SESSIONS & SCHEDULE

Day Zero

May 16

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

First Day

May 17

09:00 — 10:00 Registration
10:00 — 13:30 Sessions
13:30 — 15:30 Lunch break
15:30 — 18:00 Speed Game Dating
15:30 — 18:00 Sessions
20:00 — 01:00 Official DevGAMM Party

Second Day

May 18

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

KEYNOTES

pobst_speaker

What Hidden Path Learned Building CS:GO

Jeff Pobst, CEO, Hidden Path Entertainment

Jeff is a Founder and CEO of Hidden Path Entertainment. He has been heavily involved in the gaming industry for almost twenty years holding such roles as game programmer, producer, and chief operating officer. Before co-founding HPE 11 years ago, Jeff was a group leader at Microsoft for the Xbox and Xbox 360 platforms.

He has shipped over 30 different game titles on multiple PC, console, and VR platforms including Hidden Path Entertainment titles such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Age of Empires II HD, the Defense Grid franchise, and more. Prior to HPE, Jeff had the privilege of bringing games in the Half-Life, Homeworld and Lord of the Rings franchises to market.

Hidden Path Entertainment got an amazing opportunity to work with Valve and build a new version of Counter-Strike some years ago. With two existing popular versions of CS already being played, Jeff Pobst talks about the journey Hidden Path took to help build a version of Counter-Strike that had a chance to unify the CS audience.

Game Design by Community (based on Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread and Worlds Adrift)

Imre Jele, Co-founder, Creator-In-Chief, Bossa Studios

Lifelong gamer and game-creator, Imre is an expert in game design, narrative, crossmedia and audience engagement. He’s known for promoting innovative and collaborative creative approaches including Bossa’s regular internal Game Jams.
Throughout his colourful career, Imre has worked on a wide range of game genres and platforms. He’s Co-founder and Creator-in-Chief of Bossa Studios – winner of multiple BAFTA and other awards, creator of Surgeon Simulator and Worlds Adrift.
Imre has been serving on BAFTA Games Committee since 2012, where his focus are to increase the popular cultural perception and governmental recognition of games, and helping young talent entering the industry.

Bossa Studios is famous for creating strange games in strange ways. We learnt to let go of dictatorial auteurship and embrace co-creation with our audience, allowing players to make us laugh through the irreverent comedy of Surgeon Simulator and build Worlds Adrift together, making it the first community-crafted MMO.

Move, or die…

Nicolae Berbece, Lead Bug Designer, Those Awesome Guys

Nicolae Berbece is an indie game developer from VampireLand (Romania) and the designer of Move or Die, the friendship ruining party game. He founded “Those Awesome Guys”, a small indie dev team striving to be the developers they would support as gamers.

Get your phone out and google “Move or Die”. Check out the trailer and look it up on steamspy. Done? Good! Now come see me attempt to figure out why my game sold as well as it did breaking everything down from development to marketing and post-release updates while being on stage.

Communication for the Benefit of the Project and Artistic Freedom

Max Schulz, Visual Development & Co-Art Direction, THREAKS

Max Schulz has worked as a Concept Artist & Illustrator for video games and movies the last 10 years. His latest work include Injustice 2, Wonder woman. He is currently working with the Hamburg Indie Studio Threaks. The focus of his work lies in creating coherent/comprehensive design visions.

In this session Max will talk about the impact personal opinions can have and should have in a professional work environment and the ways to present, justify and incorporate creative design decisions into a highly focused and fast-paced production

Ask Google Play Anything

Dmitri Martynov, Head of Google Play Apps & Games, Russia & CEE
Roman Mardot, Business Development Manager CEE & Russia, Google Play

Dmitri Martynov is the Head of Google Play Apps & Games, Russia & CEE at Google. In his role, he helps apps & games businesses from Russia & CEE to find success on Android and Google Play. Prior to joining the Google Play team, Dima was a Regional Developers Relations Program Manager at Google Russia. Pre-Google, Dmitri spent almost 10 years at Microsoft, in various roles, focusing on Cloud Computing and Microsoft’s Azure platform. Dmitri has a BA in Computer Science from Moscow State University of Instrument Making and Information Science.

Roman Mardot has been working in the video-gaming and Business Development domain for the past 10 years. He attaches a big importance to the quality of products and the passion that drives the teams who are making great games.

Join Dmitri Martynov, Head of Google Play Apps & Games, Russia & CEE at Google, for a Q&A session on anything you’ve ever wanted to know about the games industry.

Hunting for exoplanets in EVE Online

Attila Szantner, CEO, Massively Multiplayer Online Science

Attila feels very lucky to have combined his two passions with Massively Multiplayer Online Science: citizen science and games. Before he had worked in IT, and in 2002 he co-founded iWiW, which was the biggest social network in Hungary with almost 5 million users at its height.

Project Discovery Exoplanets is the second iteration of the citizen science efforts in EVE Online, which became the most active citizen science efforts of all time with 70 million classifications submitted by players. Come and hear about the story, the results, the design challenges, the future.

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Rami Presents

Rami Ismail, Business & Development, Vlambeer

Rami Ismail is the Business & Development Guy at Vlambeer, a Dutch independent game studio known best for Nuclear Throne, Ridiculous Fishing, LUFTRAUSERS, Super Crate Box, GUN GODZ and Serious Sam: The Random Encounter.

Rami Ismail will share his experience being an indie developer for the last 7 years, launching games in different environments and dwell on problems in the industry as of now.

SPECIAL EVENTS

Workshop: Using cloud services in game development

Ivan Fateev, Tech Evangelist, Microsoft

Ivan Fateev is a tech evangelist in Microsoft. He specializes in modern application architecture and best practices of software development. He has a great experience both in server and client development. He started his career as a web developer in 2008 at PHP. After that, in 2010, he worked with client development of iOS apps, programming at Objective C. Later on, in 2012, he started a career in game development as a C++ Developer. After that, he used Unity/C# stack. Now, he specializes in app development with the use of cloud services.
NB! Please, bring your own laptop for workshop!

During this workshop you will learn: saving game progress from Unity directly; using cloud to deliver downloaded content.
NB! Please, bring your own laptop for workshop!

Workshop: Try Corona on

Vadim Bashurov, Evangelist, Corona Labs

Indie Game developer from 1990
Author of PC game “Pole Chudes”, 1991
Author of iOS game “Six Towers” (was UK TOP 1, US TOP1 in 2012)
10 years 3D numerical simulation in Intel.

Write a code in 45 minutes! 1 project – and you’re testing your game on all the platforms simultaneously. That’s easy. During this workshop Vadim will prove you that simplicity and promptness of games creation on Corona is not just a marketing trick. Take your laptop with you, download Corona SDK beforehand and see everything for yourself.

How bad sounds ruin your life: Interactive experience

Vasiliy Filatov, Founder, sound designer, SoundDesigner.PRO

Composer, sound designer, media manager.
In 2008 opened a studio SoundDesigner.PRO that helps brands find their own unique sound. As well I lectured about the sound design, about music in cinematography and media producing.
Founder of Sound Design Institute.

Interactive master class, during which you will participate in creating sound effects for the game, the movie scene and the digital interface. Together with the lecturer, you will determine and choose the best sound solution. Also you will learn about sound, as an element of empathy and drama.

TECHONOLOGY & DEVELOPMENT

Visual Tools for Level Design and Shader Creation in Unity 2018

Alessia Nigretti, Technical Evangelist, Unity Technologies

Alessia is a Technical Evangelist at Unity and AI enthusiast. She started developing small games at game jams, and she joined Unity to demonstrate feature projects and share tips about Unity at game conferences around the world. As a gamer, she is passionate about immersive story-based adventures.

The session covers the new powerful tools for artists and level designers in Unity 2018: ProBuilder – which provides artists with the power to build complex geometry within Unity; Shader Graph – a zero-knowledge shader editing tool that allows for rapid creation of materials; FBX Importer – to speed up artists’ workflow significantly.

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Twitch Integration – Implementation and Tricks

Alex Rose, Lead Developer, Alex Rose Games

Alex is a multi award winning game developer, and creator of Super Rude Bear Resurrection, which received Gamespot’s GOTY Editor’s Choice award. The game was one of the first Twitch Store titles and has many Twitch specific features.

This talk will show how to implement Twitch features in your PC game, specifically using Unity and C# to read from Twitch’s IRC chat. Future proofing that will prevent updates from breaking your game, and quick login.

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Lifelong learning games: while True: learn()

Oleg Chumakov, CEO, Luden.io

Programmer in Nival (strategy PC & mobile games)
R&D Lead in Nival
CEO in Luden.io

This talk will focus on the decisions made while development of the simulation game about programming, AI/ML. We will explain why we do see industry’s mission in the combination of lifelong learning and games. How we found the audience and why we decided to make a game for the very narrow audience. Talk: 60% marketing, 30% game design, 10% stories.

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How to manage animations in a multiplayer souls-like project and survive

Dmitrii Kozlov, Lead Developer, Vizor Games

Dmitrii Kozlov is a lead developer on a new hardcore multiplayer game by Vizor Games. He leads a team in charge of gameplay features, and works on architecture of important systems lying in foundation of the game with tight communication with other team members.

A multiplayer session-based game with melee focus requires many animations and logic dependent on them. Dmitrii will talk about how can one avoid getting stuck in nested checks when deciding what animation to play, when an animation state machine is your worst enemy, when designing a system comfortable for different roles in the team.

Examples of automated testing of games in Unity

Eugene Eliseev, Unity Developer, Crazy Panda

Unity tech Eugene Eliseev is a professional game developer who worked in such companies as ZeptoLab, Social Quantum and Interactive moolt. The most famous projects are the Cut the Rope series and Papermates. Now he works in Crazy Panda and helps to develop social games.

This talk is about automated testing of games in Unity. We’ll take the Unity Test Runner and consider common problems that arise during the creation of integration tests. Separately, the methods of comparing screenshots and other more rare but interesting ways of applying the tests will be considered.

Soul of a man: Cyberpunk Environment

Timur Ozdoev, Environment artist, Self-employed
Andrew Indrikson, Project lead, Trace studio
N Kayurova, Head of 2d department, Trace studio

Timur had experience working in different companies in St. Petersburg as 3d Artist, he was lucky to took part in the development of the games like Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Assetto Corsa, World of Warships, World of Tanks.
At the moment he is a indie-developer in a small team of his friends.

Andrew Indrikson, 3D Art Lead at Trace Studio. Working in game development since 2011. Created art assets for Halo Anniversary, Call of Duty and various other AAA titles.

N Kayurova, 2D concept artist. Worked at Wargaming.net, Trace Studio. She teaches at the Amlab.me portal.

Andrew Indrikson, Timur Ozdoev, and N Kayurova is going to talk about their newest project, created for the #NeonChallenge, organized by Unity.

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Why it is good to use Finite-State Machines in Game Development

Alеna Ponomarenko, Engine && Tools Programmer, Social Quantum

Alеna Ponomarenko is in game development industry for 7 years and for now works as engine programmer at Social Quantum. Early she worked at Zillion Whales, mostly known of Mushroom Wars games series.

Finite-State Machine sounds like kinda rocket science. But actually it’s a very useful concept for game development – even in case you’re developing just a small game.

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Infraworld: a long hard way to GRPC-based microservice interoperation for UE4

Raman Chakhouski, Lead R&D Software Engineer, Vizor Games
Nikita Miroshnichenko, R&D Software Engineer, Vizor Games

As a professional programmer, Raman is working in game development industry for 5 years. Formerly as a programmer and an architect of Vizor’s own game engine, since 2017 Raman dove into Unreal engine 4 and now developing network client as well as editors and subsystems for project’s needs.

Nikita:
As a graduate of České vysoké učení technické in Prague, worked in outsource game development companies across CIS. Now as a R&D and engine programmer, Nikita is responsible for creating robust network client for UE4-project.

This speech unveils an experience of integration and usage of GRPC library from Google as a transport layer, making UE4 client possible to communicate with microservices. Moreover, the speakers will present their own tool, making possible UE4 to work with GRPC fast and seamless way with either C++ or Blueprints cross-platform.

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Imitation of activity: simple and convincing AI for games

Igor Gladyshev, Lead engineer, 1C Game Studios

Igor Gladyshev is the lead programmer of 1С Game Studios. In his 12 years career, he has worked for Gaijin Entertainment, Akella, Glu Mobile, Pixonic and 1CGS. He has worked on such projects as Postal 3, Frontline Commando 2, War Robots and now Caliber.

The session will tell you about the creation of the AI ​​system for the cooperative mode of the multiplayer game Caliber. It will describe why we choose this implementation; how developers use utility-based decision making for AI and action planning with influence-map. Concrete examples of AI implementation will be shown including debug tools.

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Practical ways of optimizing and debugging memory leaks in Unity games

Andrey Oleynikov, Unity Teach Lead, Crazy Panda
Pavel Shchevaev, CTO,  BIT.GAMES

Andrey is Unity tech lead in the company “Crazy Panda”. He is engaged in the management of the department, designing and developing the application architecture and the common software core for the company’s gaming projects.

Pavel has been developing software for 15 years in which most of the time he devoted to games development. He takes part in different Open Source projects. He gives talks at conferences from time to time. Pavel has a great experience of work with technologies both on server and client. He is interested in creating of entertaining mobile and console games with the efficient use of the device capabilities.

Memory leaks are one of the most common problems of any game projects. Due to the specific compilation methods, Unity developers do not have convenient tools for diagnosing and optimizing them. In this report, Andrey and Pavel are going to cover this problem comprehensively and tell about the opportunities and means that they managed to use on their personal experience.

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TALENT MANAGEMENT

Content is Key: Pixonic Employer Branding Experience

Nikita Guk, Chief Strategy Officer, Pixonic

Starting as a copywriter and journalist, changed his career path in 2015, switching to PR to help startups reach their audience in Russia, Europe, and the US. Landed a job at Pixonic as an employer brand developer and director of PR in 2016. Currently works in the position of a Chief Strategy Officer.

Why Pixonic picked content marketing as a base for its HR brand and how exactly it helps to keep the industry curious about the company: a report by Pixonic Chief Strategy Officer Nikita Guk.

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How to Innovate and Grow your HR Brand

Andrey Ivashentsev, Chief Innovation Officer, Yode Group International

Before he finished high school he started to work in IT. He was appointed to the first management role at age of 20, largely because of the deep tech knowledge of Microsoft platform and technologies. Three years later, he was promoted to the position of head of the Technology Evangelism and became the youngest people manager in Microsoft Russia at the time. In April 2016, in the role of Chief Innovation Officer he began to land new innovative technologies in Game Insight. From November 2017, as an independent expert, he does consulting and work on his own projects.

In this session, Andrey will share his insights about using innovative technologies and approaches and how it affects your team loyalty and attracts new team members. He will also cover how it influences company HR Brand inside and outside the market.

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Quit scrolling your Facebook feed, go get a job! – or Personal Brand Building Basics

Sergey Volkov, HR Director, 1C Online Games

Sergey has been in HR domain since the 4th year in the University (it’s hard to tell how much time has passed), he’s been in game development for 7 years and most of the last year he spent working as HR Director for Videogame branch of 1C. He still believes in professional HR in game dev.

How to build your personal brand and get awesome job offers and badass conference speaker invitations. How to look like a real expert, not a windbag scum on the web. General knowledge of what is good and what is bad in terms of personal HR brand.

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Big Salary Report 2018

Tanja Loktionova, Founder, VALUES VALUE

Tanja is the head of VALUES VALUE, which helps gamedev companies build their HR, PR and recruiting processes, hire teams and setup new offices.
Calls herself a hardcore casual player, has passed thousands of match-3 levels, loves games, people and cats.

VALUES VALUE has held the second salary survey of the Russian-speaking game development industry. Tanja will share its results for the first time. There will be data from more than a thousand respondents, a comparison with the previous year, and info on what else exept salaries motivates and demotivates game developers.

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Make your brand great again. Choose the right time and action plan

Yuriy Krasilnikov, Director, Business Development, Belka Games

Yuriy Krasilnikov is the Director of Business Development of Belka Games. He is responsible for new strategic markets for company products, new directions and brand awareness. Yuriy also leads all relationships with partners and platforms.

Your company has a successful game but no one knows about your company. Yes, it’s possible! You try to hire a new professional for your team but all ask you: “Who are you?” It’s time to work with your brand and make it great. When? Why? How? Yuriy will try to cover these questions.

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Employees’ recommendations make the difference. Employee as an advocate of Employer’s Brand

Olga Abashova, HR Director, G5 Entertainment AB

Olga Abashova has 9 years of experience, specializing in Marketing, PR, and HR. Prior to G5, she was Marketing Director at Realore, a developer of casual games. Since joining G5, Olga set up the development studio in Kaliningrad as the Head of the Office. Since 2017, she has been HR Director at G5.

Employees’ recommendations are the main index of Employee Engagement, serving as an effective channel to attract candidates. Employee is an Ambassador of the company brand and a brand influencer at the same time. Olga will tell how to make employees more engaged and how to create the right message which employees should bring to the world.

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PLATFORMS

Boosting Engagement with Competitive Games

Mike Hines, Developer Evangelist, Amazon

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.

In this presentation, Mike Hines will talk about how competition promotes engagement and retention. Armed with research and data, Mike will share what Amazon has learned about where and when to offer competitions in your game, guidance on what kind of competitions to offer, and the right and wrong ways to use competitions. You’ll also learn how to pay for the player engagements only after you get the engagement!

google_apps_flyer_2

Conversation with the audience: modern marketing and analytics from Google and AppsFlyer

Sandzhar Ismailov, Head of Industry, Entertainment, Google
Arseniy Alikhanov, Analytical Consultant, Google
Alexander Grach, Head of Sales, AppsFlyer

Sanjar Ismailov
Old, very old googler (over 8 years) who loves playing games

Arseny Alikhanov
He is working in internet marketing since 2007. Has a vast experience both on project and agency sides. His primary focus is marketing and analytics.

Alexander Grach
He is responsible for growing AppsFlyer business in Eastern European and Mediterranean countries.

Google and AppsFlyer specialists will review current challenges and solutions, as well as analyze situations suggested by the audience on the spot. From presentations-monologues to dialogue and solutions.

GAME DESIGN

How to think out of the box you created

Vladimir Krasilnikov, Head of Game Design Department, Pixonic

A math school graduate, who started in game development in 2011 as a Junior Game Designer. Started working at Pixonic in 2015, focusing on War Robots — the game that didn’t have that much recognition back then. Leads the game design department as of last year.

The original War Robots meta was based on only three classes of robots: light, medium, and heavy. Our own Pixonic Head of Game Design will tell you what kinds of problems you may encounter with this approach, and how to find practical solutions to these problems.

How to figure all it takes with Excel and elementary education

Aleksey Rehlov, Head of Russian Branch, Creative Mobile

Aleksey is an external producer, game design and monetization consultant with Creative Mobile. He is a veteran of the game industry, and has been in it for over 10 years. He has been involved in dozens of game projects for different game platforms (PC, PS2, XBOX, GameCube, PSP, PS3, Mobile, etc).

A lot of game designers who don’t have any higher technical education need to do math on their projects. More often than not, it is very time consuming and is a real pain in the neck, yet the results can still be disappointing. This talk will help you save your glial cells and attain more predictable results in the future.

Neighbor’s design

Nikita Kolesnikov, Game design, Dynamic Pixels

Nikita Kolesnikov – game designer, artist, animator and music composer of Dynamic Pixels. Author of a single game – Hello Neighbor.

“Hello Neighbor” is unexpected YouTube phenomenon of 2017. Game that stretched its gameplay over a year long period. How was it all created? How all of it worked out? Is it fun to sleep on the floor? How not to die?

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From idea to proposal: a method to make your game concept viable and strong

Sviatoslav Torik, Product Vision Expert, Research & Development, Wargaming.net

Sviatoslav has spend most of his life at the screen, with game console or PC. 15 years he’s been writing about video games, and 10 years – actually creating them as a game designer, lead GD, game director etc. Now he’s working for Wargaming R&D, researching new ways to make games.

This talk will explain a method to create and revise your game idea in a new, unexplored way. Sviatoslav will guide you through the whole process: from stating the idea to explained possibilities and USPs. To be totally fair with you Sviatoslav will provide a challenging game idea example as well.

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Creating Game Design Tools

Konstantin Sakhnov, Head of Game Department, Rocket Jump

Konstantin Sakhnov is the Head of Game Department at Rocket Jump, a Moscow studio developing mobile games for 50+ million players worldwide. He is playing a key role in different studio’s projects sharing his extensive experience in game design and production.

This talk will cover useful cases of creation and tuning different game design tools (no need of in-depth programming skills) that can help every game designer optimise his work.

Prototyping pipeline: Lessons learned

Ivan Barishnikov, Team Lead Prototyping division, Wargaming.net

Ivan was at prototype division from the start, pass thru all problems and situations that happens with it and can share his experience. Now he working on standalone prototypes(PC, VR, Mobile, consoles) and features for company projects.

The session will focus on prototyping pipeline. Building process from the scratch, evolving and working on mistakes. Problems that we’ve got and solutions that we’ve found.

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UX for VR

Pavel Sovushkin, Head of UX department, WOWlab

My name is Pavel Sovushkin.I have been a gaming industry professional since 2010.
Currently I am the leading UX designer of VR projects for the company: “WOWlab”, which develops b2b projects and the project of its own franchise with VR full immersion technologies.

During this session, Pavel is going to share the insights on UX design for VR projects.
You’ll learn: what actions will help you to reduce the risks and improve the quality of a project at the pre-production stage; what you should take into account to make a VR project intuitively understandable and interesting for audience; how to make a prototype of a VR project in two days.

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MIX

Shame and money

Albert Zhiltcov, Creative producer, 1C game studios

He is a self-made man and he would like to help others to experience mistakes more easily.

Let’s talk about what money is in the gaming industry in Russia. Do you really need to become an entrepreneur for this?

Dawn of Blockchain Games

Sergey Kopov, Founder, 0xGames

Sergey Kopov managed the development in FunCorp, i-Free, HeroCraft for more than 10 years. Now he experiments with new technologies and develops his projects. Last of them is the 0xGames blockchain game development studio.

Blockchain has already earned an ambiguous reputation. Some people believe in its bright future, others rush to bury, referring to technical imperfections and a large number of scammers in the market. Without going to extremes, Sergey will talk about the emerging market of cryptogames, game mechanics and development features.

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INDIE & POSTMORTEMS

How did we make the biggest game on Defold in 1 year

Nikolay Armonik, Technical Director, Easy Team

In the industry since 2000. The author-creator of the game “Discord Times” (2004), the technical director of the games “Legends of Eisenwald” (2015) and “Family Age” (2017). A big fan of hand-made graphics engines and huge shaders.

An extremely story about how the forces of a small young team for one year was created the largest game on Defold engine. Presentation of the solutions used, statistical measurements, defeated problems.

The X-Files Postmortem

Alina Brazdeikene, Game Producer, Creative Mobile

Alina Brazdeikene is a video game producer, screenwriter and narrative designer with some strong TV background. Being in the industry for more than 5 years, Alina had a chance to work with critically and commercially acclaimed franchises like The X-Files and The Simpsons.

The talk about ups and downs of two-year development of The X-Files: Deep State game from scratch to post-launch, including: pitch, storytelling, work with brand and big franchise holders, work with community.

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Peace, Death! Postmortem

Azamat Bayzulaev, Indie, AZAMATIKA

Azamat “Xageu” Bayzulaev started his career as a developer in 2015 when he was tired of his life. He named his team as AZAMATIKA and developed nearly 10 games. A lot of people were really hyped up about Gun Done and Peace, Death!

During this session, Azamat is going to share the insights on Peace, Death! development. He’ll tell about all the mistakes and how he managed to correct them. You’ll also learn what were the problems with the game launching for mobile devices. This session will be really useful for small indie game studios.

BUSINESS & MARKETING

eSports for game developer

Alexey Ustyantsev, eSports platform manager, Mail.Ru Games

Over 15 years experience: both in game development/operations and web development. Head of eSports platform at Mail.Ru Games. Before that – CTO in Nival Network, Head of Nival GamesLab, lots of other great companies.

When you think about eSports – you imagine Dota2 International, stadiums filled with people and streams with millions of viewers. And you know that all of that applies only to top competitive games. So why would a normal down to earth game developer want anything with that?

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Marketing. Understanding your audience

Anna Grigoryeva, Chief strategy officer, GameNet

Anna has more than 10 years of experience in game industry. She brings an impressive breadth of knowledge with producing and publishing more than 25 games, including RF Online, R2, Lineage II, Point Blank and Black Desert.

If you have a finished Game, you need to know your audience. From this talk you will learn: what is positioning and brand philosophy, audience segmentation and how it is used, and some useful advertising metrics.

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How to deal with Chinese developers: lessons learned

Dmitry Ryabchikov, CEO, CreaGames

Dmitry is a Founder and CEO of CreaGames Ltd. For the last 7 years he has been also holding such roles as BD manager, BD director and chief operation officer. Much earlier Dmitry already had strong ties with game industry being one of the best FPS pro-players in Unreal Tournament 2004 in Europe and Russia.

When you take on a Chinese game, you need to know what to expect, and be aware of all the factors involved. We’ll share our experience in working with Chinese developers, and also talk about the features and risks of localization.

Dante-style QA. Which circle of hell is awaiting you in case you refuse testing

Evgeny Krukov, Deputy Head of QA Department, Bytex LLC

Having started work in industry in Bytex development department, Evgeny Kryukov soon attained the position of the deputy head. In 2016, he was transferred to Bytex QA department, consisting of more than 150 skilled specialists. At present, Evgeny occupies a position of deputy head of QA department.

On each stage of development, there is always a concern about creating an internal QA-department or engaging outsource testers. In this report, Evgeniy will investigate some typical problems facing the projects which decided to refuse testing, and consequences of such refusal.

Game analytics battle: Playtest vs Statistics

Alexander Dzyuba, CEO, Sense.Vision
Vasiliy Sabirov, Lead analyst, Devtodev

Alexander Founder & CEO at Sense.Vision.
We do the most scientific playtests worldwide with real players.
5+ years in playtesting, the first professional CIS team. The highest international quality standards. Loving games and developers.

Vasiliy started his career working at a game monetization service. Then he worked as a Lead Analyst at a big MMO game, where he learned specifics of virtual economy. At the moment Vasiliy is the Lead Analyst at devtodev, and he has already helped more than 50 game projects to improve their KPI.

Two leading in CIS game analytics companies with the different approach to analytics are going to have a “battle”. Or, rather, to cover a number of game development and operation cases – how to solve them with instruments from each company with direct comparison and winner determination.
Full coverage and the final point in game analytics.

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Game Art: the financial aspect

Vera Velichko, CEO, Art Director, Owl Studio

Drawing more than 22 years, last 10 years in game industry. In 2015 she  founded Owl Studio, and have more than 20 project that she’ve been leading in her portfolio. Currently, they’re working with the leading publishing companies of mobile and social games on Russian and foreign markets. Vera also made an education activities, for instance, last year she opened their Online School for artists.  

You can talk a lot about art and how it is made: beautiful, functional, and technically correct. But only a few people know how to put a price on it. In this talk, Vera will explain you on what features depends on the price of the artwork, what are the pricing policies on the market. You’ll learn how to save money while developing a visual content for your game.

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Localization with a 1,890% Return on Investment: from Theory to Practice

Denis Khamin, CMO, Allcorrect Group

The CMO at Allcorrect since 2006. Ideologist of the only specialized conference on localization in Russia.

A practical case study of implementing an ROI-driven approach to localization (focused on return on investment) in collaboration with the developers of a mobile game, as well as an approach to calculating return on localization investment and a concept of localization focused on the developer’s profits.

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Boost app downloads without a budget!

Iryna Pyrih, Product Marketing Manager, Gameloft

Marketing manager who has practical experience in entertainment industry and works in one of the biggest gamedev companies – Gameloft. Has successful experience and real cases in the app and mobile games promotion. Provided consulting services to startups in CIS countries, Europe and the USA.

Know how improve downloads of your app quickly and without a budget. I’ll explain how to determine your audience, how reach your user with marketing. Only real cases and hardcore are waiting for you!

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How to do financial modeling to attract investments for mobile games

Alexander Nasonov, CEO, GROSSING.GAMES

Alexander began his gamedev career in 2006 at Akella. Since 2010 he has been developing mobile games as a producer, shipping a number of successful projects including an App Store “App of the Year”. Throughout the career Alexander attracted a few hundred thousand dollars via investments deals.

The session is designed to help developers to better plan production budgets, soft launches, release preparations and post release project operation. The principles and approaches to such modeling will be analyzed using a real financial planning case made for the purpose of attracting investments.

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ART & VISUALS

Action is driven by thought: How to create believable character animation

Konstantin Chenchikov, Animation Director, Playrix

Konstantin Chenchikov is Animation Director at Playrix. He graduated from Animation Mentor and has 6+ years of work experience in animation. He is responsible for improving the quality of animation in company’s game and marketing projects, including team development and training.

Animation is usually understood as a collection of motions, actions, and some other visual aspects, but we are going to explore it on a deeper level. Get ready to find out what it takes to create truly realistic characters – in this session we’ll talk about how characters’ internal reasons determine their actions!

Shadow Fight 3: Environment design

Alexander Nemov, Lead Artist, Banzai Games

Alexander Nemov is the Lead 2d Artist at Banzai Games. He’s been in the games industry since 2012, recently specializing in concept art and visual development both in 2d and 3d. His main experience on Unity is working on Shadow Fight 3, mobile 3d fighting game.

This speech is about the evolution of the environment design in fighting games, its specifics and the problems Banzai Games faced in production process.
Alexander will tell you how to make a believable picture and what artistic decisions are worth taking for this.

2D Dynamic Lighting: Tips and Tricks

Kirill Zolovkin, Developer, Gripper Team

Kirill Zolovkin, lead game designer of OctoBox Interactive, has been developing games in GameMaker for 17 years. His projects, Steam Panic and Paper Knight, have won multiple awards including Best Game Design at DevGAMM.
During Game Lynch of his game Gripper all of the experts took off their shirts.

Kirill will speak about the ways light and shadows in 2D can significantly improve the quality of your graphics and — after some investment — your life as well. Using Gripper, a game currently in development, he will demonstrate a number of quick techniques that can create new gameplay situations and atmosphere.

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Between the devil and the deep blue sea: how to keep art-manager’s mind is clear and productivity is high

Marya Yartseva, Art Lead, OwlStudio

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

During this session Maria is going to share how to avoid professional burnout in art-manager daily routine. It will explore some details of art management in outsource studio, where customer and your team both rely on you.

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True purpose of art and 3d artist in AAA projects and how to optimize art production

Alexander Boluzhenkov, Art-Director, Advanced Schematics

More than 10 years in industry as 3D artist. Participated in such projects as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Quake, Doom, Halo, Batman, Evolve, LawBreakers. Supervises a team of experienced artists working for the most difficult tasks – the main characters, weapons, etc.

What is the real role of visual content in modern projects? What else should an artist be able to do besides modeling and texturing? Against the backdrop, increasing sophistication and higher production costs, skills and knowledge enabling to optimize processes, allow to be demanded by a specialist and reduce production costs.

Discussion Panel

Alex Nichiporchik, CEO, TinyBuild

Discussion Panel: Investment and business organization done right

What problems do developers face while seeking funding? What kind of projects are more interesting for investors and and how they make decisions?

Aleksey Savchenko, Licensing Manager, Epic Games

Ilya Karpinskiy, Director, MRGV

Mikhail Verbilo, Product Analytics Lead, Wargaming.net

Tanja Loktionova, Founder, VALUES VALUE

Discussion Panel: Recruiting and employer brand

Why are companies often spoiling their image in search of new employees? We will analyze the main problems, the claims from the candidates and what to do with this.

Marina Goncharova, Head of partnership projects
3i Games, Mail.Ru

Kirill Goncharik, Head Of Life is Feudal MMO Publishing, Bitbox, Ltd

Oleg Dobroshtan, Chief Talent Office, 101xp

Alexandra Pestretsova, Independent Expert (Ex marketing director My.com, Game Insight)

Serge Himmelreich, Game Designer, Co-founder, GDCuffs, ARPU.GURU

Anti-Lynch

Experienced game designers offer publically practical ways of gameplay improvement to 3 selected but not released projects.

Vladimir Kovtun, Creative Mobile

Sviatoslav Torik, Product Vision Expert, Research & Development, Wargaming.net

Gregory Choporov, Producer, 2RealLife

ADVISERS

Conference content is prepared with the help of our advisors.

Alex Nichiporchik

CEO, tinyBuild

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Vera Velichko

CEO, Art-director, OWL-Studio

kovtun_cut

Vladimir Kovtun

Lead Game Designer, Creative Mobile

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Sergey Bababev

Independent Expert

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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

Ressa Schwarzwald

Audio Producer, tinyBuild