DevGAMM Moscow 2018 – memories

Only a week ago we finished DevGAMM in Moscow. Let’s go back in time and recall how it was. This time 2,000 people from 30 countries attended our conference. It was traditionally held in Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel. The most unbelievable fact is that we organized this event within 3 months. Our team did a great job to make these two days unforgettable.

This time DevGAMM hosted over 50 sessions, workshops, discussions panels in 6 halls. All the conference talks were dedicated to tech, game-design, business, talent management, art, and other topics.

This years’ speakers lineup included Jeff Pobst (Hidden Path Entertainment) talking about CS:GO, Imre Jele (Bossa Studios) with a session about game design of Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread и Worlds Adrift, hour-long Q&A session about Google Play from Dmitri Martynov and Roman Mardot, and Move or Dire postmortem from Nicolae Berbece (Those Awesome Guys).

There were also talks from Mike Hines (Amazon), Max Schulz (THREAKS), Rami Ismail (Vlambeer), Attila Szantner (Massively Multiplayer Online Science), Alessia Nigretti (Unity Technologies), Alex Rose (Alex Rose Games), Albert Zhiltcov (1C Game Studios) and others.

All the videos of conference sessions, including Business track will be available on our YouTube channel within next month.

Apart from sessions, there were 3 workshops on May 17 in Blue Hall:

• Interactive workshop from Vasiliy Filatov, Founder, sound designer, SoundDesigner.PRO, during which all the attendees participated in creating sound effects for the game, the movie scene and the digital interface;
• Workshop from Vadim Bashurov, Evangelist, Corona Labs, where he proved that simplicity and promptness of games creation on Corona is not just a marketing trick;
• Workshop from Ivan Fateev, Tech Evangelist, Microsoft, during which all the attendees learned how to save game progress from Unity directly, using cloud to deliver downloaded content.

As usual, we organized three-minute meetings with publishers – Speed Game Dating. The developers had a chance to show their projects during one hour and get useful contacts.The games were divided into two streams: desktop and mobile. The representatives of Bossa Studios, Wargaming.net, Mail.ru, tinyBuild, Gamigo, AlternativaPlatform, Creative Mobile, Buka Entertainment and other companies were among the publishers.

Everyone could try Meetpoint, our new matchmaking tool for effective networking. At the moment it is an alpha version, we’re going to update it with the help of your feedback. In total, 614 meetings were held through Meetpoint and 233 cards were created.

This time Showcase area was much bigger than at last year’s conference. 102 projects were showcased: 66 desktop, 31 mobile and 5 VR. No doubt, there were very creative booths. For instance, the developers of Gripper were so involved into showcase process that after it was officially over for them, they’ve found a free socket and continued Gripper showcase on the floor.

The guys from Babushka Team, organized a tournament on their booth. The rules were simple: the participant should survive in the game as long as possible. The record of the developers – 20 days. But there was one gamer with the record – 111 days.

That’s not all. Nikita Andrusov became the youngest showcaser at DevGAMM being just 14 years old. He was as a programmer at the booth of Paper Light from Teawhy.

We couldn’t forget about parties during all the preparations for DevGAMM Moscow 🙂

On May 16 everyone was invited to club PRAVDA for pre-party from our sponsors tinyBuild. All the guests listened to the performance of DevGAMM Band. The band musicians are people who create actual music for video games.

After the first productive conference day, we welcomed everyone at club Teatr for official party, sponsored by Unreal Engine. We were happy to see lots of guests dancing and singing along to the fiery cover-band ‘Garage Band’.

The bye-bye Mingle from Crazy Panda was a final part of the event and took place in the zone of Platinum sponsors. The attendees had a chance to chat, drink beer, share their impressions of the conference, exchange contacts and hugs, and make group photos 😉

As you know, we want you to have fun at DevGAMM, therefore each conference we organize DevGAMM Quest. In a total, 325 people participated in the quest. All of them had a chance to win awesome prizes from our sponsors. This year we raffled five loot boxes from Playrix: Nintendo Switch, Apple Watch Series 3, iPad 2018, AirPods and Beats Studio 2; PS4 Pro, Xbox One X, Nintendo Switch from Pixonic; Nintendo Switch + The Legend Of Zelda from Nekki; PS4 Pro from Social Quantum; Fibrum Pro from Fibrum; Amazon Fire TV from Amazon and more.

We also hope that you had enough time to get some swag from a limited collection of our partners Niko in the shop.

We’re really grateful to all our sponsors for creating lots of activities on the booths for our attendees. Thanks for the support to Appodeal, Vizor Interactive,  Unity Technologies, Nekki, Playrix,  Pixonic, Unreal Engine, Social Quantum,  G5 Entertainment AB, Corona, KamaGames Studio, The Abyss,  ZAVOD Games, Game Insight and other sponsors.

Partner companies organized many activities to make the day of the attendees. For instance, The Abyss had Bullet-time, Social Quantum – GIF booth. We should also mention Wargaming.net interactive board with vacancies from large gaming companies. Also, everyone had a chance to play Plinko, win such prizes as bags, travel kit, traveling rug, thermos & much more.

Moreover, Nekki organized a Shadow Fight tournament at their booth. Everyone could also try out Generic Comfort tables from DXRacer.

During 2 conference days Playrix held the epic queez. It was a nice opportunity to check your knowledge of DevGAMM and game industry.

Let’s mention our awesome Career Wall where 148 job offers from the leading companies were gathered. Career Wall was sponsored by Pixonic. HR Partner –  VALUES VALUE.

This time we’ve decided to shock our conference attendees with the announcement of the last Game Lynch. Nobody believed that it could really happen. We tried hard to keep the truth under wraps. The audience went silent when Lynch experts carried out a coffin with Alex Nichiporchik inside of it. When it was on the stage he suddenly raised from a coffin 😉

It was an allegory because we decided to ‘bury’ Game Lynch which will continue to exist under a new name – Game Roast!

The experts were on top this time but even there excellent preparations couldn’t help them to win. Congratulations to Big Drunk Satanic Massacre for their victory.

Nicolae Berbece, who took part in Game Lynch for the first time, surprised everyone. He was so confident that no one could even assume that he wasn’t experienced Game Lynch expert 🙂

Expect a new format in Minsk – Game Roast!

This time the prize fund of Best Indie Game was $ 20,000. It was sponsored by tinyBuild and Kefir. The winner of the nomination for $ 10,000, other 4 nominees got $ 2,500 each.

The topic of the ceremony was DevGAMM’s Got Talent. Game industry representatives released their talents in their awesome performances. The full version of the show will be soon available on our YouTube channel.

Now, it’s time to congratulate the winners!

Best Indie Game (sponsored by tinyBuild + Kefir) – $10,000

Grand Prize (sponsored by Rocket Jump)

Game Lynch Award (sponsored by CreaGames)

Best Mobile Game (sponsored by Appodeal)

Best Desktop Game (sponsored by CarX Technologies)

Best VR Game (sponsored by Fibrum)

Excellence in Visual Art (sponsored by CrazyPanda)

Excellence in Audio (sponsored by Amazon)

Excellence in Narrative (sponsored by Amazon)

Excellence in Game Design (sponsored by Rocket Jump)

Huge thanks to all the sponsors, speakers, moderators, advisers, volunteers, the press and all participants for being part of this huge and unforgettable event.

We are ready to create this awesome atmosphere and bring you joy again and again because this is the reason we do DevGAMM.

On July 14 we’re waiting for you in Lviv at DevGAMM Talks Lviv 2018. This event will be dedicated to art in games, the tickets are on sale.

The next stop will be DevGAMM Summit Seattle that will be held two days before PAX West, on August 29.

One more big event is set to take place in Minsk on November 15-16 with over 1,800 attendees. Follow our news to learn more.

Leave us again to come back!