Develop:Brighton 2021
2021-10-26..2021-10-28
Brighton, United Kingdom
[Develop:Brighton 2021, Develop:Brighton 2023, Develop:Brighton 2024]
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| 'Pivot and Adapt' -The Artistic Hurdles of a Multi-genre Game and How it Applies to Wider Challenges | Rory Jobson | 42m |
Describes work on Battletoads (2020) where creating unique art across 11 gameplay genres forces concrete choices and workflows the publisher and team actually… | ||
| (Almost) Everything You Need To Know About TikTok. | MJ Widomska | 49m |
Claims that a campaign can explode if it gives creators a simple, remixable prompt prove true: a #dndme campaign aims for 500k views and hits 15 million, with… | ||
| 3D Audio in Games: What, Where, Why and How? | Cal Armstrong | 48m |
Clear, actionable claims: a bottom-up explanation of 3D audio from HRTFs to implementation, concrete measurement and rendering steps, and practical PS5 best… | ||
| A Modern Development Culture for a Modern Development Process. | Whitney Burner | 42m |
Studio uses trunk based dev with continuous integration and deployment, pushing builds to a build repository so one binary deploys to dev/stage/live via config… | ||
| A practical perspective on training reinforcement learning bots. | Alexandre Borghi | 37m |
A pragmatic system for training RL bots claims to make research‑level methods usable at reasonable cost by combining worker/trainer orchestration… | ||
| How to Manage an Epic Intergalactic Music Project Remotely (in a global pandemic) | Richard Jacques | 51m |
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy score uses a distributed workflow: 11-person composition team cleaned MIDI and Sibelius engraving, remote layered string… | ||
| How to Get More Out of Your Code Reviews. | Joe Kilner | 45m |
Argues that code reviews exist to share knowledge and surface design intent not to be primary bug catchers, recommends 100% coverage of changes, reviews sized… | ||
| How to Build Amazing Mobile Games With Rapid User Testing. | Kim Kohatsu | 46m |
Claims rapid iterative validation using PickFu polls with a panel of ~10,000 US respondents and simple single-question tests that return 50 respondents in an… | ||
| How Much Does This Even Cost? Using Analytics Tools to Measure ROI on Consoles & PC. | Kat Welsford | 44m |
Shows how to tag every marketing URL with UTMs, send them through Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics/GA4, and read results in the Steam UTM analytics… | ||
| How an Artist Got into Game Development: The Art & Process of Making Silt. | Tom Mead | 42m |
An artist moves from pen drawings into a practical pipeline: Photoshop → Unity pipeline where shots are built as layered PSDs, tested with graybox layouts and… | ||
| Games User Research Throughout the Development Process and Beyond! | Dan Marshall | 40m |
Clear claim: games user research throughout development catches costly problems early and improves playability. Methods shown include questionnaires… | ||
| Games that Retain. | Robbie Hopkins | 36m |
Twelve mobile studios and five industry experts inform a retention playbook: build predictive LTV models using behavioral data, not just time-based D1/D7/D30… | ||
| From Classroom to Boardroom. | Matt Busuttul | 44m |
Waving Bear Studio describes concrete outcomes: an early Kickstarter goal of £60k raises only £1.5k, an incubator year that funds a prototype and leads to… | ||
| Fireside Chat: All Things Insomniac | Ted Price | 47m |
Insomniac describes concrete practices: almost 30 years old, about 400 staff across Burbank and Durham, simultaneous projects with a matrix structure and three… | ||
| Dynamic & Different: Real-time Look Development for Stylized Games. | Nick Carver | 44m |
A workflow uses custom ramp shaders in Unity (Flat Kit, Tunic Colors Pro) plus photogrammetry, tiled normal maps and post‑processing (tone mapping, colorized… | ||
| Don't Panic: Scaling Your Team Without Losing What Makes You, You. | Jonny Hopper | 44m |
Studio growth focuses on concrete practices: define and publish values, hire for those values, and give juniors explicit onboarding and mentorship so they ask… | ||
| Dialogue Performance and Design for Creatures, Monsters and Demons. | Dan Stirling, Will Tidman | 48m |
Creative Assembly documents a full in‑house pipeline for Total War: Warhammer that moves from concept art through live casting and script proofing to… | ||
| Designing Better Quests Using Science. | Hal Sandbach | 43m |
Talk claims that measurable specifics beat vague topics: self‑determination theory shows autonomy, competence, relatedness each predict enjoyment and longer… | ||
| Delete Your Video Game Website (and other sensationalist advice) | Dan Thomas | 43m |
"We need a new website"..... "We need to be on TikTok"... "We need to make dev diaries for YouTube"... "We need to do a weekly live stream"....
Marketing a… | ||
| Creativity: The Indie Way. | Chris Olsen, Dom Clarke, Tom Mead, Pete Bottomley, Mike Bithell | 01h 03m |
Describes concrete practice changes: using Discord for daily collaboration and weekly one-hour check-ins, shifting design scribbles into Miro whiteboards… | ||
| Creating a Thriving Work Culture in a Remote World. | Jenny Muhlwa | 44m |
Company culture moves from vague aspiration to measurable change: Sumo builds a social learning site called dojo, reaches roughly 1,000 users, records about… | ||
| Contract Killers: What Developers Should Eliminate From Their Publishing Agreement. | Tim Repa-Davies | 46m |
Look for the actual deal terms not the buzzwords: avoid handing over IP via one percent assignment or perpetual grants, insist on carving out proprietary… | ||
| Console Development in Unity. | James Stone | 44m |
Registration requires NDAs and dev kits often bought or issued and Windows 10 only is mandatory for console toolchains. Development uses Unity LTS plus Visual… | ||
| Case Study: How No Man's Sky used Azure to share an infinite universe. | Iain Brown, Harvey Eagle | 33m |
No Man’s Sky shares discoveries and real-time play by using Azure App Service for platform as a service, Cosmos DB holding ~3 TB of JSON documents, Event Hub… | ||
| Can AI Help Moderate In-game Chat? | Mari-Sanna Paukkeri | 36m |
Claims that AI can screen in‑game chat in real time: model trains from past human moderation and is ready in two weeks to production, integrates via a… | ||
| Building Outside the Engine - How and Why to Use Your Engine Only for Display and User Input | Christopher Knowles | 41m |
Argues for keeping game logic as a pure C# DLL and using Unity only for display and input, with message-passing event lists between them; core simulation is… | ||
| Building Dynamic Environments for the Dungeons of Gloomhaven. | Sam Swain | 45m |
Flaming Fowl Studios adapts Gloomhaven using a hybrid pipeline: gameplay code analyzes map tiles, a data‑driven node system called apparence runtime node… | ||
| Building a AA Studio: From Start-up to Fully Funded. | Sally Blake | 41m |
Studio is founded 2018, builds a playable demo via a Teesside University partnership, wins a UK Games Fund grant and an angel cheque in 2020, then is acquired… | ||
| Better Playtesting For Indie Developers. | Steve Bromley | 47m |
Regular, cheap playtests actually change outcomes: small teams validate concrete hypotheses, rank them by risk, and fix the highest-impact problems quickly… | ||
| Being Boring: How Less Innovation Made Overboard! a Hit. | Jon Ingold | 47m |
Indie studio inkle makes Overboard! in about 100 days using the existing inkle narrative engine, reused UI and art patterns, and heavy content-first… | ||
| Behind the Split Screen Sound of It Takes Two: A Story About CO-LA-BO-RA-TION. | philip eriksson, Anne-Sophie Mongeau | 45m |
Philip Eriksson, Anne-Sophie Mongeau.
This session tells the story behind the sound design of Hazelight's intriguing and entertaining title, It Takes Two -… | ||
| Avoiding the Pitfalls of Interactive Narrative. | Tim Fletcher | 47m |
Explains the concrete claim that big narrative choices get ignored when their implied consequences are out of scope, and shows the production tools that… | ||
| Ask Me Anything: Questions for the Artists. | Leanne Bayley, Daniel Hutchinson, Louise Andrew | 38m |
Practical hiring and day‑to‑day details: studios ask for a curated portfolio of a few stellar pieces not a dump of everything, tailor applications to the job… | ||
| All Aboard: Tools and Tactics for Building Team Consensus. | Jessica Fiorini | 49m |
Concrete methods for getting teams aligned: use a kickoff to set 3–5 design pillars, run short brainstorms with 2–8 people, capture results in simple docs or… | ||
| Active Listening – How Amazon’s New World Evolved into an MMO Success Story. | Katy Kaszynski | 45m |
Amazon describes a development loop driven by in‑game telemetry and community channels, with iterative Alphas that change core design (single‑player survival →… | ||
| The Story of Oddworld: Soulstorm. | Bennie Terry, Lorne Lanning, Will Freeman | 01h 00m |
Oddworld: Soulstorm reimagines side‑scrolling as 2.9D in Unity by rendering far more world at once, forcing a concrete engineering gamble: build a… | ||
| The Principles of Empathetic Programming. | Pavle Mihajlovic | 41m |
Argues that empathy measurably reduces technical friction and bugs, with concrete tactics: check prior knowledge, document why (link bug tickets), prefer… | ||
| The Gallery - A Case Study on Interactive Storytelling in FMV Games. | Ru Howe, Paul Raschid | 45m |
Claims that a 450‑scene linear script becomes a branching FMV game are backed by specifics: 4.5 hours of FMV and feature‑length playthroughs of 65–80 minutes… | ||
| The FIVE Indie Marketing Mistakes I See Everyday. | Jon Calvin | 48m |
Five concrete failures decide whether to watch: assets that don’t sell the game—bad capsule image, bland screenshots, no gameplay video and trailers longer… | ||
| The Evolution of the Player Interface. | Philip Oliver, Andrew Oliver | 59m |
A clear claim: natural‑language conversation is the next meaningful game input, so a platform is built to prove it — a prototype authoring tool (easier than… | ||
| The 3 Best and Worst Technical Audio Systems from The Ascent. | Joe Thom, John Tennant | 46m |
UE4 and Wwise systems get concrete numbers and code tricks: reduced 1,300 Ak components to ~80–90 with scoped groups (demoing limits 16→3→1), a GameState AC… | ||
| Test Driven Development: A Mindset to Develop Games from the Start, Middle, or End. | Nikky Armstrong | 43m |
Argues that Test Driven Development belongs to the whole project as a mindset not a checkbox, showing concrete tools: Behavior Driven phrasing (Given When… | ||
| Tackling The Myths & Misconceptions About NFTs in Games. | Tony Pearce | 38m |
Claims concrete outcomes: switching to Ronin side chain drops user fees to near zero and Ramp Network enables credit‑card onramps; Axi Infinity shows the scale… | ||
| Subtlety & Nuance: A Foley Masterclass & Live Demonstration. | Zoe Freed, Jemma Riley-Tolch | 42m |
Molinare's Foley masterclass names exact deliverables and shows methods: walk cycles used to match character intention, Pro Tools sessions and per-asset… | ||
| State of the Art: The Future of Visual Development. | Nader Alikhani | 49m |
Atomhawk describes concept art as a problem‑solving, fast medium used on Halo Call of Duty Minecraft FIFA and Mortal Kombat 11 and shows concrete workflow… | ||
| Skye Tales: Creating a UI That Couldn't Be Happier to See You. | Cari Watterton | 39m |
Brief recount of concrete outcomes: a diegetic journal becomes the single UI hub, built as a 3D diegetic journal hub with sticker-like Scrapbook pages and a… | ||
| Show Me The Money. | Spike Laurie, Ian Livingstone | 47m |
Clear rundown of what gets funded and why: fund targets 1–3M EUR seed and 3–7M EUR series B, has done 20 investments after reviewing ~2,000 studios, and looks… | ||
| Selling Your Game Studio. Insights from the Sale of Hutch to MTG Group. | David Amor, Shaun Rutland | 49m |
Hutch sells to MTG for an expected $375M headline after years of bootstrapping, early angel rounds, and fast prototyping that generates ~20M downloads per… | ||
| Project Release Planning: Building an Iterative Framework. | Adam Lavender | 45m |
Framework sets quarterly releases of three months (four per year) for a ~50 person AAA project, starts with a two-day planning workshop, then a kickoff, four… | ||
| Procedural Foley for a Cinematic Sound. | Hugh Waller, Andrej Smoljan | 46m |
Procedural Foley for the Dark Pictures builds fully runtime systems that play 3200 assets across footsteps, upper/lower cloth, guns and props, and adapts the… | ||
| Orthors Story: Running a Black Owned Games Studio. | Max St Hill, Yasmin Ali, Taylor Campbell | 45m |
Team describes how they taught themselves development using Unity with Playmaker then C# and shipped to the Apple App Store, where a title initially hits about… | ||
| Noise vs Momentum - Driving Desire for Your Game. | Ravi Vijh | 45m |
Compares one-off launch spikes with steady buildup and gives five concrete tactics: start momentum at day one, document origin stories, set communications… | ||
| Mind your NPCs and Q’s: what’s next for Game AI? | Sandy MacPherson | 46m |
Overview of concrete work and demos not platitudes: middleware Kythera is presented with live features — ORCA+ for dynamic avoidance, runtime nav links and… | ||
| Meditation for All. | Jan Meppen | 40m |
Claims that a daily mindfulness routine increases focus, reduces anxiety and even shortens needed sleep, supported by specific practices: Ashtanga/Pranayama… | ||
| Learning to Lead a Craft Team: Year One. | Adam Pearce | 46m |
An account of concrete first-year lessons: write three bullet points that define the role, prioritize lead first create second, stop being the hero by… | ||
| The Spirit of Independence: Challenges and Inspiration from Three Decades at the Top | George Osborn, Debbie Bestwick | 57m |
Team 17 booms from 30+ years and 120 released games, pivots from being the worms company to running a rapid management buyout then an IPO completed in 91 days… | ||
| Running a 21st Century Games Studio. | Maria Sayans, Rami Ismail, Sally Blake, Alex Grimonpont, Jonathan Smith | 01h 08m |
Stores reveal concrete moves: shipping Alba Wildlife Adventure (Dec 2020) with ~30 people, running a buddy system and weekly “teas at threesies,” sending care… | ||
| It's Not Real Money, it's Robux: An Exploration of Children's Attitudes Towards In-game Spending | Raj Pathmanathan, Jelena Stosic | 54m |
A mixed methods study reports how children and parents think about Robux Roblox and Fortnite purchases, giving concrete numbers and behaviors: a mean spend… | ||
| Is Working With a Publisher Worth it? | Julia Kenny | 46m |
Publisher deals trade money and distribution for participation in IP and control, with concrete outcomes not promises: expect funding for ramping teams… | ||
| Improving Data Structures for Rapid & Intelligent Gameplay Design. | Michael Robson, Ben Ponsford | 48m |
A modular propulsion and drivetrain system replaces monolithic vehicle classes so components are assembled by data not hard code, stored as structs with unique… | ||
| Hyper-Social: Designing Games for Young Millennials and Gen Z. | Ioana Cazacu | 30m |
Claims that small, specific design choices drive engagement: a mobile cooking game Ready Chef Go! reaches about 75 million Snapchatters by using light… | ||
| How Your World Builds Fans (and How Fans Build Brands) | Dave Tovey, Ben Roberts | 42m |
Claims that licensing turns games into retail brands with measurable hits not vague promises The talk gives specifics: a dedicated e‑commerce and… | ||
| How To Support Learning in Multiplayer Games. | Joseph Hesketh | 49m |
Four years of research using interviews surveys and quantitative analysis leads to a practical framework of roles — instructor, messenger, creator/provider and… | ||
| How to Stop Cheat Sellers Damaging IAP and Ad Revenue. | Andrew Hogan | 43m |
Mobile games lose real money to concrete techniques not just lore: MOD APKs offering unlimited coins and invisible ads use naked ad calls and ad stacking to… | ||
| Understanding Your Game's DNA. | Richard Jones | 38m |
Konami Europe sets up a PC and console publishing and co‑development arm about 18 months ago and narrows focus to Western games by Western studios for Western… | ||
| There’s A New Way To Develop And Thrive. | Mike Gamble | 34m |
Claims a service that helps small teams keep IP and creative control while solving discoverability using concrete tools and partners. Offers a free Hub (launch… | ||
| Video Games - The Future is User-Generated. | Dean Anderson | 19m |
Concrete results not promises: Roblox adds 5.01 billion hours of engagement in the first three quarters of 2020 and pays developers over $250 million; a… | ||
| We Belong - a Look at the Industry's Lack of Diversity, Challenges and Ways to Improve it. | Troy Aidoo, Andy Sesay | 43m |
Argues that specifics matter: 11% of characters are Black and only 3% of protagonists are Black, 60% of 2019 sponsorships go to white creators… | ||
| What's Next for the UK Games Industry? | Dr Jo Twist | 47m |
Covers concrete wins and numbers: the industry records 3,200 responses to its census (target 6,000), reports 24 major acquisitions totalling £4 billion, and… | ||
| Why does everybody want flipping metaverse? | Dave Ranyard | 47m |
Metaverse projects here claim real outcomes: 10,000 frog NFTs sell out on day one, funding a persistent world where 50% of the budget goes to the shared space… | ||
| Why Marketing Your Studio is Just as Important as Marketing Your Games. | Abbie Dickinson | 32m |
Argument: studio marketing matters as much as game marketing because it recruits talent, reassures partners and exposes toxic opacity. Evidence and methods… | ||
| Why You Should Not Underestimate First User Experience and How to Improve It. | Kristina Miles | 46m |
Claims that reviewing more than a hundred games and decomposing onboarding yields concrete fixes: reduce time-to-play by avoiding large downloads and mandatory… | ||
| Work for Hire Studio Seeks Own IP to Develop: What Could (and did) Go Wrong?? | Bob Makin | 42m |
SockMonkey Studios builds Fish Tanks as a self‑funded arcade arena game, ships a playable demo at GDC 2019, then faces chronic team churn, repeated context… | ||
| nothing matches | ||