Talk: Indigenous Culture in Video Games

Speaker: Phoebe Watson

The sensitive presentation of culture in video games is a relatively new concept to the medium. It has continually been able to reach wider audiences over the years. With this ability to create and share stories and experiences, we can make a seriously positive impact.  

In this talk, Phoebe will speak to her experiences working with the Indigenous community in videogames and the processes that were taken to involve them in the production of Chaos Tavern by DragonBear Studios. Following, she will express her opinion on the importance of including Indigenous culture into videogames; Highlighting how it can preserve one of the oldest living cultures on the planet and aid in closing the gap between non-Indigenous and Indigenous people.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Making Games More Interactive on Twitch

Speaker: Richard Deveraux

Streaming has become a big part of how people engage with games from tuning in to watch their favourite streamers, to cooperatively playing a game through text chat via Twitch Plays. With Extensions, Twitch has made it even easier for developers to add viewer interactivity to streams with games like Borderlands 3 now offering in-game loot for viewers that participate in live-streaming events.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Ensuring the Quality of your Quality Assurance: the studio guide on getting the most out of your QA team

Speaker: Callum Harrington

Whether you’ve just started your own studio, about to launch your first game or you’re a big name company with multiple projects under your belt, there’s one thing that will never change: your game needs testing. Probably more than you thought you would. But who should be testing?

And when?

And how?

And why?

In this talk, we’ll be covering what are the best practices when it comes to hiring QA roles and what steps studios can take to better support their QA teams. Whether your considering contractors or employing a new member to your team, it’s best to have a firm understanding on the different QA roles and what preparation will be required when bringing them onto your project.

To light the way, we’ll dive into the day-to-day tasks, the month-to-month plans, and the year-to-year goals of QA, to ensure your studio can facilitate a high quality QA team.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Anime and the Illusion of Visual Simplicity

Speaker: Ngoc Vu

Anime despite it's minimalist appearance, can be a difficult style to work with. What defines it from western animation? What can we do when the elements and design seem so established?

For any artists hoping to adopt an anime artstyle into their concept art and games, this talk will go through the specific visual tools, methods, and thought processes that were considered when establishing Ngoc's artstyle for her anime inspired work and how practical they were in a game studio environment.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Puzzles to be explored but not solved: Designing ambiguous navigable worlds

Speaker: Alexander Muscat

How can we create worlds to be explored but not fully understood? This talk discusses how to design game levels for experiences of exploration and curiosity by introducing spatial ambiguity. Focusing on the design of award-winning WORLD4, a multi-view exploration game where players chart out a layered abstract world, I will describe an alternative approach level design by reframing game levels as something to be scrutinised and understood.

By presenting multiple design strategies designers can learn how to heighten player perception and vary navigation, seed uncertainty and encourage investigation, and subvert expectations to create surprise and foster interpretive readings. Through these insights attendees may build an understanding in how to enrich their own designs for exploratory and narrative player experiences.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Monitoring Performance on Massive Games

Speaker: Tony Albrecht

Monitoring the performance of your game as you build it is relatively easy, but how do you do that with a game that has already been released? And has millions of players? On thousands of different hardware configurations? Is the average FPS enough? This talk will dig down into how we do this on League Of Legends - how we do it, why we do it and what benefits it gives us. We'll start with simple metrics and progressively refine them as we discover problems until we have something that makes intuitive sense.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Storm Boy: The Game Game Director Postmortem

Speaker: Ellen Jurik

From the first meeting with IP Holders to the multi-platform simultaneous release, “Storm Boy: The Game” had a nine-month full development cycle. To hit this goal, the team had to control scope, iterate, and make decisions fast. In this talk, Game Director Ellen Jurik will cover her approach to defining a game’s vision and how this vision is carried across to all aspects of the game. She will also discuss the process of adapting an existing IP of another media to a game, and the production and design challenges for releasing a game across eight platforms in a limited timeframe.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Do you find yourself confused by colour theory?  Have you been overwhelmed by sliders?  Ever Wondered what things like agnostic or triptic colour schemes so you try googling them only to find out that they’re actually spelt Analogous and Triadic and it’s too late to take back that message you’ve already sent to your colleague?!? Well! Then this talk is for you! This talk doesn’t really tell you what any of those fancy words mean, but it will tell you how to make your colours look nice and consistent using data, research, colour matching, rulesets and other colour grading techniques.

This talk will first focus on getting enhancing the colours you’ve already got and how to grade things using the various tools that engines like Unreal and Unity provide (as well as how to generate a look up table in photoshop so you can use all of photoshop’s tools!). We’ll then look at ways to coming up with a cohesive colour scheme for games as well as easy way to generate colour palettes for items, shaders and textures. Finally this talk will finish up on with a case study on creating thousands of colours, research and inclusivity of skin tones, colour ux, and share some data and analytics on colour schemes. This talk isn’t so much about reinventing the colour wheel, but destroying it (and maybe setting it on fire.)

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Composing The Music for Florence and Necrobarista

Speaker: Kevin Penkin

Kevin will present on two recent game projects he's written music for, Florence and Necrobarista, to compare and contrast the vastly different aesthetic, stylistic and interactive approaches to both soundtracks.

He will then deep dive into how he worked with the development teams, music supervisor and other musicians to create the distinct sound worlds of both games.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Who Are You Helping And How?

Speaker: Shane Trewartha

Over all the years I’ve worked in games, especially since also working in games education, the one universal truth that I have noticed that seems to plague our industry, even through all our ups and downs, is that it is “hard to get into”, often opaque, and sometimes outright hostile to newcomers.

What if we changed the way we thought about growing the industry? What if we realised that creating art/entertainment/media/all of the other great things games can be is not a zero sum game? What if we realised that anyone can do it, most people just need to be pointed in the right direction?

So I started a studio with these exact goals in mind, Mana Tea. I had seen year after year, dozens and dozens of talented, enthusiastic, versatile and valuable graduates bounce off our industry because there “wasn’t enough room” for all of them. The thing is, they had everything they needed right there between them. With the right guidance, they could have been making their own games rather than someone else’s.

As well as telling my own story, this talk is going to be a thought provoking call to action to everyone in the audience to get out there and help the newbies. Our industry has the potential to be so much broader, richer and more diverse, but for a little bit of effort on our part to stop accidentally keeping people out.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au