat to many crafts people is around the corner, staying true to your vision armed with authenticity is still uniquely human.

Step into the world of Sanctuary through the lens of typography and Visual Design. This talk reveals how custom fonts and glyphs were crafted to embody the game’s dark atmosphere—from the sacred scripts of Classes and areas in Sanctuary to the infernal marks of demons and factions—shaping the way players experience Diablo IV beyond visuals, through the very language of design.

The talk covers building Battlefield 6's audio identity across global teams, creating an immersive soundscape, refining audio direction and examples of how to execute on a raw, gritty and believable war soundscape in a modern, competitive shooter. It touches on sound design and recording techniques, team collaboration and overall mix.

How can we create games that are both cutting-edge and energy-efficient? In this session, we’ll explore the Xbox Sustainability Toolkit—a suite of resources designed to help developers reduce energy use in their games without compromising player experience. We’ll cover practical techniques, best practices, and real-world examples from major Xbox games.

Whether you’re working on AAA titles or indie projects, you’ll leave with actionable insights to integrate sustainability into your development process.

Nearly 2 billion people play games - with children and youth at the heart of this number. With the right design choices, games can connect, include, empower, and help them build real-world skills for the future. That’s a serious opportunity for devs and designers - to craft experiences that feel good and do good!

In this session, UNICEF will equip you with insights from the RITEC Design Toolbox, alongside examples from studios already putting some of these ideas into play. We’ll also spotlight global collabs like the Game Changers Coalition, where the whole industry can turn good games into great impact.

In this talk I will go through a few of the player-systems of "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle". I will cover the reasoning of some design choices as well as technical details around our player setup.

Let's take a quick look at all the things that we had to cover whilst developing the FrostKit - modkit for Frostpunk 2. The technical issues, deployment on different markets with different laws regarding UGC, community management and loads of other interesting things we had encountered!

Most of us are fully aware of the powerful tool music is in affecting our emotions as we play games. But have you considered how powerful it also can be as a game design tool in your toolbox as a designer? We'll show you the hidden secrets on how to have music directly guide players to act as you intended, as a game designer. May it be combat design, level design, puzzle design, narrative design, or movement design - by the power of confident music design, the impact can elevate the experience of your game to new heights.

To understand all of this from the ground up, we'll take a look at some of the "black box" of music: how it's actually made, what our interactive intention truly is, and how we should think about design and tech before our very first note. This is a talk about how to think when designing and making music, and how you can apply that thinking to music for your game and other audio technical aspirations. To that end, we'll showcase a wide range of examples from our 12+ years career in game music.

Our work has been awarded or nominated for best music and/or technical music achievements at various awards, including the BAFTAs, The Game Awards, Golden Joystick Awards, MCV/Develop Awards, Game Audio Network Guild Awards, Game Audio Awards, and Steam Awards, among others.

What does it take to design a game that actually takes off on Roblox? In this session, I’ll break down the creative and design process behind Prison Pump — a top-performing Roblox experience built around player humor, satisfying progression, and one simple goal: become the baddest, most feared prisoner on the block.

In 3D games we see many types of user interfaces. In this session you will learn what they are, and how to best select which type of interface should be presented to our players depending on the player's level of 'presence' while playing your game.

You will see a case study covering a fictional abstract AAA open world game realised for this talk and how the UI is structured from the ground up while best respecting immersion in our game world and giving the game's core systems room to breathe. You will also learn how to apply this process to your current game project.

Do you find a lack of meaning in your life? That's why your game is lacking. Come get cured and celebrate Death, Love and Sex to incorporate them into your games.

Join this session to hear how studios across mobile, AAA & indies are using design tactics that can turn ordinary players into climate superheroes – whilst boosting their engagement metrics up to 30%. Discover the behavioural science secrets behind excellent green storytelling that can deepen knowledge, raise vital funds, or even shift attitudes.

Porting Star Stable’s 12+ years of code and content to iOS and Android was far more than a technical challenge. It was a lesson in balancing legacy systems, performance limits, and player expectations.

This talk shares the key insights, pitfalls, and breakthroughs from bringing a long running MMO to mobile without losing its soul.

For the past 6 years, I've worked on VR headsets, leading very embodied, very physical games (Blaston, Racket Club, Spatial Ops). Those past 6 months working on the AR glasses from Snap have been very different. I come to share this experience of bringing an XR device back to couch gaming.

I'll also bring the Snap Specs' dev kit for the curious to try!

I will be talking of how my game dev background is always present in my everyday work as an author and illustrator.

A little talk about how to make guns good and perhaps not try to hard but still try pretty hard.

How we ditched tool fear, tamed the database, and built apps that do the boring stuff for us.