Talk: Being A Multi-Disciplinary Artist: Games, Film and Beyond

Speaker: Hannah Crosby

The presentation will cover insights gained through the presenter’s experiences working within multiple creative industries as an artist.  Specifically, looking at the fundamental principles that underlie the creation of good art, regardless of medium, and which skills allowed the presenter to move between the video games and feature film industries by applying concepts relevant to both.  Creating believable art is strengthened through understanding real fabrication methods which will allow the artist to elevate their art with a real understanding of how physical objects are built and weathered. The talk will explore the importance of traditional art training for games artists, not just the study of specific digital software or games-specific art ideas, and why this creates better artists who are more resilient and creative.

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: Co-operative Game Development

Speakers: Maize Wallin & Jason Bakker

When making games in a team, you need to decide on how to legally structure your group; how IP is held, how liability is shared, how decisions are legally made, etc. The path that most teams take at the moment is to set up a private company, but this hierarchical structure may not gel with how your team works together in the longer term.

Co-operatives are an alternative to companies, and are founded on the concepts of democracy and equality. In this talk we will discuss how their unique democratic structure affects the many facets of running a business, including ownership of shares, how profit share is handled, team member obligations and recompensation, private investment in its many forms, team decision-making, and how new members joining or current members leaving the team is handled.

At Ghost Pattern, we are converting to a co-operative, and have done a significant amount of research into both the nature of co-ops in Australia, and various games co-ops around the world. In this session we’ll share with you what we’ve learnt about the pros, cons, and gotchas of incorporating as a co-operative. Overall this should give you a solid grounding in what co-ops are, how they differ from companies, and the basis of what you need to understand and prepare in order to decide which direction to go in for your own 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: Mobile pre-launch optimisation

Speaker: Christina Chen

Critter Clash, the debut mobile title for Lumi Interactive shipped in less than a year to over 600K pre-registrations and over 400K downloads in the first two months. This talk will be a postmortem from Game Operations Lead, Christina Chen, covering the evolution from Soft Launch to Live Operations. Learn how Lumi Interactive improved Critter Clash's monetisation 80x and leveraged Google Play's Start on Android program to run traffic experiments before launch. This will be a pre-launch optimisation deep dive exploring what we did right and what mistakes we've learnt from.

- Key KPIs to measure and how to optimise for them pre-launch

- Our experience with soft launch vs. Google Play Early Access

- Monetisation experiments and results

- Easy and free data pipeline - utilising Firebase and BigQuery

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: Prototyping into Production - Technical and Creative Convergence

Speaker: Dean Finnigan

Prototyping is a critical part of the development of ideas and gameplay and requires a highly functioning team of cross disciplines to work together in an arena that can be hugely different from the pace of normal development.

This session will look at my experience of working within a fast paced team and how the role of an artist/technical artist is constantly evolving especially with tools such as unreal allowing the artist creative and technical freedom.

This session will cover ideas of best practices, common pitfalls and observations both from specific skillset point of view but also contributing to the team. The dynamic creation of something that has the potential to emerge that can be more than the sum of it’s parts.

Rather than be a definitive approach to a process, this session should hopefully raise questions and add value to any prototyping process and allow me to share my experiences of identifying where prototypes have been successful, how the team has performed and responded to diverse ideas, and anticipating the clients expectations.

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: Championing Others Starts With Championing Yourself

Speaker: Pritika Sachdev

When we’re given the task of managing others, often our own wellbeing falls by the wayside. Suddenly we’re in charge of humans, and that can be really daunting! So how can we make sure that we’re creating the absolute best workspace for everyone including ourselves?

Pritika has been the community manager at CheckPoint for over 2 years now, and in that time has gone from managing an online community, to a team of passionate volunteers and now her coworkers. She’s the first to admit that she’s made some bad decisions regarding her own self care and implores you not to make the same mistakes. This talk will explore the benefits of self care, and how looking after yourself can help you light the way for others.

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