SESSIONS & SCHEDULE

Day Zero

November 9

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

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First Day

November 10

09:00 — 10:00 Registration
10:00 — 13:00 Sessions
11:30 — 13:00 iOS Workshop
13:00 — 15:00 Lunch break
15:00 — 18:00 Speed Game Dating
15:00 — 18:00 Sessions
20:00 — 00:00 Official DevGAMM Party

Second Day

November 11

09:00 — 10:00 Registration
10:00 — 13:00 Sessions
13:00 — 15:00 Lunch break
15:00 — 18:00 Unity Certification
17:00 — 18:00 Game Lynch
18:00 — 18:30 People of the Year
18:30 — 19:00 DevGAMM Awards
19:00 — 21:00 Bye-Bye Mingle
21:00 — 00:00 Unreal Party

KEYNOTE

The Journey Of Samorost 3

Jakub Dvorský, CEO, Amanita Design

Jakub Dvorský, the designer and project lead from Czech independent studio Amanita Design will guide you through the 5-year long journey of Samorost 3 development. The talk will cover everything from initial concept and game design to art and animation techniques or sound-design magic.

Jakub Dvorský is the founder, lead game designer and creative director in Amanita Design, Czech based award-winning independent studio best known for puzzle adventure games Machinarium, Botanicula and Samorost series.

From concept to environment art

Marta Dettlaff, Concept Artist, CD Projekt RED
Kacper Niepokólczycki, Environment Artist, CD Projekt RED

Working as a team is an essence of game development. The session will focus on crucial cooperation between concept and environment artist to show you benefits of working together and how it improves their work on The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine expansion pack.

Marta Dettlaff is a Concept Artist working in CD PROJEKT RED studio. She participated in production of “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt”, “Hearts of Stone” and “Gwent: The Witcher Card Game”, however the most important title for her is “Blood & Wine” – the final expansion for “The Witcher” franchise, where she was responsible for most crowd and character designs.

Kacper NIepokólczycki is an Environment Artist at CD PROJEKT RED. He worked on “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” and the final expansion for the game “Blood and Wine”. Previously collaborated with The Farm 51 on “PainKiller HD” and “Deadfall Adventures”. He is a passionate gamer, working in the game development industrie for 5 years.

Alex Nichiporchik, CEO @ tinyBuild

Clustertruck: road to PS4 & XBox One

Alex Nichiporchik, CEO, tinyBuild

Launching games on PC and consoles at the same time isn’t as easy as it seems. Alex Nichiporchik takes a look at Clustertruck’s challenging road to consoles, and what it takes to turn a game jam prototype into a multi-platform release.

Alex Nichiporchik is now a director of tinyBuild GAMES, worked as Innovation Projects Leader at Spil Games for the previous 4 years. He spends his work and leisure time playing games. Since 2010, he’s been moderating and organizing the Game Lynch.

SUPERHOT: turning a game jam success into a full game

Piotr Iwanicki, Game Director, SUPERHOT

SUPERHOT is an innovative FPS game built around idea of “time moves only when you move”, released for PC and Xbox One. The team started the project for a game jam. Piotr will tell you about the lessons they learned in between.

Piotr Iwanicki is a game designer and studio lead responsible for SUPERHOT. He started his career developing games for flash portals and his projects slowly grew and became more visible. He started SUPERHOT as a game jam project and as the game gained recognition, Piotr transformed a mostly amateur team into a full fledged development studio.

Virtual Reality in 2016 from Valve’s point of view

Chet Faliszek, Video Game Writer, Valve

Chet will provide an overview of trends in  Virtual Reality this year. He will talk about what Valve has learned from working internally and with outside developers and discuss the future potential for virtual reality.

Chet is an American videogame writer and one of the main writers for the Valve Corporation. He has worked together with his co-writers in order to create the storylines for the Half-Life and Portal series, along with having personally written the story for Left 4 Dead.

Gamejamming to Success: Surgeon Simulator, Worlds Adrift and Beyond

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

At Bossa, they believe that truly innovative games require disruptive production methods and novel use of technologies. Most companies use new tech and leadership approaches to improve and accelerate what they already do, Bossa team however uses them to inspire themselves to create better games in a better way. Their obsession with doing things differently shines particularly well in their regular internal gamejams which created multiple million selling games like Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread and their ambitious new title; Worlds Adrift.

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.

ROCKING THE FUTURE… how to best prepare for change in the industry

Tony Watkins, Head of EA Games Russia, EA Games

Rocking The Future explores how choices we make on our career paths can influence the direction we take and the speed of career development.

We will identify some tools to help guide those choices – some do’s/ and dont’s.

All presented through the lens and experience of Tony Watkins and his many experiences in Games Industry and FMCG both in the UK and Russia over the past 25 years.

Tony has vast experience centred around strategic development of businesses & brands with some creative input/ talent to support this – including Lavazza Coffee, Tetley, Red Bull, Russian Standard Vodka and Dirol to name a few.

Over the past nine years this has been focused on building a team and successfully developing business for EA on the Russian market – particularly focused on driving digital sales as well as packaged goods direct to key Russian Retailers.

In addition Tony performs in Russia and Europe with his own rock band ‘The Smokebreakers’, has recorded six albums of original songs and in 2000 released his first book ‘Loves Roads’.

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Amazon Lumberyard: end-to-end solutions for game developers

Mike Hines, Developer Evangelist, Amazon

The session will be dedicated to the capabilities of new Amazon Lumberyard engine. Mike is going to tell about the advantages of the engine for AAA games, about native integrations to AWS Cloud and Twitch, and modular architecture.

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.

Fireside Chat: Script writer, producer and game designer walk into a bar…

Leonid Sirotin, Independent Expert
Alex Nichiporchik, CEO, tinyBuild

Leonid Sirotin and Alex Nichiporchik will share their experience and discuss a few burning topics during the fireside chat. This includes: A true nature of gamedesigner, producer and game writer, how their functions differ depending on a project. Good/bad producer: how to save the team. How many game writers does it take to change a light bulb? Mysteries & scandals of game marketing in 2016. And more…

Alex Nichiporchik is now a director of tinyBuild GAMES, worked as Innovation Projects Leader at Spil Games for the previous 4 years. He spends his work and leisure time playing games. Since 2010, he’s been moderating and organizing the Game Lynch.

Leonid Sirotin, 16 years dedicated to gaming. He worked as an advisor to the president and as producer at Astrum. He was a general producer at GameInsight, and was directly involved in making of such hits as Mystery Manor, Mirrors of Albion, Tribez and over a hundred of various titles – social, mobile, desktop ones.

Presently, Leonid is working on his own projects. At DevGAMM, he takes part as an independent gaming industry expert.

GAME POSTMORTEMS

Oceanhorn – from mobile to consoles

Philipp Döschl, Co-Founder/Executive Producer, FDG Entertainment

Oceanhorn has been a massive hit in 2013 on iOS when it was released. Since then, it has sold more than a million units across several platforms. With the port to Xbox One and PS4, both teams at FDG and Cornfox have fulfilled a childhood dream of making a console game. Join Philipp, the Co-Producer of Oceanhorn, in a talk about the challenges and struggles the team was facing when taking this mobile masterpiece to the living room.

Philipp co-founded FDG Entertainment back in 2001 at the age of 19. Having graduated in Sound Engineering and studied Japanese, Philipp can look back onto a video gaming background of about 30 years, starting playing games at only 4 years old, witnessing the evolution and growth of the video gaming industry from the big crash in 1983 to nowadays first hand. After a long journey in Mobile Games, he fulfilled his childhood dream of making console games with the release of Oceanhorn on PS4 and Xbox One in September 2016. He is now travelling around the planet to promote FDG’s games and is the Co-Producer of the Studio’s biggest title so far: Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom.

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The Final Station development process

Oleg Sergeev, Kim Jong-un of Game Design, Do My Best
Andrew Rumak, Programmer, Do My Best

Briefly, in a nutshell about development of The Final Station. Choice of project, engine, graphics style, working on gameplay, toolset and the story. Lots of facts, no twaddling.

The Final Station is the first big game project for Oleg. His previous experience included about ten canceled games that were never released, and 10 years of working as a web designer.

Andrew always liked experimenting with game engines. As a child, he used RPG Maker, GameMaker. He’s into programming in C# for the last five years, works with Unity for the last three years. Over this time he started to make various casual mobile games, used to write extensions for Unity. Since 2013 he worked on the Final Station.

How the paper universe of Fold the World was created

Grisha Raikhman, Co-Founder/Game Designer, Eon Games

This story is about almost 2 years of hard work to make Fold the World. All levels and worlds first were made of paper, it took 3 days of work of entire team to make 1 level. Fold the World is a handmade game.

Grisha Raikhman is a co-founder / game designer from Belarus independent studio Eon games. Worked as a game designer for 7 years, has experience in balancing, writing game scenarios and level design.

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TECHNOLOGY & DEVELOPMENT

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Microsoft Technologies for Game Development – Present and Future

Romuald Zdebskiy, Gaming Lead CEE, Microsoft

In this session we will make the full overview of Microsoft game development technologies with latest updates. From native development with DirectX to middleware engines, from smartphone to PCs and Xbox, from devices to cloud. You will get comprehensive picture on where to put your efforts to get the most from ecosystem and have the biggest support from Microsoft.

Romuald Zdebskiy. Responsible for working with leading game developers in Central and Eastern Europe. Prior to that, coordinated the work of technical experts in software development and management of IT infrastructure at Microsoft in terms of the key technology priorities of the Microsoft platform.

In recent years, he was responsible for the work with a number of key partners of Microsoft on the development of the region and was engaged in the release of the most popular games and applications.

Creating Cloud Backend for mobile multiplayer FPS

Andrey Ivashentsev, Chief Innovation Officer, Game Insight

Most of us see server backend for mobile games as a place to host user profiles and save games. Some of developers moved further and started to implement some scenarios of in-game collaboration including PVP of any kind. But what if we want to create synchronous multiplayer with multiple sessions that would be scalable up to millions of players all over the world? We’d definitely need some kind of cloud.

Andrey Ivashentsev is a Chief Innovation Officer for Game Insight and he is responsible for collaboration with strategic partners and platforms to land new innovative technologies into company’s games. Before that he led Technology Evangelism unit in Microsoft Russia and was responsible for working with GameDev audience, leading gaming studios and also leaded VR/AR ecosystem development in CEE region.

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Unreal Engine 4: Busting 10 Most Common Myths

Aleksey Savchenko, Licensing Manager, Epic Games

The session will turn over a few stones for those who are looking for a candid, no B.S. discussion about tools. Game development is full of legacy and lore, and from time to time it’s useful to get together and talk through how to shrewdly get from point A to point B and achieve your goals without sacrificing quality or breaking the bank. Let’s talk about the realities of accessibility, platforms, pricing and where technology is heading. Hear about moves smart teams are making with our help. Let’s bust a few myths together.

Aleksey Savchenko is a licensing manager from Epic Games Europe, who has been in industry for about sixteen years at this point. Previously, Aleksey worked as a technical evangelist in Epic Games, an executive producer in Black Wing Foundation, producer in Vogster Entertainment and PR executive in GSC Game World. He has also been participating in different roles in couple of dozens of games being developed and shipped to the market, twelve of which was developed with Unreal Engine 3 and 4. Major expertises of Aleksey are in communication, narrative design, production, sales and marketing.

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Practical guide to optimization in Unity

Valentin Simonov, Field Engineer, Unity Technologies

At Unity Technologies Valentin is the one who provides technical support and advice for developer teams. Often he assists at later project development stages, when attempts to fit the project into 60 FPS and 100 MB become so desperate they look more like a ritual dance. Things you need to know, tools you need to use and what you need to pay your attention to – Valentin will cover all this in details during his speech.

Valentin Simonov. Valentin is the one who finds technical solutions for major clients and, in his spare time, he travels over Europe sharing knowledge about the different technical aspects of Unity at various conferences. Before Unity, Valentin worked at Interactive Lab creating intera?tive installations for expos and other events; at Mail.Ru and its branches he worked on social games; delivered lectures at the British Higher School of Design and Mail.Ru Technical Park at Bauman Moscow State Technical University. Valentin translated Unity’s book about shading into Russian and is supporting the open-source projects. He is a graduate of Novosibirsk State University.

AI and navigation in games: problems, solutions, mobile platform optimization

Timur Kozanov, CEO, Double Dice Games

The session will discuss the pitfalls of behaviour development (AI) and gaming substances navigation for RTS games on the example of Boom Beach. The author will also share his experience of optimizing this system for mobile platforms with real examples.

Over 12 years of experience in commercial programming.

Timur developed high-loaded web services for 7 years. Worked for the last 5 years as a leading client-server developer at Social Quantum and Destiny Development.

Presently, he leads an indie studio Double Dice games that works on Willy-Nilly Knight, a tactical RPG title.

Intro to Unreal Engine 4

Sjoerd De Jong, Evangelist, Epic Games

Intro to Unreal Engine 4: Building a game with the power of Blueprints

During this technical in-depth presentation, Sjoerd De Jong, Unreal Engine Evangelist, will build a game from scratch working with freely available Unreal Engine assets. By using the power of UE4’s visual scripting language Blueprints, along with some C++,  a visually appealing flying game will be constructed, and give you as the viewer a great overview of the features and workflow found in UE4.

Intro to Unreal Engine 4: Level building, lighting, post processing

In this follow up presentation, Sjoerd continues work on the flying game and shifts focus to building up the graphics of the game. Level building, effects, post processing, and almost all of UE4s standard lighting features will be covered. The end goal is to create a realistic apartment room. It is meant to give the viewer an overview of the various tools found in the Unreal Engine, and the overall process of creating a simple game.

As Evangelist for Epic Games, Sjoerd travels around Europe to talk about and teach Unreal Engine 4. With 17 years of experience in the Unreal Engine, Sjoerd is an expert at a wide range of topics. Throughout his diverse career he has worked in everything ranging from AAA development to running his own indie studio to education. His most recently released game is The Solus Project for PC and Xbox One.

The story of MSQRD

Sergey Gonchar, Software Engineer, Facebook

The talk is dedicated to the story of MSQRD. Speaker will talk about team, first launch, development processes and common principles used for product development.

Co-founder & CTO MSQRD. Co-founder & CTO Realaxy. Worked on Alternativa3D, Away3D and AwayJS engines. Organizer of Flash Online Conference.

6 Years of BigWorld Engine Evolution Caused by the Success of World of Tanks

Maksim Baryshnikov, Head of Server, Wargaming.net

This talk is about the technological influence that World of Tanks caused to its core engine — BigWorld, the development of subsequent Wargaming titles using this engine, and lessons Wargaming learnt from this.

Before joining Wargaming, Maksim worked as a software engineer, an enterprise architect and CTO in a small development company. At Wargaming, he worked on various World of Tanks projects, including Clans, Global Map 2.0 and Platform services. In his current role, Maksim leads the World of Tanks Server Team.

The use of data-oriented programming paradigm in Unity games

Alvina Rubalskaya, Software Engineer, Interactive Moolt
Vladimir Rotterdamskii, Lead Programmer, Interactive Moolt

Modern development of mobile games brings up new challenges. Old development methods fail to keep up with the ever-changing conditions. “Interactive Moolt” company offers data-oriented programming as an alternative. In this session, they will show that you already use some of the methods subconsciously and will tell how to use them intentionally.

Alvina Rubalskaya. Currently, a programmer at “Interactive Moolt” studio’s project “Fantasy patrol”. Aside from projects, she is engaged in bio-informational research of viral genomes. A winner of the regional sports programming contests.

Convert this: peculiarities of cross-platform mobile game development at Vizor

Roman Chehowski, Game Engine Architect, Vizor Interactive

Roman will tell you about Vizor’s own mobile engine in the context of the mobile version of a popular Zombie Island game. He will comment on the decisions made at the first stage of the engine development, give you some advice on how to get the highest performance under the conditions of limited resources of mobile platforms, using Java language from start to finish.

Roman is Game Engine Architect at Vizor Games. He has been developing videogames professionally for 4 years. Past experience: Unity 3D Graphics Programmer. Nowadays Roman is engaged in improving and optimizing Vizor Games’ game engine. He graduated from the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics.

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Development specifics of MMO RTS made with Unity

Artem Durnev, Client Development Team Lead, Plarium

In this session Artem will try to describe as many structure peculiarities of the mobile MMO RTS game on Unity engine, both the programming and management aspects. He will touch on such subjects as technologies that were used, app architecture, give examples of various optimizations and solutions of problems that they had in two years of development and support of the game.

27 years old. 7 years of experience. 4 years in gamedev industry. 2 years of working in Cocos2d, 2 years – in Unity.

Moving from Flash to HTML5 – converting large projects

Sergey Zapatylak, Developer, Vizor Games

The session will dwell on the problems the team behind Klondike had on attempt to convert the social app into a HTML5 game having acceptable performance and resource consumption.

10+ years of experience in game development. Developer at Vizor Games since 2011.

ART & ANIMATION

Specification and feedback: from producer perspective

Alexander Shtachenko, Lead Product Manager, iLogos

Some managers dare to ignore specification and often set tasks verbally. This is a big mistake which usually affects work quality, results in overstated development term and exhaustion of the team. The session will tell about the importance of specification and its preparation based on real example. The main focus will be on communication between the task originator and executor, and feedback obtainment.

Alexander Shtachenko is the Head of iLogos Product department with rich and diverse background. Used to work as a producer at product gaming company, a cyber-sports project leader and tried lots of other roles, but gamer was always the main one. Since the 90s when Dendy Junior 2 (8bit) was released he’s played games nonstop. Dendy, Sega, PSX, DreamCast, PC, GooglePlay, Appstore – one can hardly count the amount of games he’s tried by today.

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Two ramens, one icon

Romanova Alexandra, Lead Artist, Orc Work

Art pipeline of indie studio with no money and no time. How to keep foot in three worlds to produce quality art and stay alive.

Designer and Art Lead at Orc Work. Alexandra has been making games since childhood, starting from Ludumdare and GeekParty jams. Works as Artist and Ui/UX designer in ‘grown-up’ gamedev for 3 years ago.

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Pixel art as a tool, not a feature

Evgeniy Yudin, Artist, Zombie Dynamics

Pixel art is a technique, not a retro feature. Pros and cons of using a pixel, and why you should not follow the canons of pixel art.

Freelance Pixel Artist. Worked on The Tribe, SMASHBASH, Garage.

The patient is rather alive than dead

Roman Evpakov, Art-lead, Armatur Games

Adobe Flash is still alive as a cool and handy tool for game art and animation creation (and much more).

Works at gamedev industry for 9 years as an artist and animator: concept art, backgrounds, characters, animations of all these, videos (as director and scriptwriter), basically, all the art :)

Main tool: Adobe Flash.

Roman also worked as cartoonist and illustrator.

Game settings design

Svyatoslav Kholod, Game Designer, Gameloft

Every demiurge should know how to create his worlds properly and in a balanced way. The world must excite and engage a player, make him feel with what’s going on and the characters, believe that everything happens for real. Svyatoslav Kholod will uncover the basic approaches to development of game settings and storylines in game making.

Game designer and co-founder of M81 studio.

Svyatoslav organizes training in the field of game design and concept art.

M81 studio creates visual content for desktop, PC and mobile games.

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Voxels based on Madness Road

Eugene Lavrinenko, Founder & CEO, Cells Games

Eugene will tell why voxels are a good solution for indie games and how to work with them. He will share his experience of creating a voxel graphics on the example of his own project. He will elaborate on prototyping, designing game elements and polishing up the game. Other topics will include finding professional artists under for this type of graphics.

Eugene Lavrinenko is a founder and CEO of Cells Games indie studio.

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Delicious and useful GUI: cooking recipe

Vera Velichko, CEO, Art-director, Owl Studio

Interface is a translator between user and gameplay. The speaker will tell you how to make the clearest possible translation, and about the best way to organize working on interface and assess the results.

Vera has drawn for 22 years, of which 7 dedicated to gamedev industry. She started as full-time artist to become Art director. A year ago, Vera established a studio mostly formed of artists. Owl Studio has people from all over the world working on various projects. Vera is trying to create a universal system for managing creative teams that can be used by everyone.

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Animation in Spine. Tips & tricks. 3D effects in 2D Graphics

Vyacheslav Borovik, Spine Animator, Moona Group

Spine is a program for creating skeletal animations. The session will be about animations in games and Spine features. Also, there will be some tips and tricks from author’s two years work experience with Spine, and of course. Speaker will also discuss pseudo 3D effect.

Now, Vyacheslav is working as spine animator at Moona Group. Earlier – Character animator at Carpazzzi Soft (Spine/Maya), motion designer at Game Show and freelance as animator with various teams. Total experience at animation – 4 years.

The tale of lost time

Maria Yartseva, Art Lead, Owl Studio

Typical reasons why art production takes more time than you want.

Maria’s been drawing for as long as she could remember, the last 4 years she draws for gamedev. Formerly a fine arts teacher at elementary school, now an Art lead at game development studio. The principles of working with charges at both positions are mostly the same.

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The psychology of visual perception. Notes on a match-3 fields by Playrix

Svetlana Sablina, Art Director, Playrix

The seemingly simple graphics of match-3 games is always a result of hard work. How to place accents when every element matters. Where the line between conditionality and imagery goes. How to choose the right artistic device and introduce new regular portions of content into a finished game. The talk will give insight into match-3 graphics in general, and its overview from the viewpoint of visual perception psychology.

Growing from the artist to the art director, Svetlana Sablina participated in the development of almost every Playrix project. The speaker will share more than a decade of experience and tell about the company’s approach, creating hits and a becoming a member of the top 20 publishers of mobile games in the world.

GAME DESIGN

Game design technology: easy solutions for complex problems

Vladimir Yatsukevich, Game Designer, Vizor Interactive

Vizor Interactive company, the amount of its projects and designers grew twice over the last 3 years. From this session you will find out about the main game design and development principles that are taught to all newcomer designers at Vizor so they can deliver quality design at once.

Vladimir has been developing games for about 16 years and basically haven’t tried anything else, so he thinks of game design as his profession. The games that are especially important for Vladimir – Zombie Farm and Klondike – are popular in social networks. He сoncentrated all his skills and knowledge in them. His professional motto is GGG, which means that Good games are made by Good guys having a Great mood.

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Game design analytics: case studies

Konstantin Sakhnov, Head of Game Department, Rocket Jump

The session will cover a few real cases from speaker’s practice and take you into the analytics use and fail compilation cases. Speaker will share practical advice on the use of product analytics for game developers.

Konstantin Sakhnov is a Game department director at Rocket Jump. He started career as a game design department head in 2016. Worked on game design for such titles as Evolution: Heroes of Utopia, the client MMO Action Panzar and many other browser games. Formerly an operating producer and mobile projects leader. Konstantin gives lectures on game design at the Higher School of Business Informatics.

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How to create the right competition system for your game: methodology

Aleksey Rehlov, External Producer, Creative Mobile

Designing of competition systems from scratch can be a really challenging task, this presentation is a logical successor of Alexey’s previous lecture “Mathematical and psychological fundamentals of competition systems in modern mobile games”. But this time, the speech is dedicated to the methodology, which helps to create your own competition system that corresponds to requirements of your game.

Aleksey is an external producer, game design and monetization consultant with Creative Mobile; and mentor and expert with the IT cluster in Skolkovo. 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, and Social Networks). Aleksey is not only experienced in creating his own intellectual property, but also has a work experience with such publishers as Activision, Midway, Konami, Disney and many more.

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Listen up, your game’s got problems

Ilya Smirnov, Head of Game Design, Pixonic

Once the project is launched, you should carry on analyzing the metrics and looking for bottlenecks. Ilya Smirnov, Head of Game Design Pixonic, is going to discuss the common mistakes and solutions most developers have to deal with, and so did their team while making War Robots.

Ilya Smirnov, Head of Game Design at Pixonic. Joined the team to work on the most successful mid-core title “War Robots”. Since then the project revenue grew 20 times, and Pixonic is now the 7th largest company by revenue in CIS according to App Annie.

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Lessons learned from being in Games Production

Slava Lukyanenka, Project Manager, Wargaming.net

Everyone can speak about his success story. This talk is different. It’s full of personal fail-stories about gamedev production and the lessons that can be learned to prevent such failures in the future.
During this talk you will discover several illustrated stories: about the essence of management in gamedev, about the team, about the processes and products. It’s better to learn from the mistakes of others.

Slava Lukyanenka is Project Manager at Competitive Gaming Department, Wargaming.net.
Has been working in gamedev industry since 2011. Co-organizer of several gamedev events held in Minsk. Inspired by Blizzard and Supergiant Games.

Game Designer’s viewpoint: Want to be a better developer – play games!

Eugene Shevchenko, Game Designer, Gameloft

It’s no secret that games can not only entertain but also educate. But now with a plenty of markets and games available choice can become a problem. Some tips on choosing the educational games from game designer.

Eugene has been in gamedev industry since 2011. Worked on WAP, browser and mobile titles as game designer/producer. He became a game designer at Gameloft in Kharkov in 2015. Took part in creation of Asphalt Nitro.

Producing for indies

Yaroslav Kravtsov, Producer, Rising Wave

It’s good when the team has an experienced game producer who knows how to start developing a game and, most importantly, how to bring it to release and make it a success. But what can you do when none of your team has such expertise? The session will help to learn the basics of producing in a short time.

9+ years experience in gamedev on big titles (Allods Online, Skyforge, Armored Warfare), indie titles (Message Quest, SMASH BASH) and mobile games based on franchise (Star Wars, Simpsons, Sims, Saints Row, Hellboy). Used to be level designer, lead level designer and producer.

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PLATFORMS

How indie developer can conquer mobile tops with VK game platform

Maxim Babichev, Developer Advocate, VK
Eugene Trufanov, Producer, Indigo Bunting

In this session the speakers will talk about the opportunities for small teams and indie developers on how to become visible in the mobile market and make money. They will look into all aspects of the promotion in VK mobile catalogue, the integration of social mechanic and making apps visible in the mobile app store using a small studio that launched nine games in the VK catalogue in the past few months as an example.

Maxim Babichev graduated from the Saint-Petersburg State University of Economics in 2010 where was taught computer science and business informatics. Joined VK team in 2007, the developer advocate since 2014. Working with gaming partners from the first acquaintance to a project launch as well as passionately evangelize and advocate developers’ needs within VK platform.

Part of two-person surviving gamedev team. Making games for 3 years. Started from social MMO Piratecraft with tremendous fail. Now producing mobile games and even marketing them with moderate success.

iOS Workshop

With the latest announcements on the iOS platforms – Watch, iPhone and iPads and Apple TV –  our speakers for this Workshop will run through some of the highlights on these and a few pointers that you should consider if you are looking to be successful. This year we have lined up two international speakers who will run through a presentation and afterwards provide an opportunity to do a short review on your in-development game.

Google Apps & Games Track

App User Acquisition Strategy Best Practice – Top Eleven

Mladen Vlašić, Gaming Industry Expert in CEE, Google

How to raise awareness with Youtube, how to export with Adwords, How to get installs at scale with positive ROI (on an example of Nordeus and their Top Eleven – Be A Football Manager app).

Mladen is an Account Manager in the Google Large Customer Sales Adriatics Team and Vertical Expert for Gaming Industry in CEE. He works with the region’s top companies across different verticals. Prior to Google, Mladen spend 4 years at Croatian Telecom as a Business Intelligence specialist. He then moved to HTC, where he was the Regional Account Manager for Adriatics. It was during that time that he developed a particular interest in International App Promotion and International Mobile Market and shortly after this found himself working within this space at Google.

How to improve app business based on data?

Mariusz Gasiewski, Google Performance Products Expert in CEE, Google

How to choose right KPIs for app? How to understand users based on Firebase and analytics reports (Hitwe, Sparkpeople case studies). Improving app monetisation based on data. How to segment users for marketing activities?

With Google since 2007. Responsible for business development of Google performance products in CEE region. Advising biggest Google clients in Central and Eastern Europe. One of the most renowned experts in Poland on the use of performance marketing, web analytics, search engine marketing. Lecturer at most prestigious university in Poland, Warsaw School of Economics. Runs the oldest and biggest blog about Performance marketing in Poland www.ittechnology.us, author of many books, publications about performance solutions. Founder the biggest search engine marketing community/conference in Poland, SEMcamp.

A journey of monetization in apps

Rami Jawhar, Strategic Partner Manager (Google’s Apps and Gaming), Google

The shift in monetization models. How to optimize for the user journey. Using the right ad at the right time. Integrating analytics with monetization.

Rami is a Strategic Partner Manager on Google’s Apps and Gaming team. He works with top partners in emerging markets by helping them build, grow and monetize their audience on mobile apps and games. Prior to Google, Rami held various positions at Facebook and the United Nations. He holds a BE in electrical engineering from AUB and a MEng in Operations Research and Information Engineering from Cornell.

MISCELLANEOUS

Getting investment: how-to guide based on real cases

Sergey Kopov, Head of Publishing, HeroCraft

It’s getting more difficult for small games to gain popularity. And a big project requires more funds than you have. Where can you get investments these days? How can you get investors interested? Should you fear of someone stealing your idea? Sergey will try to answer all these questions in detail and give real cases for each.

Sergey is the head of apps and games development since 2005. He started career at Fun Corp (ex Flysoft), continued at i-Free and now works on publishing at HeroCraft. Sergey is well-versed in production, direction and sales.

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Dominating Influencer Marketing

Johan Lofstrom, General Manager EMEA & India, Chartboost

Influencer Marketing is booming and is becoming a new fast-growing advertising channels where game developers can find new valuable uses at scale. This session will describe why this is a huge opportunity and also gave tips on how to best reach influencers and how to set up successful campaigns.

Johan Lofstrom is an expert of mobile games user acquisition and monetization and mobile gaming strategy, including html5, mobile web gaming and native game apps. As GM of EMEA & India, Johan currently leads Chartboost’s business in those areas. He is passionate about start-ups and fast-growing businesses, especially in mobile and online games.

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From ancient China to post-apocalypse: deep localization under the new setting

Alexey Medov, Localization Editor in Chief, Inlingo Localization Studio

How can you make a game based on the history of Ancient China that would be clear and engaging for someone other than the Chinese or orientalists? From the session you’ll learn about the original way of launching a game on new market. Inlingo team will share its own experience of internationalization and recreation of game content.

Alexey has worked in game localization industry for over 8 years, has  hundreds of fulfilled projects behind, from small indie games to large AAA titles made by the world’s top industry companies.

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Mobile Ads in names and numbers

Slava Taraskin, Business Development Director, Unity Ads

The session will be about mobile advertising. The speaker will share some interesting facts and figures about the current state of market and its prospects. But the most important is that the entire presentation is based on data from the key developers in Eastern Europe.

Started to work at game development around 2 years ago, was responsible for Unity game engine business development in Eastern Europe until the end of 2015. Established close business relations with the biggest gamedev studios and supported them in many ways, starting from technical questions and up to finding a publisher and successful launch a game.
Switched to Unity Ads business from 2016. Now helping developers all over Eastern Europe to increase their revenue via video ads integration. Evangelizing smart video ads integration as a way to improve player experience. Also providing monetization consultancy for the most of mobile developers in respective region.

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How to develop understanding while working with remote teams

Semen Kovalev, Studio Production Manager, Ubisoft Kiev

In 8 years of Kiev branch of Ubisoft, the team has worked with studios from all over the world: Canada, France, Finland, Romania, etc. Every experience with a remote team was unique and uncovered new aspects of cooperation. During this presentation you will hear some of those stories through the prism of cultural differences.

He’s been in the gaming industry since 2006. Joined Kiev branch of Ubisoft in 2012. Spent a few years working on such successful titles as Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag, Assassin’s Creed Unity and Far Cry 4 as a producer responsible for PC version development. Works as a Studio Production Manager for the last 2 years, being responsible for inhouse development, as well as building and strengthening the relationship with partner offices.

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AUDIO

Sound drama in game projects. Movie sound in games

Vasily Filatov, Founder & Director, Sound Design Institute

Comprehensive approach to creation of sound effects as means to engage a player into gaming universe. Blamestorming and correction of mistakes on the example of indie, casual and hardcore games. Games and movies: what they borrow from each other.

A composer, sound designer, lecturer. Founder of the Sound design institute and SoundDesigner.PRO institute. Curator of Russia’s first faculty of sound design. Creator and organizer of Sound Sunday.

Applied music: how to speak the composer’s language

Artem Samoilenko, Composer, Freelance

What’s an applied music and where can we hear it in everyday life? What distinguishes music created for the gaming industry from the rest? How can we use music to control player’s attention? The lecture will give answers to these and other interesting questions about music and games.

A composer, sound producer. Over 3 years of working with the applied music. Artem worked on voiceover of 10 computer and mobile games, wrote music for 7 movies.

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Sound in World of Tanks 2016: vision and approach to sound in AAA MMO

Aleksey Tomanov, Audio Team Lead, Wargaming.net
Vyacheslav Skadorva, Sound Designer, Wargaming.net

Description of sound systems development process. Recording of content. Integration into the audio engine.

4 years of game design experience. 6 years of sound design experience in AAA gaming. 11 year of experience in game industry. 7 years of tours and music release (3 albums, 13 vinyl records, more than 20 digital). 22 years of experience in music and sound field.

Education – graduated from Belarusian state music academy. Worked as a composer and arranger. Since 2012 working at Wargaming.net as a Sound Designer.

Twists and turns of developing music applications for iOS

Alex Parhimovich, iOS Developer, Gismart
Pavel Khasanov, Product Manager, Gismart

The session is about the technicalities of developing audio apps and games for mobile platforms on the example of Gismart company. It will also cover the integration of various audio solutions into mobile platforms.

Alex has over 4 years of experience in iOS app development. He’s passionate about music and sound work. Works at Gismart since its founding.

More than 5 years of project management experience. He’s also a musician, arranger. He loves to combine music and IT at Gismart.

VR

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UX and Interaction in Virtual Reality

Ciro Continisio, Technical Evangelist, Unity Technologies

2016 has been called “The year of VR”, but reality is that we’re very far from getting a proper ‘killer application’ for this medium. Interaction in VR is still largely uncharted territory, and we need to build a shared vocabulary of verbs and rules of interactivity and UX to be able to create the next-level VR games and applications.

Previously developing games with his own company, Ciro recently joined Unity as Tech Evangelist for the EMEA region. His job is technically going around Europe and spread the word about Unity, but you’ll also hear a lot about good game development practices and game design, for which he has a soft spot. He also has a passion for education and teaching, and is a restless advocate for game jams.

SPECIAL EVENTS

DISCUSSION PANELS

Anti-Lynch: how to correct mistakes in your game design

Host

Serge Himmelreich

Producer and Founder of ORC WORK

First time at DevGAMM! Exquisite GD show! Anti-lynch discussion panel will feature 3 games that are going to get a game design tune up in real time. Panel participants will take those games to pieces to glue them back together with upgrades.

Supported by

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Vladimir Kovtun

Lead Game Designer, Alawar

Yaroslav Kravtsov

Producer, Rising Wave

Artyom  Volkov

Lead Game Designer, Rocket Jump

Alexandr Pashin

Senior Game Designer, Silly Penguin

Sviatoslav Torik

Product Vision Expert, Wargaming.net

Ilya Ostashko

Senior Game Designer, AlternativaPlatform

Game designer hunt or how recruitment actually works

Host

Michael Kuzmin

Business Development Manager, Herocraft

The participants will discuss the burning problems of recruiting that companies of various sizes have today. A ‘perfect game designer’ will be used as an example to discover places where you should look for the right candidates, what things are worth paying attention to during search, whether playing games is essential for candidates and how the demand is formed.

Tetiana Evdokimenko

Head of Kyiv Office, Playrix

Ivan Slovtsov

Producer, Ice-Pick Lodge

Sergey Volkov

Head of Gamedev, Spice IT Recruitment

Philipp Gladkov

CEO, Pixonic

Sergey Brui

Managing Partner, Vizor

New realities and form factors in gamedev

Host

Andrey Ivashentsev

Chief Innovation Officer, Game Insight

The discussion will be about the history and fast development of VR, AR devices, about how different types of immersion influence players. The experts are going to discuss the trends of virtual and augmented reality, bring up the topics of tracking, interaction with the game, work with the senses and neural interfaces.

Dmitrii Kirillov

CEO, VRARLab, CEREVRUM

Gleb Khodorkovsky

CEO, Neuro.institute

Alexander Lukichev

Chief Information Officer, VRTech

ADVISERS

Alex Nichiporchik, CEO @ tinyBuild

Alex Nichiporchik

CEO, tinyBuild

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Vera Velichko

CEO, Art-director, OWL-Studio

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Vladimir Kovtun

Lead Game Designer, Alawar

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Sergey Bababev

VP of Strategy, Nekki

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Valentin Simonov

Field Engineer, Unity Technologies