Program
May 15
Day 0
9:00 — 17:30 Unity Dev Day
10:00 — 18:00 Build up (exhibitors only)
18:00 — 22:00 Badge Pick-Up Pre-Party
May 16
Day 1
09:00 — 18:00 Registration
10:10 — 18:00 Sessions
11:15 — 13:30 Speed Game Dating
13:30 — 15:30 Lunch break
15:00 — 18:15 Roundtables
20:00 — 00:00 Official Party
May 17
Day 2
10:00 — 16:00 Registration
11:00 — 18:30 Sessions
13:15 — 15:00 Lunch break
14:30 — 15:00 Quest Ruffle
17:30 — 18:30 Game Roast
18:30 — 19:15 DevGAMM Awards
19:15 — 21:00 Bye-Bye Mingle
Keynotes


Borderlands and Beyond
Randy Pitchford, CEO, Gearbox
Randy Pitchford has served as Gearbox’s CEO since its founding. In 2000 Randy accepted the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences award for best PC Action Game for his production and direction of Gearbox’s debut title — Half-Life: Opposing Force. Since then, the company has been involved in the development and production of Half-Life: Blue Shift, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, James Bond 007: Nightfire, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, Halo: Combat Evolved.
Randy led the creation of the Borderlands series. The Borderlands games have achieved critical acclaim, record-breaking sales and the recipient of multiple video game industry awards including the Video Game Awards “Best Shooter” and “Best Multi-Player Game”. Borderlands 2 became the best selling game in publisher 2k Games history. On March 28th they announced Borderlands 3 game to be released this fall.
Learn the story behind Borderlands series creation, including the lately announced Borderlands 3 title. In the keynote Randy is going to dive into studio history and creative process.

Fireside Chat with Randy Pitchford and Richard “Levelord” Gray: Old School World Building and the Legacy of Duke Nukem 3D
Randy Pitchford, CEO, Gearbox
Richard “Levelord” Gray
He is perhaps best known for his “You’re not supposed to be here! – Levelord” hidden message in Duke Nukem 3D. He also create the first suspended platform deathmatch level called “HIPDM1” (Edge of Oblivion) for Quake’s “Scourge of Armagon”. This deathmatch level paradigm soon became a staple in many other games. Next, he created the first mouse-sized player in a normal-sized world deathmatch level called “Spry” (Behind Zee Bookcase) for SiN.
Richard “Levelord” Gray is a level designer for 3D video games. His work includes Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, SiN, Heavy Metal FAKK2, and others. He was also a co-owner of Ritual Entertainment.
He is perhaps best known for his “You’re not supposed to be here! – Levelord” hidden message in Duke Nukem 3D. He also create the first suspended platform deathmatch level called “HIPDM1” (Edge of Oblivion) for Quake’s “Scourge of Armagon”. This deathmatch level paradigm soon became a staple in many other games. Next, he created the first mouse-sized player in a normal-sized world deathmatch level called “Spry” (Behind Zee Bookcase) for SiN.
In 2008, Richard retired and went home to tend to his garden. He still tinkers with small games and projects. These include the first two installments of his Becky Brogan Adventures: “Meane Manor” and “The Institute”, as well as “Duke Nukem 3D – 20th Anniversary World Tour” with Gearbox.
Randy Pitchford has served as Gearbox’s CEO since its founding. In 2000 Randy accepted the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences award for best PC Action Game for his production and direction of Gearbox’s debut title — Half-Life: Opposing Force. Since then, the company has been involved in the development and production of Half-Life: Blue Shift, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, James Bond 007: Nightfire, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, Halo: Combat Evolved.
Randy led the creation of the Borderlands series. The Borderlands games have achieved critical acclaim, record-breaking sales and the recipient of multiple video game industry awards including the Video Game Awards “Best Shooter” and “Best Multi-Player Game”. Borderlands 2 became the best selling game in publisher 2k Games history. On March 28th they announced Borderlands 3 game to be released this fall.
TBA
Randy and Richard will have an informal chat about working on the original Duke Nukem games. They will discuss what was it like getting into the gaming industry back then, how Duke Nukem games gained success despite going against Quake. They will also talk about different-sized teams, share funny stories from back in the day and reflect on the future of gaming.

Going beyond 'Yes, Queen': The Narrative Design of Reigns: Her Majesty
Leigh Alexander, Narrative designer
Leigh Alexander is a writer and narrative designer (Reigns: Her Majesty, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Monitor). She also writes fiction and journalism (The Guardian, How We Get to Next, Medium, Motherboard) on futurism, digital society and other topics where the internet meets pop culture.
In the sequel to popular mobile kingdom management swipe-em-up ‘Reigns’, the team wanted to push past “Yass Queen” and “go girl!”. Writer Leigh Alexander shares her narrative design process around the tricky political tightrope of women’s power, especially when it has to be both violent and funny — and talks about how procedural storytelling appeals to our fantasies of controlling the uncontrollable.


Iron Galaxy - From the basement to AAA - How this no-named studio grew to work on the biggest franchises in the industry
Adam Boyes, CEO, Iron Galaxy Studios
Adam Boyes is the CEO of Iron Galaxy Studios and has been in games for 20+ years. Prior to his current role, he was VP of TPR at PlayStation where he oversaw 3rd party content and helped launch PS4 & PSVR. Prior to that he has held various roles at Capcom, Midway, and EA. He knows 10 Russian words.
10 years ago, Iron Galaxy started in a basement & now employs 135 people, has multiple locations, & has worked on the biggest franchises like Destiny, Diablo 3, Skyrim, Street Fighter, Killer Instinct, and many more. Learn how they’ve tackled the industry’s hardest problems like Source Code Reviews, Games-As-A-Service, and so much more.

Preventing the Collapse of Civilization
Jonathan Blow, President, Thekla, Inc
Jonathan Blow is a game designer/programmer living in San Francisco, USA. His most recent games were The Witness and Braid. He is working on a programming language to replace C++, and is a partner in IndieFund.
A discussion about how we make software and what this means.


How To Raise Money? (in gamedev)
Alex Nichiporchik, CEO, tinyBuild
Alex Nichiporchik founded tinyBuild in 2011 to make video games. The company has since then worked on games like SpeedRunners, Punch Club, Hello Neighbor, Party Hard, and more – in most of which Alex acts as a producer from the publishing side.
Alex will discuss the latest trends in games publishing, investment and funding. Learn how to get your game noticed, signed and funded.

Fireside Chat with Timur Bekmambetov Screenlife: A New Gaming Experience
Timur Bekmambetov
Timur worked on such projects as “Wanted”, “9”, “Searching”, “Night Watch”, “Day Watch” and even more.
Several years ago Timur created a new movie language — Screenlife. The first movie in this genre that was produced by Timur and his company “Bazelevs” was a horror “Unfriended”.
The next project in the screencast style was “Searching”. This movie received a prestigious award at the Sundance Film Festival. “Searching” has grossed $ 75 million.
Several years ago Timur created a new movie language — Screenlife. But since cinematic experiences and games are getting closer to each other each year, screenlife gamification introduces a groundbreaking way to create rich involving gaming experience to the audience. In the fireside chat, he is going to talk about the joint future of the gaming and movie industries.


How to make "NARUTO" the most famous Ninja boy in the world - Expanding Animation Business through Licensing
Keirou HEMMI, Pierrot
Mr. HEMMI is taking in charge of production sales, and he is responsible for licensing, and general affairs at Pierrot. He is expertising on 20 years of experience on contents investment at banks in Japan and the United States. His works has improved the overall value of Japanese animation.
With the world popular Ninja animation “NARUTO” as its flagship title, PIERROT is one of top animation company that handles representing animation works such as “BLEACH”, “Yu Yu Hakusho”, and “TOKYO Ghoul” in Japan.


Game Development for the Makers Generation: Co-creating your game with your players
Henrique Olifiers, Co-Founder, Gamer In Chief, Bossa Studios
With a games career of more than 30 years, Henrique has been at the demoscene of the late 80s, through to mobile, MMOs, VR and creatively-led indie titles. At Bossa Studios he heads the company strategy and design. The studio’s biggest titles are Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread and Worlds Adrift.
The session will discuss the merits of co-developing a game and its content with the community of players, the pros and cons of open development, and how to deal with the community. We’ll use the case of Worlds Adrift, an MMO whose entire content was created by its players before its launch.
Special Event

One-To-One Review with iOS experts
Apply for one-to-one 30-minute meetings with iOS experts before May 10. There are going to review your projects, answer questions and provide feedback.
When & Where: Purple Hall, May 16, from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm.
Pre-registration is required, and the number of appointment slots is limited.
Register now.


Game Design Review
Hosted by Svyatoslav Torik, Product Vision Expert, Research & Development, Wargaming
Within a few one-hour sessions, experienced experts will show and tell what is wrong with several pre-selected games. They will dissect features, point out the untapped potential of the metagame and / or monetization, tell about other shortcomings. So that the feedback remains constructive, experts will offer options for solving these problems.
Open for wide audience.
Technology & Development


The amazing new alternative rendering methods.
Gregory Ivanov, indie generalist, Bananaft
Almost 10 years in industry, started at Targem Games as an FX artist, also worked as technical artist, designer, did trailers, UI, was a project lead and R&D manager. Now a one person indie team.
Talk on how to raymarch distance fields. Why they are cool and what interesting effects and solutions they can bring to the game.


Painless UI development - Game Insight experience
Arvydas Brazdeikis, Lead UI/UX Designer, Game Insight
Arvydas is a UI/UX designer from Game Insight. He has been in the gaming industry for more than 6 years and worked on AAA franchises such as Dragon Age, Mass Effect and League of Legeds. Currently he is working as a Leader UI/UX designers on Tanks of Boom.
In this session Arvydas will share how we developed our own UI editor. We will talk about toolset development and pipelines in our internal ecosystem – the Game Insight Platform.


How to develop a matchmaker for your online game
Yahor Murashka, Server Developer, Wargaming
In Wargaming Yahor Murashka is developing server-side logic of World of Tanks game and mainly focuses on complex algorithmic features.
This talk will focus on the process of designing and developing matchmakers for online multiplayer games. It will be done by using the evolution of random battles matchmaker World of Tanks as an example. Mathematical and algorithmic approaches to the development will also be considered.traffic.


Robot Warfare: backend evolution
Maksim Tiganov, Senior Server Developer, Azur Games
Maxim Tiganov has been a game developer for over half a decade. He started out on a small indie team making niche games with an occasional online component. Two years ago, Maxim joined the Azur Game team as a server developer, and today spends his time working on Robot Warfare and Space Armada.
Robot Warfare: project architecture and infrastructure evolution in 3 featurings. From simple solutions on a single server, to a multi-regional infrastructure powered by servers in 4 different data centers from 3 providers, plus Amazon cloud solutions.atical and algorithmic approaches to the development will also be considered.traffic.


Modular approach to Match-3 development
Pavel Korbut, Producer, Game Insight
Pavel is a Producer and a Game Designer at Game Insight. With more than 10 years of social and casual gameplay experience under his belt, he is leading the development the next generation toolset for Game Insight Platform projects.
Pavel will share our approach to developing game mechanics and in-game events for multiple match-3 projects at once. In this sessions, we will share our internal toolsets and innovations based on the Game Insight Platform.


Crazy Panda experience: Asset System or one solution for different issues and projects
Andrey Mishuta, Platform developer(R&D), Crazy Panda
Throughout his career, Andrey Mishuta has grown from 3D modeler in 2011 to Head of Unity 3D for Crazy Panda’s R&D department today. He’s taken part in both small indie projects and large undertakings by famous brands like Social Quantum and Destiny Games (and Crazy Panda, of course).
In his report, Andrey will demonstrate how Crazy Panda once solved issues with managing external assets for good, adapting its solution to several different projects. He will talk the audience through the ways of using these solutions for their own product today, since the company shares its experience with others in open source.and forecast traffic.


Getting Started with LWRP in Unity and Shadergraph
Josh Naylor, Evangelism Lead, EMEA, Unity
Throughout his career, Andrey Mishuta has grown from 3D modeler in 2011 to Head of Unity 3D for Crazy Panda’s R&D department today. He’s taken part in both small indie projects and large undertakings by famous brands like Social Quantum and Destiny Games (and Crazy Panda, of course).
Learn how to get started with Unity’s new Lightweight Render Pipeline fully released in 2019.1.
Talent


The 2019 Overall Salary Survey (CIS, Ukraine, Cyprus)
Anastasiya Manina, Chief Brand Officer, VALUES VALUE
Anastasiya has more than 8 years of experience in fields of PR & Marketing Communications. Promoted both Ukrainian companies in the global market and international businesses in Ukraine, Europe, and the USA. Second year in a row acts as the Overall Salary Survey in GameDev (CIS) counselor.
The session will reveal the results of the third salary research with 1700+ responses and comparison with 2017 and 2018 Big Salary Report. It will cover plain figures and new insights.


Dream Remote Team: You're a part of dream
Alla Ivanova, Head of Talents, Learn 2 Play
Alla is responsible for the entire People Talents area in an international startup L2p (less than a year the project audience reached million users), previously engaged in hiring and internal communications at ESforce.
Working in eSports is often portrayed as a dream job. However, the gaming industry dictates its own rules, such as the need for working in a remote team. Alla will tell you how to understand whether you’ll be effective in this new format, how to make a smooth transition, and share many life hacks and myths of working remotely.


Relocation from A to Z, all you need to know when moving to a new country
Oleg Paliy, Business Developer / co-founder, Games Factory Talents
Oleg managed complex R&D projects in Nokia, has both technology and business higher educations from Finland and worked and lived in few countries and cities. He co-founded Games Factory Talents – talent agency that helps game industry professionals to find dream job in the games industry.
Gamedev industry is the most international and diverse today. English is the language of and game industry professionals get to move around the globe and chose which country to work at. What does it actually mean to move and work in another country? I would like to talk a few relocation cases and my own experience of working and leaving abroad.


Salary negotiations: Please, don't quit
Tanja Loktionova, Founder, VALUES VALUE
Tanja is the head of VALUES VALUE, which helps gamedev companies headhunt executives and hire teams.
Calls herself a hardcore casual player, has passed thousands of match-3 levels, loves games, people and cats.
Tanja will focus on the intricacies of salary negotiations. How to defend your interests at the stage of hiring and discussing an offer. How to achieve a raise in the current company, and when it is better to wait. Secret secrets of companies and recruiters.


Is resume a professional biography or memoir?
Marina Solovova, HR Director, Lightmap
Marina Solovova, Human Resources Director, LightMap (Pixel Gun 3D project). In the industry 7 years. She has gone from a recruiting trainee to HR Director. 5 years working in Saber Interactive. Got developers for projects Halo, WWZ, Quake Champions. Last 2 years working in mobile development
Marina will tell you what is happening with your CV after you clicked “send”. Will tell about the most frequent mistakes and reasons for refusal on the CV. And together with you, you will sort out the real CV of the conference participants and offer recommendations for improvement.


Successfully integrating junior developers into a team: how to build an efficient process
Alex Parhimovich, iOS Team Lead, Gismart
Alex is iOS Team Lead at Gismart with 5+ years experience in iOS development. He’s passionate about music and games. Works at Gismart since its founding.
This keynote will cover the work organization process within a team and company to highlight how to integrate junior developers successfully and efficiently.
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.

Tanja Loktionova, Founder, VALUES VALUE

Nikita Guk, Chief Strategy Officer, Pixonic

Olga Khomenko, Playtomax

Vladimir Pranov, Wargaming

Alina Mudraya, VALUES VALUE
Analytics


5 simple models in game analytics that help you understand how much money you will earn
Vsevolod Kotovich, Analyst, MAIL.RU GROUP
6 years in game analytics.
Before mail.ru had worked in Rocket Jump and Social Quantum. The main experience is marketing analytics.
The story will focus on predicting the following metrics:
1. Total revenue for the game that is just starting.
2. Total revenue for the game 6-12 months after a soft launch.
3. Revenue from advertising channels.


A/B Testing in Games: Common Mistakes & Important Details
Vitaliy Cheremisinov, Head of data unit , AIC
Vitaliy started his career from game development. Straight after the education he worked with data analysis. The projects he workes/workes with include: MasterCard
Adidas
VTB
mos.ru
Utkanos
Azbuka Vkusa
The biggest challenge in conducting A/B testing is proper analysis of results. That’s why in this session Vitaliy will share the most common mistakes analysts make from the mathematical point of view. He will also talk about the convergence of tests and bootstrap, p-value, its resampling and problems of rank tests.

Analytics, Customer Development and User Surveys: Synergy and a Bit of Magic
Vasiliy Sabirov, lead analyst & co-founder, devtodev
Kate Nahornaya, analyst, devtodev
8 years of experience in analytics of games.
Vasiliy started his career working at a monetization service. Then he worked as a Lead Analyst at a big MMO game, and at the moment Vasiliy is the Lead Analyst & co-founder at devtodev, and he has already helped more than 50 games to improve their KPI.
Speakers will try to compare methods of getting insights and generating hypotheses. Which one is better: quantitative or qualitative research? What can tell you more about a project: user data or users themselves?
As an interesting bonus, Vasiliy & Vera will present the results of the research that will be taking place during the whole track.


Case: how we increased revenue from game through offers personalization
Sergey Panyushkin, Product Analytics Lead, Crazy Panda
At Crazy Panda, Sergey is engaged in product analytics, developing several projects: World Poker Club, Pirate Tales and Stellar Age. The main activity is monetization in games, both through the development of a system of personal offers, and other aspects leading to an increase LTV.
We have come a long way in developing and improving the system of offers personalization: from the introduction of the simplest system to the development of ML-models. Sergey will tell about the main points that made it possible to move from monetization through a bank to monetization through offers.


Operation Metrics Detector: matching product analytics with marketing
Oleg Lapin, Head of Game Analytics, NX Studio
Ilya Matveev, NX Studio
Oleg Lapin is the Head of Game Analytics in NX Studio. In his 10 year analytical career he has worked for Avito, Domofond and AlfaBank. Now he is focused on how to use best analytical practices to improve monetization of current projects like Hero Wars, Island Experiment and develop new hits.
Ilya lead analytics in Island Experiment and develop analytical applications.
“What is to blame: product or UA?” – a basic question when ROI drops if you are not satisfied with the comparison with organic traffic. NX Studio analysts solved this problem and created a convenient framework. In their report, Ilya and Oleg will tell you how to use it in daily work and immediately identify problems with metrics in all dimensions.


ROAS early forecast
Vasilii Smetanin, CMO, Playkot
7 years of expirience in mobile marketing and social games. He leaded traffic buying at Game Insight company and People & Screens agency (Dentsu Aegis Network). Now he is a lead of the marketing team at Playkot. Age of Magic, Supercity, The Tribez are among the projects he has done
The quicker a company determines traffic quality, the quicker it can stop running ineffective campaigns and reallocate resources to more profitable sources. This helps save money, grow ROI and cover expenditures even faster. The evaluation of the effectiveness of linear regression and machine learning as ways to assess and forecast traffic.
Discussion Panel: Interaction Between Analytics and a Project Team
In some companies, the analyst is a person who provides reports on requests only; in others, the analyst is someone who stands the closest to making the most important decisions. During this round table, we will discuss the roles analysts perform in different projects and will make an attempt to agree on what analysts should actually do.

Vasiliy Sabirov,
Lead analyst & co-founder, devtodev

Evgeniy Gilmanov, Lead Game Analyst, Belka Games

Vasiliy Siniurin, CAO, Kefir

Gleb Sologub, CAO, SkyEng

Maxim Kozhnov, Head of Analytics, Azur Games
Game Design & Narrative

Adapting game content for freeroam VR experience
Asya Orlova, Game Director, District Zero VR
Ivan Guschin, Art Director, District Zero VR
Asya Orlova started in games 4 years ago as an indie developer, later becoming a contract Game Designer specializing in building prototypes and vertical slices. In 2018 joined District Zero VR as Game Design Lead.
Before gamedev worked in Enterprise software development for 7 years.
Ivan is a skilled technical artist with extensive experience in 3d modelling and performance optimization. Previously worked at AnvioVR pioneering freeroam VR experiences on Russian market.
In this section we will focus on how we optimized the balance, mechanics, level design and other in-game content of the game Soviet Experiment. We will share our experience on problems we had and how we solved them to make the game smoothly playable and enjoyable by a party of up to 4 people in a freeroam VR experience in a 10×15 m. hall.


Visual Novel: More than just a picture book
Anton Arkatov, CEO, Soviet Games
Anton Arkatov. Main writer for Everlasting Summer and Love, Money, Rock’n’Roll, founder of Soviet Games studio.
This talk will focus on the growning popularity of visual novels and my own experience working on Everlasting Summer and Love, Money, Rock’n’Roll. It will explore main aspects of the genre as well as how as simple story may be not so simple.


Beyond Hardcore, Battle Pass in a Casual Game. Case of Cooking Diary
Aisen Martynov, Lead Game Designer, MyTona
Martynov Aisen – senior game designer at MyTona. He travelled a long way in the project: starting from the QA department, he gradually became the senior balancer, and now the senior game designer, so it is safe to say that Aysen learned all aspects of the project from the inside.
In his lecture, Aysen will talk about a bold step – the first implementation of battle pass system in a casual game. In the course of the story he will speak about several important details: how the Cooking Diary team came to this decision, how the development took place, how the changes were made and how did battle pass performed.


Creating Cool Boss Fights
Dmitry Aborilov, Game Designer, Banzai Games
Dmitriy Aborilov – game designer at Banzai games. Working on bosses for Shadow Fight 3 and core-gameplay for brand new project – Shadow Fight: Arena.
Why one boss will be remembered for years, while others are not noticeable at all. Dmitriy going to discuss formation solid concept of memorable opponent: what you should focus on during development stage and how to cause different player’s experience and emotions.


Game Maker game prototyping from scratch
Serge Himmelreich, Indie, INDIKATOR
Serge Himmelreich is the founder of INDIKATOR. In 19 year career he has worked for Rikki Group, iFREE, Zillion Whales, Nival. He has worked on series such as Etherlords, Shararam(Smeshariki MMO), Mushroom Wars, Evilibrium, Rolling Yarn, FEAREA, ST(VR) and more.
Creating fast game prototypes for testing hypotheses and game mechanics is an important part of the game development. This is useful for game designers working in large studios, and indie developers too. Sergey will show an example how to make fast and quality game-prototypes using Game Maker Studio 2.


How we demolished the fourth wall in Maginary
Semyon Poliakovskiy, Founder, Maginary
Semyon Polyakovskiy is an indie develope of the game-book Maginary. This is his debut project in the Game Dev. Before that he created escape rooms and immersive performances EXIT. He also worked as a creative in the advertising agencies (BBDO, Friends) and is a tutor in MADS creative courses.
The fourth wall demolition seems to be logical and organic technique to use in games. Based on the case of immersive game-book Maginary, Semyon Poliakovskiy will tell about what the 4th wall actually divides, which methods could be used to demolish it an what are the cons and pros this technique provides for games.


Machinations — free powerful tool for game designers with examples
Vladimir Kovtun, Product Manager, Social Quantum
Vladimir Kovtun literally lives games from the age of three. He has come a long way from organizing D&D parties and MTG tournaments to managing project development at AlternativaGames, Alawar, Creative Mobile and Social Quantum. He is always glad to share the experience within “Game Designer Cuffs” and the podcast “Radio GD” projects.
I often tell game designers about Machinations and I see only surprised looks in response. During this session, you’ll learn about this useful tool for prototyping the balance and economics of the game. This is going to be definitely useful for you.


Pathologic 2 Mindmap: a Game Journal People Might Actually Read
Alexandra “Alphyna” Golubeva, Narrative Designer, Ice-Pick Lodge
Alexandra “Alphyna” Golubeva is a narrative designer and localization lead at Ice-Pick Lodge. Now she’s working on Pathologic 2. Published several comic books and stories, translated Blood, Sweat, and Pixels into Russian, and loves pickles.
Narrative-driven games often suffer from walls of text, that players don’t always pay close attention to. The talk will describe Ice-Pick Lodge’s attempt to reinvent the game journal, turning it into a mini-game-like visual mindmap that preserves and emphasizes the complexity of the plot while being more engaging to players than classic journals.
Mix


Captains on deck: Communication between Project Manager and Team Leads
Danil Deneko, Project Manager, Sperasoft
Danil Deneko, Project Manager at Sperasoft.
9 years ago I started my career in the video game industry as a game designer but gradually moved to project and product management. Before Sperasoft, I worked at Deus Craft, Nevosoft, Playrix.
At this session, we will discuss how to establish an effective communication flow between Game Project Manager and Team Leads.


Embrace the uncertainty of your multiplayer launch
Matthew Morris, Head of Sales In EMEA, Unity Technologies
Matthew has over 20 years experience in internet technologies and has helped dozens of companies plan and launch their multiplayer games, including one of the fastest growing online titles, APEX Legends.
Launching a multiplayer game is scary. The only constant is change
So you have to learn to embrace it. Matthew has helped plan and launch dozens of multiplayer games. During this talk he is going to share some best practises to help embrace your multiplayer launch.


How In-Game Chat can Change Your Multiplayer Game, Based on the Success of PUBG and Rainbow Six: Siege
Cody Bye, Business Development Manager, Vivox
Cody Bye is the business development manager for Vivox, helping them secure business with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, My.com, and many other online games. He began his career in the games industry in 2007, focusing on multiplayer online games and how they attain success.
The session will provide an overview of Vivox, the in-game voice and text chat company that was recently acquired by Unity. It will provide a short overview of the features and integration paths for the technology, plus a few success stories and how implementing Vivox impacts your multiplayer game.


War Robots — 5 years in operation
Oleg Poroshin, Producer, Pixonic
Started as a product analyst in IT consulting, then switched to banking and dating, and then ended up in game dev. Now works as a producer for mobile tactical shooter War Robots.
War Robots has gained more than 120 million installs during its 5 years of operation. The team has already tried a lot of various in-game mechanics, but this time we’ll share our main ones devoted to content distribution. We’ll look at their pros, cons, and limitations, and also our community feedback and repercussions.
Indie & Game Postmortems


The Six Skills of Solo Indie Success
Alex Rose, Lead Developer, Alex Rose Games
Creator of Super Rude Bear Resurrection. Serial game jammer, multi award winner, and Physics graduate.
To successfully launch and sell an indie game, there are a handful of extremely important skills required. Often a small team is required to cover all of these skills, as few people are able to do all aspects of an indie launch alone. This talk will analyse the different skills and talk about how you can fill the gaps in your abilities.


Designing a Story Across 6 Genres (with a Secret Ending Hidden in a Different Game!)
Daniel Mullins, Indie Game Developer, Daniel Mullins Games
Daniel Mullins is an indie developer best known for creating the suspense-puzzler Pony Island. For 3 years after its debut, he worked on his larger and more ambitious follow-up: The Hex, released in late 2018. He is a frequenter of game jams, which have served as inspiration for his larger projects.
In this talk Daniel steps through the bizarre process of creating his follow-up title to Pony Island, The Hex. On its face The Hex is 6 games in one, which poses its own design and technical challenges. But things get stranger as genres are subverted, mechanics collide, and the story spills over into an entirely different secret game on Steam!


Indie game budget. Calculate, search and spend!
Dmitry Kachkov, Head, Sobaka Studio
Dmitry Kachkov began in games more then 10 years ago. Starting from simple engineer, continued working on titles for PS3 and Mobiles and succesfully started an indie developer studio already shipped big indie project Redeemer to steam.
This talk is about how to find and spend money for your indiegame. Talk will help you (or your indie team) find out how much money you realy need, what amount of money you need for needs that you don’t even know about and how better spent money.


The Killing Game: indies and mental health
Kirill Zolovkin, Lead Game Designer, OctoBox Interactive
Kirill Zolovkin, Lead Game Designer at OctoBox Interactive, has been making games in GameMaker for 17 years. His projects Steam Panic and Paper Knight have won multiple awards including Excellence in Game Design at DevGAMM. Leading DevGAMM expert has torn his t-shirt after playing Kirill’s Gripper.
Kirill will talk about the difficulties of making a game based on painful personal experience. In his action game Gripper, you tear singing hearts of your relatives out from bosses. Following the interviews with indie game developers Kirill suggests different ways to fight depression and mental disorders while making and releasing your game.


Life is Strange mobile adaptation
Yurii Denysiuk, Lead Game Designer, Pingle Game Studio
Yurii Denysiuk starts work with Unreal Engine in 2013 and in few years become a Lead Game Designer. Was responsible for “Life is Strange mobile adaptation” project from the development side.
This talk will highlight the main challenges and special aspects of bringing the award-winning adventure game from desktop and consoles to mobile platforms. And what you need to know when you want to transfer a big project from one engine to another. making and releasing your game.
Business & Management

Legal checklist for meeting with investor
Andrey Krivosheev, CEO, copyrightlawrussia.com
Andrey Krivosheev is the CEO of copyrightlawrussia.com and the founder of “Gamedev: legal aspects” telegram group (750+ developers and counting!). Working as the copyright law lawyer since 2001, I’ve gained rich legal expertise in gamedev field (and night time game developer myself).
This talk will be about the main legal aspects for preparing indie studios for investment: the registration of the legal entity, the conclusion of NDA with investor, the aggregation of rights to studio assets, preparation for other KYC procedures. Any questions are welcome!


Games worth $1M - how FB partners make it happen
Boris Kalmykov, Sales, Facebook
Boris has spent last year at FB helping mobile developers gain momentum & succeed. He has experience of taking developers from $0 per day to $100 000 per day in earning.
Many studios think of perfect products, but they don’t have a perfect business plan. Obviously, one cannot live without the other for success to happen. Boris will share his experience of managing some of the most successful studios & their approach to business (product & monetization)

Mobile games marketing and business planning (based on Mushroom Wars 2)
Andrey Korotkov, CEO, Zillion Whales
Anastasia Shelepova, UA manager
Entrepreneur, game producer, and passionate indie game developer for more than 15 years. Created my first game for ZX Spectrum and then gained experience as a developer and later became a game producer at large companies. For the last 5 years I am operating Zillion Whales company as a top-manager.
Started to buy traffic almost 6 years ago, of which the last 4 were devoted to purchases on Facebook. Agency + product experience allows her to look at the purchases from two different perspectives and make it more interesting.
This talk would be focused on how to market mobile game from pre-production to post release operational stage. Also I will cover important practice on how to build vital business model and plan based on different user aquisition strategies. All based on our personal experience with Mushroom Wars 2 game.


How to gain success in China
Jingxian Ma, Senior Business Development Manager, Mobvista
Jessenia Ma, Business Development manager from Mobvista, responsible for Chinese Market and Russian market, helping a lot of Russian developers grow in China market.
This session will target for developers who are willing to achieve something in Chinese Gaming Market. We will focus on how to earn money in China, including using Chinese domestic monetization platform and China Social Media. To be more accurate, we will disclose some related data to give reference to user acquisition.


GamesPress, KeyMailer, Woovit, Terminals – best free and paid PR tools to launch your game
Kirill Perevozchikov, Director, White Label
Kirill is Director at White Label, industry-leading gaming PR & consulting agency.
Launched Divinity: Original Sin 2, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Bard’s Tale IV and many other games. Worked with Deep Silver, Larian Studios, InXile, Bandai Namco, Microsoft, Sony, ASUS, NVidia, Focus Home Interactive
During this session, you will learn about the paid PR tools for promotion of your game among the press and bloggers.
We will review the system of placing press releases on the example of GamesPress, the key distribution system, KeyMailer, and also full-fledged distributors for publishing the keys of your games – Woovit and Terminals. You will learn about the rates, pros and cons of each system, and also get tips on how to use them efficiently. As for indies – a few tricks on what can be done with these tools without any money.


Present-day team leader: Plarium exprience
Maxim Muraviev, Sub-Lead of Customer Experience and Support Division, Plarium
At Plarium, Maxim works as a deputy head of the Customer Experience and Support Division which deals with all post-production of Krasnodar studio. Focused on working with people and on the implementation of the strategic tasks of the Division.
The presentation will introduce a contemporary concept of team leadership.
The main focus of the session is leaders’ personal qualities: what characteristics should be developed, goals to strive for, how to work with a team to achieve great results and help teammates be happy.
We’ll be reviewing specific concepts of teamwork used by Plarium.


How do you teach a pubsliher and a developer speak a common language
Kirill Stadnik, Publishing Director Caliber, Wargaming.net
Kirill has been working in games industry since 2009 and dedicated major part of his career to game publishing. Starting at Mail.Ru, where he was in charge of multiple products including such titles as Perfect World and Warface, Kirill moved to Wargaming, where he leads publishing activities for Caliber, an online action game about special forces (currently in Closed Alpha).
Many try to exploit the topic of greedy publishers disturbing developer teams, who just want to make games with no outside interference. Kirill will elaborate on the tools used by Wargaming and 1C Game Studios in Caliber’s development that engage reasonable data-driven decisions and help avoid conflicts of personal interests and desires.
Art & Visuals


Cascadeur Animation Software or why Disney principles of animation are not enough
Evgeniy Khapugin, Lead animator, Cascadeur
Evgeniy Khapugin started working in animation since 2006. In 2011 he joined Cascadeur team and participated as a lead animator in projects 11×11, Vector and Shadow Fight game series. The total audience of the projects reaches approximately 400 million people.
Almost everyone can see when physics in animation is broken but hardly anyone could say “why”? We strongly believe that animator should think more about the artistic design and should rely on a set of auxiliary tools when he has to solve the problems of the animation physical correctness. We will tell you about these tools and animation rules.


Creating visual effect and destructible objects in Houdini for game on UE4
Evgenia Plohova, Technical artist, AlterGames
Evgeniya is a technical artist with more then 5 years of experience. She started from mobile games on Unity and now working on project “Partisains”, before she took part in Skyforge, F.R.A.G. and some unannounced projects.
This session will cover how Houdini can be used to create visual effects, destructible objects for games on UE4. Evgeniya will show some techniques and tools in Houdini and UE4 blueprints that can be used in game development.


Illusions or art: optical secrets
Marya Yartseva, Lead Artist, G5 Entertainment
Marya is Art Lead and 2d artist, teacher, the author of courses on gaming graphics, the First of Her Name, Breaker of Office Chains.
Picture is illusion of volume and space on flat surface. If you want to make your illusion convincing, you need a knowledge about how human eyes and human perception work. Most efficient cases based on light fhysics will be shown be Marya.


Being an artist, thinking like a game designer
Alexandr Maslyukov, Art Lead, Moonlight Mouse
Maslyukov Alexandr is CG(3D/VFX) artist since 2013. First game project Rune Guardian(Bloxorz). Later I worked for Gardenscapes and Homescapes as vfx\tech artist. Now I’m an art lead in Elinor(survival-RTS), Moonlight Mouse and main vfx\tech artist in Secrets of Pandora(match3), Trilobite Inc.
Why every artist should be a bit of tech artist?! Explanation of the importance in the understanding working process: game designers, tech artists, animators.
Pre-concepting preparation in prototyping for 3-rd view RTS. Understanding the scaling and density of visual information. Analysis of the playing field “reading” by player.


Mobile game UI design and Unity
Nikita Kandybin, Lead UI/UX Artist, Banzai Games
Nikita Kandybin is a Lead UI/UX Artist at Banzai Games, that gave us one of the most popular mobile fighting game franchise – Shadow Fight. Previously, he worked on projects such as Winx: Bloomix Quest, Slugterra: Dark Waters and Deploy and Destroy (in collaboration with film company Lionsgate).
Good interface is good not only on the layout. In his report, Nikita will talk about how and why the game UI artist should at least be interested in the engine of his project, about an effective collaboration of design and development teams, and will also share the company’s experience in optimizing the mobile game interface in Unity.


Art team survival kit
Olga Cherkashina, Art Director, Zeptolab
Olga Cherkashina began working on mobile games in 2005 at Dynamic Pixels company, and then in 2015 joined the Zeptolab team first as an artist and later as an art director.
Talk not about art, but about people who are now working as artists in game development. I’ll speak about their motivation, as well as about the ways to work more effectively in a team, whether you are one of artists or a lead.