SESSIONS & SCHEDULE

Day Zero

November 15

10:00 — 18:00 Build up (exhibitors only)
15:00 — 17:00 Unity Sertification
18:00 — 22:00 Badge Pick-Up Pre-Party

First Day

November 16

09:00 — 10:00 Registration
10:10 — 13:30 Sessions
13:30 — 15:30 Lunch break
15:30 — 18:00 Speed Game Dating
15:30 — 18:00 Sessions
20:00 — 00:00 Official DevGAMM Party

Second Day

November 17

10:00 — 11:00 Registration
11:00 — 13:15 Sessions
13:15 — 15:00 Lunch break
16:00 — 18:30 Sessions
17:30 — 18:30 Game Lynch
18:30 — 19:00 DevGAMM Awards
19:00 — 20:00 Bye-Bye Mingle

Esport
Track

Marketing
Track

Game Design Track

Workshops
& Other Events

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

telltale_speaker_logo

Optimization and automation in cross platform development (based on Batman: The Enemy Within)

Zacariah Litton, VP of Engineering, Telltale Games

Telltale games simultaneously releases on mobile, console , and desktop 15 times a year. This talk will dive into the philosophy, automation, tools, and process which makes this possible.

Zac Litton is the VP of Engineering at Telltale Games, an award-winning independent developer and publisher of digital entertainment, including The Walking Dead and Minecraft: Story Mode. Before joining Telltale in 2011, he worked at independent studies developing on console, mobile, and desktop.

Horizon Zero Dawn: Tribes Design

Ilya Golitsyn, Senior Character Concept Artist, Guerrilla Games

Guerrilla Games approach to the character design in the context of world building for Horizon Zero Dawn.

As a senior character concept artist at Guerrilla Games, Ilya Golitsyn is responsible for the visual language and style of various tribes, as well as several main character designs for Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Add

dice_speaker_logo3

Life and Death on the Battlefield

Carola Berens, Senior Game Designer, EA DICE

The challenge in BF1 was to bring the epic scale of conflict that the Great War represented to the player while illustrating the human aspect of each soldier. We’ll talk about how we populated the singleplayer levels to systemically add life and intelligence to the player’s AI encounters.

I have worked on the new Star Wars Battlefront II, Battlefield 1, Need For Speed 2015, NFS Rivals, The Secret World, Age of Conan, Anno 1404, and several Grand Theft Autos at studios EA DICE, EA Ghost, Funcom, Ubisoft Related Designs, and Rockstar Games Lincoln.

The Future of Narrative: Architects, Westworlds, and Matrices

Rob Auten, CEO, Hexagram

A discussion of the evolving role of the storytelling, from the writers of the past, designers of today, and architects of the future.

Rob Auten, writer on Gears of War, Battlefield, Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

 Follow  Add

You developed a game. Now, develop a community!

Jonathan Joyce (aka Jon Carnage), Director of Strategic Partnerships, Twitch

Jon will share what it takes to build a thriving community. For half a decade Jon has been helping Developers, Brands and Variety Broadcasters find their own unique voice on Twitch. It will be an updated, 2.0 version of his Moscow talk.

Jonathan “Jon Carnage” Joyce is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Twitch Studios where he oversees the creation of Twitch Studios–the company’s in-house production studio–original shows and content. A 17-year veteran of the entertainment industry, Jon started at Twitch in 2012 managing the company’s content distribution, curation, and production and has dedicated his work to helping game developers, brands, and content creators find their voice on Twitch. Prior to Twitch, Jon was the Online Video Director of Destructoid, a Webby Award-winning independent video game news website, and Morning News Coordinator at CBS News.

 Add

TLDR: Making a small game, well

Mike Bithell, Creative Director, Bithell Games

Earlier in the year, we decided to make a game in 6 months. In this session, we’ll talk about how we did it, how we built a successful launch, and how we’re capitalizing on its surprise success.

Mike Bithell began in games 10 years ago, making games for PS2, XBox 360 and Wii, after a stint in social games, he made Thomas Was Alone, for which he’s best known. After that he worked on Volume (a stealth game), a VR collaboration with Google called EarthShape, and the recent Subsurface Circular.

 Follow 

Finding the Game

Dell Siefert, Lead Designer, Blind Squirrel Games

Find a Game’s Identity through honesty and quick iteration. Discussing development trends and the challenges of distinct IP.

Most Known for Star Wars: Battlefront 1&2, Clive Barker’s Undying.  Over 22 years in the industry as a Designer and Creative Director.

 Add

Guide to video game marketing for PC and Console

Alex Moyet, Marketing Director, Curve Digital

Video game marketing can be a daunting task for many developers. In this session I will break down the fundamentals of marketing for PC and Console from finding an audience for your game to getting noticed on social media.

Alex started her career in video game marketing working for Xbox’s advertising agency before leading the European marketing for some of PlayStation’s franchises including The Last of Us, Uncharted, SingStar and Killzone. She is currently Marketing Director at UK indie publisher Curve Digital.

 Follow

drozdosky_speaker

Creative Leadership: How to Orchestrate a Creative Team

Aleksas Drozdovskis, Strategy Director, Global Marketing, Wargaming.net

According to Aleksas, leading a creative team in highly dynamic environment of today’s world is more like playing in a jazz quintet rather than conducting an orchestra. Leading from the back and leading from the front is different. We need to be clear here: we are speaking about creative teams, not operational teams. An operational team looks to solve defined problems with known solutions. A creative team works on understanding and re-articulating the problem itself first and then searching for solutions that are unknown or unconventional. This is especially important for creative industries, marketing and advertising professionals, game designers and anyone involved in innovation development.

Aleksas Drozdovskis, cross-disciplinary strategist with experience that spans across brand planning, design strategy, digital media and leading creative teams. As Strategy Director, Marketing Creative Services at WARGAMING, Aleksas  leads strategy practice and creative process aimed at defining new opportunities to grow business through brand experience and innovative campaigns. In addition to that currently he is a participant of the Executive Leadership Program at THNK School of Creative Leadership in the Netherlands. Before his transition to WARGAMING, Aleksas has spent years building his credibility in creative industries, working for international and regional strategy consultancies, creative agencies and educational institutions such as Heraldist & Wondermarks, BBDO Worldwide and British Higher School of Art & Design.

TECHNOLOGY & DEVELOPMENT

Games as a Service: lessons learned from The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land

Sylvain Cunzi, Technical Director, Engineering, Next Games

Let’s go through the journey of NextGames: from the early development of our backend in Azure to the launch and live operation of The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land. We’ll explore the main technical decisions and share the key learnings on how we build games as services.

I moved to the game industry by starting my game studio where I led the development of our game engine. I moved to Finland to join Rovio as lead developer for mobile then NextGames working as back-end and client engineer.

How i spent my AR summer

Oleg Chumakov, CEO, Luden.io

What you need to know to join AR revolution and what they already did to save your time working with ARKit. Postmortem of developing ARrived godsim sandbox game.

  • Programmer in Nival (strategy PC & mobile games)
  • R&D Lead in Nival
  • CEO in Luden.io (AR/VR/AI)

 Follow  Add

octobox_speaker_logo

Blueprint vs. C++ in UE4

Leonid Gorbachev, CTO, OctoBox Interactive

Blueprint usage is often subject in UE4 discussions. From one hand some programmers do not believe in visual scripting, from another hand blueprints are very unusual for game designers.

Our team has an interesting experience to share how to use both languages better.

Working on MMO-shooter “Project Echo” as tech lead, and on VR shooter “High Noon” as producer in Octobox interactive. Build process by using Unreal Engine 4 and Kanban.

Before was game designer in Nival.

Game project on iOS/Android/Steam: traps, bonuses, and a bit of luck

Dmitriy Fokin, CEO, CarX Technologies

Game development on iOS, Android and Steam: multiplayer, render core, GUI, game balance, level design. How should be a team?

Work in CarX Technologies; Projects: CarX Drift Racing, CarX Highway Racing.

 Follow  Add

Perfecting Platform Physics

Alex Rose, Lead Developer, Alex Rose Games

Most people can make a platformer, but it takes a lot of work to make a platformer really feel amazing. We’ll going to build a perfect physics engine from the ground up in Unity. From smooth jump physics to moving platforms and more.

Developer of Super Rude Bear Resurrection (PS4/Switch/Steam). Develop 30 Under 30. BSc Physics. Winner of EGX Rezzed Game Jam. Ludum Dare gold medalist.

 Follow  Add

octobox_speaker_logo

Organization and building of materials (shaders) in Unreal Engine 4

Dmitry Borisov, Technical Artist, OctoBox Interactive

I’ll tell you about the way I understand the materials in the Unreal Engine 4. I will show you how we work with the materials in our project.

3d Artist in smal game projects; Rendering and compositing movies for stereo attractions; level artist in World of Tanks.

 Add  Add

Practical game rendering optimizations for mobile platforms

Igor Lobanchikov, CTO, Confetti

Mobile-specific GPU optimizations which can bring fill-featured desktop deferred shading-based rendering pipeline to 3-year old mobile hardware.

Computer graphics expert (desktop, mobile, console) game graphics improvements and optimizations, porting.

Flash is dead, long live Haxe

Vyacheslav Buynov, Haxe engineer, Playtika

Transition from Flash / AIR to Haxe or how to get a cross-platform application (web + mobile) with one code base.

BIT.Games – Western-story. Crazypanda – Farmstory. Belka Technologies – Clockmaker.

Textures not for texturing

Andrew Chaiko, Senior Unity Developer, Heyworks

We’ll look at textures’ use other than for texturing. We’ll see how textures can be used in shaders to create exciting and cheap VFXs.

Worked at Heyworks, developing Pocket Troops, The Troopers and other games.

 Follow  Add  Add

Online Beacons: Tips and Tricks

Victor Schepkin, Unreal Engine developer, OctoBox Interactive

What are “Online Beacons” and how do they work? How can we use them and what can they do for us? We will try to find the answers to these and many other questions.

In the gaming industry from 2013. Since 2015 I work exclusively with Unreal Engine. During this time, I participated in the development of VR Shooter game “High Noon” and MMO Tactical Shooter game “Project Echo”, which received Dev Grant from Epic Games.

 Add  Add

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Solution: Making an Open-World Game in Unity

Maria Khomenko, Developer, Ice-Pick Lodge

Pathologic 2 is an open-world in Unity with a decently big world. In this talk we’ll discuss the numerous challenges that designing its systems posed and our solutions to them.

Joined Ice-Pick Lodge as a Game Logic Programmer two and half years ago. Worked in this capacity on Pathologic 2 and Pathologic: The Marble Nest, and also as a QA Lead on Pathologic Classic HD. Loves combining behavior trees with state machines.

 Add

How to choose technology, create a team, and release the first game

Alexandra Marcius, Developer, Wise Hedgehog Studio
Roman Petrov, CTO, Wise Hedgehog Studio

The choice of technology, engine and relationship building for the first game is  always a wonderful thriller with an unpredictable plot. The team from Yoshkar-Ola will tell their story which ended with the release of the game on the PlayStore and the App Store.

Alexandra Marcius: Pocket Weights (iOS & Android). Roman Petrov: Sahara Dig (J2ME), BattleBots (GBA, work for Cave+Barn Studios).

Protecting your mobile game from the most common hacks

Alexey Chubar, Technical Project Lead, BIT.GAMES

As your mobile game grows, it’s a matter of time until someone decides to hack it. A so-called “hacker” can impact your profits even without having any technical experience. We’ll talk about the most common threats and how to protect against them.

Working at BIT.GAMES since 2012. Took part in development of Android & iOS versions of those games as full stack developer:

– Western Story

– Cinderella Story

– Funny 2048

– Guild of Heroes

Currently work as tech lead at our flagship project – Guild of Heroes (Unity-based mobile action-RPG).

 Add

Machine Learning in Unity – How to give your game AI a real brain

Ciro Continisio, Technical Evangelist, Unity Technologies
Alessia Nigretti, Technical Evangelist, Unity Technologies

Discover how to implement Machine Learning through Unity, and how to use its power to create the next level of AI.

Ciro joined Unity after years of developing games at his own indie company. Alessia joined the team straight from University, bringing her experience on making small games at game jams and hackathons. They are both Unity Evangelists, focused on showcasing new Unity features and advocating good development practices at conferences and meet-ups around the world.

Large multiplayer UE4 project: How to build development infrastructure

Alexander Sorokin, Project technical director, Vizor Games

This session is dedicated to the  development infrastructure of a big project. Alexander will explain you how they created it and what they still have to do.

Alexander has developed games since 3dfx Vodoo and CDs. Before  Vizor Games he used to work at Wargaming, Skype/Microsoft, Nival.

 Add

C# Job System — Writing Safe Multi-Threaded Code in Unity

Valentin Simonov, Field Engineer, Unity Technologies

We want Unity games to fully utilize all CPU cores. This is why we are working on the C# Job System — a new paradigm of writing multi-threaded C# code that runs faster than native code and is absolutely safe.

At Unity Technologies, Valentin helps studios with their technical issues, organizes trainings and presents about various engine features at conferences all over the world.

 Follow  Add

ECS in game development – good software architecture for everyone

Kirill Nadezhdin, Lead programmer, Kumo Kairo

Breaking the chains of OOP design with Entity Component System paradigm. Good software architecture for everyone.

Sand Sphere Games – Ancient Rivals (general programming and graphics programming), CarX Technologies: CarX, Highway Racing – Lead Programmer, Kumo Kairo – Road Trip Overdrive.

 Follow

ESPORT

VK for Gaming & eSports

Alexander Schepilov, Head of Gaming & eSports, VK

How to be in touch with your audience, if you are gaming publisher or eSports organisation.

Alexander is the head of gaming & eSports at VK company. He creates comfortable atmosphere for gaming companies and professionals at the platform, and helps to create interesting cooperative projects. Together with his development team he is also responsible for development and promotion of products for gaming audience.

Add  Add

eSports: how to monetize

Alexander Konyakhin, eSports producer, Mail.Ru Group

What you need for eSports in your game, show eSports activity help monetize your audience.

I’ve been working in Mail.Ru for over 8 years. I worked in different positions in the gaming unit, worked in the social network Moy Mir. In each workplace, I worked in marketing and product development. Since 2016 I have been working in the e-sports division as a producer. I am engaged in monetization and partner projects.

Esports аudience and tools for communication with it

Ivan Voznyak, Esports producer, Mail.Ru Group

From making tournaments for our own published games, to esports ecosystem that works for all projects, and involves players and streamers from casuals to professionals.

Started organizing esports tournaments in 2004. From 2009 till 2016 – game development and publishing in Nival and then in Mail.Ru. 2016 – back to basics, Mail.Ru Esports established.

Add

Esports and competitive element in games: the examples of ecosystems and concepts of monetization

Maksim Maslov, General Manager, Epic Esports Events

Esports and competitive element in games: how they differ from each other. Maksim is going to share some case studies of such ecosystems, and explain how publishers and developers create them. You’ll also learn the ways of their monetization.

More than 17 years in gaming industry. Maksim was involved in creation of internet resource DTF as a producer. While being a cofounder and general manager of KRI (Russian Game Developers Conference), IgroMir exhibition, Comic Con Russia, he took a position of general manager of Epic Esports Events in the end of 2016.

 Add

Third-party services for competitive games. Your way to Esports through product development

Kirill Chuvakov, Product Manager, GOSU.AI

Competitive games have become quite popular, so that third-party developers can profit off a part of their audience. In this talk, we will consider the advantages and disadvantages of the fact that your product is dependent on someone else’s game.

The product manager in the GOSU.AI company, developing artificial intelligence, which helps to improve skills in competitive games. Prior to this, he managed educational projects at Mail.Ru Group.

 Follow  Add  Add

How we will publish your competitive game

Aliaksei Kornyshau, Head of Competitive Gaming, Wargaming.net

In this session we describe how we publish competitive titles based on four-year publishing experience. I present the key findings, explain and demonstrate how to turn them into publishing operations.

Lead regional cross-functional team to develop Wargaming Competitive Gaming across the CIS and grow World of Tanks regional professional league. Publishing: responsible for competitive player journey management and grassroots development in company’s products.

 Add  Add

Brands and esports. Storytelling, exposure, marketing

Stepan Shulga, Creative producer, Starladder

How organize advertising campaign for a brand that want to get exposure in front of esports audience? How to avoid make mistakes?

Responsible for esports projects, online broadcasts and offline events at  Starladder company, has personal experience with over 20 international esports events.

 Follow  Add  Add

Esport in Belarus

Denis Bogush, Chairman, Belarusian eSports Federation

During this session, Denis is going to describe you all the stages of Esport development in Belarus.

The final of the Golden Series of WGL, Twister Cup, TNA Challenge Cup.

 Add

PLATFORMS

“Direct Games”: more social, less instant, nevertheless lightweight games

Maxim Babichev, Head of Games, VK

HTML5 technology makes it possible to develop full-scale, yet lightweight, web applications. These games provide a full-fledged gaming experience comparable to games played on social platforms on the web or most games on mobile devices. That’s what Direct Games is.

Head of Games at VKontakte. Build and grow VK’s game ecosystem, which is consist of social platform, Direct games, esports, communities and other gaming-related stuff.

 Follow  Add  Add  Add

Moving towards Customer Lifetime Value

Stijn Tops, Analytical Lead, Google

In a data-driven world, simply measuring the value of your customer base is no longer enough. Businesses are moving to more advanced models, that allow them to predict how much revenue a unique customer will drive for their business. Marketing, Finance and Product teams can benefit tremendously from these insights. This session will introduce the concept of CLV and show how it can add value to your business.

Stijn is an Analytical Lead at Google, covering Gaming and FinTech customers in Central Europe. He is a product expert on Google’s Apps business, consulting stakeholders across the region on all parts of the mobile growth stack. His role involves building data-driven growth strategies for advertisers that want to scale profitably across the world. He leads performance marketing discussions around lifetime value, cohort analysis, and automation.

Lessons in Appstore Optimization from the Amazon Appstore

Mike Hines, Developer Evangelist, Amazon

Over half of your downloads will come from organic sources, so make sure your listing pages on the appstores are working for you. Amazon will share data on the kinds of improvements you could get and show you actual examples. In addition, Mike Hines will share data from his game when he followed the advice.When this presentation is over, you will know how to build a professional product listing page.

Mike Hines is a recovering tech entrepreneur, developer evangelist for Amazon Appstore, and active advocate for getting more developers over the app poverty line. Mike is on a continuing mission to find out and share what currently is and isn’t working in mobile app monetization, and to identify trends that shape the industry.

GAME DESIGN

Innocent Till Proven Guilty: Waging War Against Cheaters

Arthur Mostovoy, Producer, Pixonic

Arthur will introduce you to various types of cheaters — from refund abusers to hackers — and dangers that rise when they are allowed to run rampant. He will also share what can be done to counter them, using War Robots as an example.

Arthur currently manages anything AR/VR-related in Pixonic — War Robots VR in particular. He used to lead technical game design team (level and content designers) on the company’s most recent project — War Robots.

Arthur is mainly interested in gameplay, balance, economics and product management.

Add

What is the USP, how to create and use it?

Aleksey Rehlov, External Producer, Creative Mobile

The USP is widely underestimated and misunderstood in the game industry, but it is one of the main elements on course to make successful games. This presentation explains what is the USP and how to use it.

Aleksey is an external producer, game design and monetization consultant with Creative Mobile. He has been involved in dozens of game projects for different game platforms (PC, PS2, XBOX, GameCube, PSP, PS3, Mobile, and Social Networks).

 Add

Level Design in Virtual Reality

Linnea Harrison, Lead Level Designer, Neat Corporation

As more games begin to explore Virtual Reality, it is important to consider how being immersed in a space influences the experience of a level. In this talk we will look at how to plan level pacing and space in order to create the feeling and experience intended, with a focus on Virtual Reality.

Linnea began playing games during the ’90s, and through a passion for creating experiences she discovered that she also had a passion for making games. After shipping Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Mirror’s Edge titles, Linnea now works as a VR Level Designer on the game Budget Cuts.

 Follow  Add

Game Mechanics Patterns

Serge Himmelreich, Co-founder, GDCuffs

Patterns of game mechanics are an amazing tool that allows you to deconstruct the gameplay of existing games and build a new complex mechanics. I am going to present you this kit as a smart and useful tool.

Co-founder of the professional blog of game designers – GDСuffs. Professional Game Designer, Indie Developer. Worked in a variety of projects on different platforms, including the Evilibrium, Disciples 3, Etherlords (mobile), Mushroom Wars (mobile) and many others.

Distrust postmortem: procedural generation — to hell and back

Vladimir, Kovtun, Lead GD, Alawar Premium

Most of the time of Distrust development the company spent on its generated world. It was really hard. During his presentation, Vladimir is going to share the company’s experience with those who only starts to dive into an incredible world of procedural generation.

Vladimir is a lead GD of mid-core games at Alawar company.

 Add

Balancing between eSports, pay2win and single player according to Mushroom Wars 2 experience

Andrey Korotkov, Producer, Zillion Whales

How we updated gamedesign of the original game with modern MOBA elements and eSports targeting. Also about global featuring and ESL partnership after the year since the game release.

Entrepreneur, game producer and passionate indie game developer with near 10 years experience in the industry.

 Follow  Add

Balance of mobile shooters. Methodology and approach

Alexander Podrezov, Lead Game Designer, Bigpoint

The talk on game balance methodology that was used during the development of several mobile shooters.

Lead Game Designer in Bigpoint. Worked in Glu Mobile (Lead Game Designer), Zeptolab (Senior Game Designer), was reading lectures in Scream School, 7+ year of experience on mobile.

The most common mistakes in the first game session and how to avoid them

Vera Karpova, Analyst, devtodev

Vera is going to give you some insights on the importance of the first game session. She’ll share some examples of mistakes that game developers usually make. You’ll learn how to avoid the same mistakes and increase efficiency of your first game session.

I have been working as an analyst for more than five years. During this time I analyzed products with various monetization models, participated in different experiments and products promotion.

MIX

Killing managers with AI

Alexander Myasischev, Executive Director, Nival

This talk will explain you why managers can be shifted by Artificial Intelligence. What are the benefits for developers of such condition.

Alexander has 8 years of work experience in game development. Over 10 years on the management positions, half of which in the crisis management field. He took part in the development of both huge PC projects, and small mobile and social projects.

Why multi-product strategies aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution

Igor Klyukin, COO, Pixonic

Spreading your bets over several products always seems like the safest option – each strategy, however, has its upsides and downsides. Igor will detail our experience in adopting different strategies before we returned to a multi-product approach.

Started career in 2008 in F2P gaming industry as a game designer. Joined Pixonic in 2011 as Chief Analyst to establish marketing and in-game analytics for the company. Became COO at Pixonic in 2014, since then Pixonic reached top-10 mobile publishers from CIS and became most known for it’s newest hit title “War Robots” with more than three million dollars monthly revenue on mobile platforms.

Quality over culturalization: Making player-approved quality game through A/B testing

Igor Petrov, Game Design Director, MyTona

Games created for the Western market do not always have success in the Asian. MyTona will share with listeners how to enter the Japanese market in the best possible way through A/B testing.

I am working at MyTona, as a Game Design Director.

Is VR adaptation possible: how to overcome motion sickness?

Alexandra Radchenko, Head of Research Department, Playtestix

Exploring the health effects: we figured out if the adaptation to VR exists through the experiment with various people groups. Users took part in numerous VR sessions with the variety of top platforms under the experts’ supervision. We ready to share all the revelations of the field experiment.

I am fond of games and playtests analytics. The portfolio includes more than 100 projects, worldwide market. My experience includes Ph.D. articles, marketing researches, business strategic planning, target audience and user research.

Science instead of religion: building a team

Albert Zhiltcov, Creative producer, 1C Game Studios

Albert is going to share their experience on how to organize a creative process and how to manage it.

He graduated from a Special professional technical school #2 named after Lopatin in Kovrov in Vladimir Oblast as an instrument mechanic.

He worked on IL-2 Sturmovik which is a series of World War II combat flight simulator video games, and currently, he is working on a game Caliber.

 Add

Licensing games: what to expect

Elena Bugakova, Co-founder, Arpu.guru

What to expect if you are making a licensed game with a nonspecialized investor – difficulties and bonuses.

Game designer for Nival, Allods Team, screenwriter for Game Insight, and lead game-designer in Towards Mars.

 Add

AI for GAMES

Alisa Chumachenko, Founder and CEO, GOSU Data Lab

The rise of Artificial Intelligence powered by Machine Learning techniques has changed the game in a number of fields. Alisa will tell you how the AI will change the industry of games.

Alisa Chumachenko, is a specialist with more than 15 years of game dev experience:

– Astrum Online Entertainment: Vice President of Marketing (2004-2009)

– Game Insight: founder and CEO (2009-2014)

– GOSU Data Lab: Founder and CEO (2017 to the present).

 Follow  Add  Add

Belarus is new Cyprus for IT. Everything you’d ask about new benefits of Hi-Tech Park

Dmitry Matveyev, Partner, Aleinikov&Partners

New Presidential Decree aims at creating the whole ecosystem for IT businesses. E-documents, English law instruments, removal of foreign trade legal barriers and much more.

Dmitry Matveyev, partner at “Aleinikov & Partners”. Dmitry Matveyev has been assisting the projects in the field of IT and IP for more than 10 years.
Dmitry worked for Vizor Interactive, Awem Games and other game projects.

 Add

Road to success in Japan

Arthur Chow, CEO, 6waves

Japan is one of the largest mobile gaming markets yet it is also one of the most differentiated from rest of the world. This session will share the keys to increase the chance of your game in hitting the top grossing chart in Japan.

As CEO of 6waves, Arthur has worked with many companies such as Game Insight and Playrix in bringing their games successfully to the global Facebook audience. The company has shifted its focus to mobile publishing and is one of the top foreign publishers in Japan.

INDIE & POSTMORTEMS

Google Play: Early Access and Earlier…

Eugene Trufanov, Producer, Indigo Bunting

Eugene is going to share the experience of a small independent studio of how to lead and develop a game from idea till Early Access in Google Play. He will also give insights on how to reach maximum efficiency at the early stage in order not to be left with nothing after release.

Head of independent studio Indigo Bunting, developer of 1200, Wordycat and 2For2 games.

 Follow  Add  Add

Bring me Cakes. From San Francisco till release

Alexey Gulev, CEO, Potato Jam
Oleg Pridiuk, Evangelist, King

In this talk, Alexey will delve into development, marketing, and release of Bring Me Cakes, indie game from Minsk. He’ll also share 5 short stories about indie teams, which got a marketing support from King company.

Alexey has been working as indie developer for 7 years.

Oleg previously worked as game evangelist of Unity, also handled game production at Games Insight. At the moment he is King Evangelist and promotes their game engine Defold.

Party Hard. Sequel development difficulties

Alexandr Potapenko, Producer, Pinokl

How to make a successful sequel. How to jump over own head. Repeat or not repeat.

Co-Founder in Pinokl (2010). Worked on social and mobile games Arena: Secrets of Dark, Dino Battle, Real Steel, Mecha Titans during 2010-2014. Work on Party Hard, Party Hard Tycoon, Party Hard 2 since 2015.

 Add  Add

How to get funding for indie and not to fail?

Alexander Simakhin, CEO, Drunken Monday

Alexander will give you insights on how to found investors, what to be afraid of, how not to fail during the contract conclusion.

CEO of indie game company, former tech lead at Techno Bears ltd and destiny development.

 Add  Add

How to create an innovative indie project alone: the G30 story

Ivan Kovalov, Indie

The story of atypical start in the industry and the successful implementation of the first project alone. Difficulties and challenges during the development of the G30 and how to deal with them. How the framework and tight deadlines influence the development, the generation of ideas and the choice of the right direction and what are the bright and dark sides of this path.

Musician, the designer, Front-end developer and Indie Game Developer and author of the game G30, on which he has started working a year ago. With this being his first game project, he was able to prove that you can create quality games alone.

 Follow  Add

MARKETING

PR for Kickstarter campaign. How we got almost a million dollars for Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Karina Konkova, PR Lead of Gaming division, Mail.Ru Group

During this session, Karina is going to touch on such aspects: How to prepare a campaign for Kickstarter? Why does your campaign need PR? Are there any chances for success for russian products? Karina will share a case study on a campaign for Pathfinder: Kingmaker game.

Joined Mail.Ru Group in 2015 to become PR lead of Gaming division. Karina has over 8 years of experience in communications, having worked for the Russian and international PR agencies as SPN Ogilvy and Grayling. And most of all, she just loves games.

 Add  Add

Crowdfunding Marketing Campaign

Kirill Perevozchikov, Head of Marketing, Larian Studios

Explore how Larian Studios used crowdfunding marketing for its award-winning RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2. Dive into the lessons learned during two successful crowdfunding campaigns and collect some of the tips and tricks on how to prepare one of your own!

After 5 years in the gaming press, Kirill switched to PR and marketing and joined Larian Studios in 2013. His latest project is Divinity: Original Sin 2 (2017, PC), announced through a 2M USD Kickstarter campaign and claiming a Metacritic score of 94/100 with 500.000 copies sold in the first 4 days.

 Follow  Add  Add

Games marketing done right with Facebook

Igor Pashchenko, Client Partner, Global Gaming, Facebook

The session will focus on the winning strategies and case studies for growing mobile games with Facebook’s solutions at each stage of game lifecycle.

Igor Pashchenko consults gaming partners on Facebook marketing strategies and leads new business development across EMEA & CIS.

 Add  Add

Entering the global blogger market. Practice, tips, lifehacks, fun facts

Andrey Skochok, Blogger Relations Manager, Mail.ru Group

During this talk, you will learn the difference between  work with bloggers on the West market from the work on the Russian market. Andrey is going to share some case studies of work, funny and ridiculous situations with bloggers.

Andrey used to work at Igromania and 101ХР company. Currently, he is working at Mail.ru with all the client-games of the company (Warface, Armored Warfare, ArcheAge, Revelation, etc).

 Follow  Add

ASO: a guide to promoting apps in stores

Anastasia, Selchuk, UA Lead, Pixonic

You keep buying traffic, and yet there’s little to no output – does this sound familiar? This is a rather typical situation that raises questions as to how one can raise both the conversion rate and traffic volume without hiking up the price per install. During this talk, Anastasia will go into how you can achieve this by optimising your product’s page in app stores, and how you should attract organic users.

Anastasia Selchuk is Pixonic’s leading marketing specialist. She has worked on projects such as Megapolis, Throne Rush, Paradise Island and Jungle Heat, advising developers on marketing-related issues.

 Add

Twitter: how to find the audience for your game around the world

Evgeniy Kozlov, Marketing Director, Httpool

Evgeniy is a marketing director at Httpool Russia, a Twitter partner. He is going to share gaming insights based on big data on the platform and share best in class examples from biggest game developers and publishers around the world.

TBD

 Follow  Add

ART & VISUALS

Sharing is caring: art production at outsource studio

Marya Yartseva, Art Lead, OwlStudio

During this talk Marya is going to share some realias of outsource studio and dataflow method of art development for a project customer. You will learn how to divide your tasks and subtasks efficiently into small parts as a way to speed up the process with quality improvement.

Projects:

  • Casual Heroes – Lead Artist
  • One Day in London – Art Lead
  • Dawn of Civilization – Art Lead

Marya is Art Lead and 2d artist, teacher, the author of courses on gaming graphics, the First of Her Name, Breaker of Office Chains.

 Add

Evolution of tank pipeline in wot. From SD to HD

Andrey Sarafanov, Senior 3D Artist, Wargaming

This lecture will cover the full cycle of tank production, touching on the complexity of creating photoreal historically accurate vehicle.

Andrey spent 5 years as a 3D modeler in the aircraft and jewelry industry. After that, he was a 2D artist in mobile games, and in 2014, he joined Wargaming where he now works as a senior 3D artist in tank department.

 Follow  Add  Add

Marketing Art – let me speak from my heart

Vera Velichko, CEO/Art-director, Owl Studio

During this talk, Vera is going to unravel the secrets of marketing art: perceptual psychology, insights on technique of performance, some statistics based on real projects.

Vera learned to draw 23 years ago. 9 years of which she dedicated to gaming industry. In 2015 she founded Owl Studio which specializes in graphic outsource. During 2017 Owl Studio completed 11 big projects, opened an online school CG Artnest, and released 2 episodes of a visual novel game One Day in London.

 Follow  Add

Pipeline of creating procedural PBR materials in Unreal Engine 4

Zahar Scherbov , Lead material artist, Vizor Games

This talk is going to unravel you the variants of materials creation in Unreal Engine. You will learn what instruments you can use and what results you can achieve.

Zahar has over 5 years of experience of art development for mobile games as a 3d artist. He started to create the materials for PC games about 3 years ago. Currently he’s working at Vizor Games as a lead material artist.

AUDIO

Legal issues: game’s soundtracks

Andrey Krivosheev, CEO, Copyrightlawrussia.com

The session addresses legal issues that are encountered most often in composers’ relations with publishers, game developers, rights management societies. We’ll talk about contracts, the deposit of works, limiting the use of the music and other important issues.

16 years+ professional expertise in copyright and related rights. I’m lawyer from Russia and have graduated HSBI on game development in 2015.

Add

How to complete a set of basic plug-ins and not to get broke

Michael Malkov, Composer, Between August and December

With free plugins it is possible to achieve decent results in most of basic tasks like equalization, compression, metering, saturation and other. I’ll tell which of vast multitude of plugins I found to be good.

Wrote music for “Everlasting Summer”, “Leave Me Alone” and less famous projects; worked for “iichan eroge team”/Soviet Games, Moonworks. Besides of game scores, self-released 1 full-size album, 2 EPs and several singles.

 Follow

Why Wwise?

Yauhen Trubin, Senior Sound Designer, Wargaming

  1. The advantages of working in Wwise
  2. Examples of building systems in Wwise

Senior Sound Designer at Wargaming.net – 3 years.

Creative and passionate Sound Designer experienced in game audio.

Sound Designer working on:

– World of Tanks

– World of Tanks Blitz

 Add

Sound is a big part of product perception

Aleksey Tomanov, Audio Team Lead, Wargaming.net

Unfortunately, the domestic media industry is not aware of the influence of sound on audience. During this session, Aleksey is going to touch on the importance of sound in games and cinema. You’ll also learn how to increase the general level of media content production with the help of right approach to sound effects development.

Aleksey has been in game development since 2006. He worked at Floodlight Games as a game designer, and (since 2011) as a sound designer. Alexey came to Wargaming in 2013 and developed audio concepts and sound design for World of Tanks (PC) and Blitz. In 2014, he became the Minsk audio team lead.

 Add

The use of AR at musical games

Alex Parhimovich, Lead iOS Engineer, Gismart

The session is about the designing and development of music mobile game using AR on the example of Gismart company.

Alex has over 5 years of experience in iOS app development. He’s passionate about music and games work. Works at Gismart since its founding.

 Add  Add

Sound design in trailers music

Arseni Khodzin, Keepforest Instruments

In this session, Arseny will talk about the working formulas of the track structure in the Hollywood trailer industry, the correct combination of sound design and pictures, the construction and analysis of climax in the trailer track.

Keepforest Instruments, 8dio, Trailer Rebel, Sonic Symphony, RSM, Audiomachine, Dos Brain, end etc.

What is IADG?

Serj Phomin, Owner, Phonophilist

During the talk, Serj will share the story of IADG development and what it works on now.

Currently he works at Phonophilist.com. 1CGS – Caliber. Wargaming – World of Tanks, World of Warplanes. Allods Team – Allods Online. Gaijin Sound – Heroes of Might and Magic V: Tribes of the East.

Serj has more than 14 years of experience of sound design for video games.

WORKSHOPS & OTHER EVENTS

yandex_company

Workshop: development of a real-time HTML game in a browser

Vsevolod Shmyrov, Team Lead, Yandex

During this workshop Vsevolod is going to add a network mode to his game which will have a constant connection with a server. After that he is going to play that game.

His current work is not connected with games. Vsevolod used to work at progrestar, leading social game developer in Russia.

Add  Add

ADVISERS

Conference content is prepared with the help of our advisors.

Alex Nichiporchik, CEO @ tinyBuild

Alex Nichiporchik

CEO, tinyBuild

velichko_cut

Vera Velichko

CEO, Art-director, OWL-Studio

kovtun_cut

Vladimir Kovtun

Lead Game Designer, Alawar

sergey_babaev_cut

Sergey Bababev

Independent Expert, DTF managing partner

4843

Valentin Simonov

Field Engineer, Unity Technologies

Konstantin Sakhnov

Head of Game Department, Rocket Jump

Aleksey Savchenko

Licensing Manager, Epic Games

Tanja Evdokimenko

Founder, Values Value

Alexandra Pestretsova

Independent Expert

Olga Khomenko

Co-founder, PlayToMax

Ressa Schwarzwald

Audio Producer, tinyBuild

Stepan Shulga

Producer, Starladder