Games Connect Asia Pacific 2018
2018-10-23..2018-10-24
Melbourne, Australia
who it's for
studio founders and managers, producers and product managers, game developers, marketing and user acquisition managers, game artists, quality assurance engineers, backend and live-ops engineers
topics
optimising graphics for mobile; procedural generation with Blender; Unity C# tooling and serialization; scaling web services for free-to-play; player segmentation and live ops; marketing funnels and demo testing; ux design for games; quality assurance for small teams; studio hiring and onboarding practices; studio culture and retention tactics; AR streaming
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Your marketing Guide | Lauren Clinnick | 44m |
Clear, actionable rules for outreach: test trailers and marketing assets before public release, build a demo/Kickstarter funnel that grew one horror game's 200… | ||
| So you (or someone else decided) you're a producer | Amy Dallas, Cass Gray, Meredith Hall, Lisy Kane, Jair McBain, Joe Park, Kamina Vincent | 51m |
Six producers compare concrete tactics: use JIRA, Kanban and six‑week sprints, run demo days and weekly “awesomeness” reviews, keep a production Slack and… | ||
| Finding Your Audience | Gabriella Lowgren, Henry Fong, Matt Hall, Sophie Rossetti, Ken Wong | 43m |
Panel lists concrete tactics: use Google Play player segments and demographic UA filters to target high-value users (example: male 30–55 targeting for a… | ||
| Opening Keynote | Leighton Gray | 34m |
Argues cultural shift to metamodernism: sincerity + irony and prescribes concrete marketing/design moves: use Unity/Blender/Twine, publish on Steam/itch.io… | ||
| Transcending Entertainment | Kathleen Yin, Matthew Lee, Attila Szantner | 46m |
Panel describes embedding real science into commercial games by integrating microscope images and star light curves into EVE Online as gameplay and lore… | ||
| Lessons in Technomancy | Anna Tito | 47m |
Builds a data-driven core that generates C# and Java code from an XML schema + Geocell 4.1 pipeline, producing typed classes, serializers, factories, bindable… | ||
| Your Studio boo and You | Meredith Hall | 45m |
Frames studio culture as a relationship and gives concrete fixes: introduce monthly one-on-ones, tighten standups so each person gets uninterrupted time, keep… | ||
| Porting Your Thoughts | Jess Watson, Amos Wolfe | 45m |
Outlines a usable model: four communication types (amiable/expressive/analytical/driver) and two knowledge habits (eagerness/willingness), plus tactics like… | ||
| Too Clever isn't Fun | Andrew Rowse | 50m |
Rival Stars uses a simplified 5v5 model with eight selectable plays and player-versus-match performance modifiers that can shift success chance by up to 30%… | ||
| Hire Intelligence | Philip Mayes | 46m |
Company growth from 4 to about 48 people drives hiring changes: always be recruiting, use referrals and university partnerships, and avoid recruiters for… | ||
| In the Business of Games | Luke Henry | 50m |
Review of 15 years of Australian indie revenue finds concrete shifts: early B2B dev‑for‑hire gives way to retail spikes, then DLC and freemium, then ads and… | ||
| Mentorship Myths & Mistakes | Ally McLean | 51m |
A year‑long mentorship program called Working Lunch pairs entry‑level women with core and guest mentors through workshops (context, freelancing, pitching… | ||
| I Know kung-Fu | Emre Can Deniz | 55m |
Claims that XR and off‑the‑shelf game tech make serious training cheap and scalable: a six‑person, object‑tracked lunar VR setup is built from store‑bought… | ||
| BoomBox - Audio Workflows Inspired by Constraints | Jeff Van Dyke, Zander Hulme | 52m |
Shows a concrete music brief that leads to a piano/string quartet demo for Submerged, a 20-minute improv workflow that yields tiny “gems,” and a Google Sheet… | ||
| Dismembering 'The Forest' | Michael Theiler, Trevor Dikes | 59m |
Detailed post-mortem of The Forest explains concrete choices: audio pipeline uses FMOD + Unity, editing moves into Reaper to batch-render assets, and the… | ||
| Drawing Heaps of Objects on Console, Fast, as an Indie | Justin Whitfort | 41m |
Projects use Graphics.DrawMeshInstancedIndirect plus GPU-side compute to cull and drive instance counts, moving transform data into GPU compute buffers and… | ||
| You (CAN) Ask That | Charlie Francis Cassidy, Fae Daunt, Snow McNally, Damon Reece | 58m |
Panel answers practical how-tos: introduce your pronouns first or ask “what are your pronouns” (avoid “preferred”), correct slips quickly and move on, and… | ||
| Creating Emotional Engagement Through Narrative and Game Design | Melanie Taylor | 53m |
Uses Orwell and Hacknet as concrete case studies and gives measurable design moves: a five-episode structure with two deliberate mechanical breaks (a timed… | ||
| Optimising Graphics for Mobile Devices in Unity | Brian Akira Su | 49m |
Crash of Cars (25M+ downloads) uses concrete tricks: splat map shaders with XZ/world-space UVs to cut texture samples, reusing a baked top‑down shadow map for… | ||
| Games for the Military? Are you Serious? | Ryan Stephenson | 45m |
A game engine originally modded from Operation Flashpoint becomes a purpose-built training tool called VBS 3 that runs on enterprise licenses across 59… | ||
| GCAP 2018: Charlie Red | Charlie Red | 47m |
Builds a Melbourne art collective called Charlie Red (launched March, first public event June) using a Discord prototype then Slack and Twitter promotion to… | ||
| Delete Videogames | Louie Roots | 54m |
DELETE Jam runs as a one-day jam at Bar SK (about eight hours) and exhibits games to the public, then delete everything: files erased or physical objects… | ||
| Procedural Generation by Automating Blender | Jon Manning | 42m |
Generates rock/asteroid assets by scripting Blender’s UI with the Blender Python API, using metaballs to form base shapes, bmesh to convert to meshes, then… | ||
| A Step by Step Guide to Ads for Your Game | Katie Stegs | 50m |
Soft launch ads focus on getting usable data not vague reach metrics, so run quick experiments with real tools: use Google Consumer Surveys to test icons and… | ||
| Design of the Senses | David Harris | 47m |
Argues that theatre supplies concrete sensory tools games ignore: tactile haptics and blindfolded VR in Ilk’s "And the Birds Fell From the Sky" pair physical… | ||
| The Bridge Between | Ally McLean, Emre Can Deniz, Matthew Dyet, Jessica Gates, Carolyn Mee, Adrian Webb | 53m |
Panelists describe concrete practices and results: using collaborative design workshop sessions to turn non‑gamers into designers, building a lifesaver mobile… | ||
| Clone-nite Unknown | Matt Lee | 51m |
Covers concrete IP actions for games: how patents last 20 years (innovation patents 8) and what qualifies (technical solution, not game mechanics), why… | ||
| Closing Keynote | Morgan Jaffit, Ken Wong, Ally McLean | 39m |
Conference recap argues that the industry built protective “walls” in response to fear and that those walls now block talent and knowledge; mobile, Steam and… | ||
| Opening Lightning Talks | Anna Tito, Rob Davis, Saf Davidson, Nick Suttner, Jean Leggett, Keith Fuller, Kate Edwards, Tony Albrecht | 55m |
Nine five-minute talks deliver specific calls and examples: industry veterans report 100-hour crunch claims at Rockstar, urge stop crunch and pay staff fairly… | ||
| From There and Back Again! Porting from Mobile to Console and Back Again | Hadleigh Barton-Ancliffe | 53m |
Gems of War moves from console back to mobile by focusing on textures: over 3,000 textures are reprocessed, switching Unity compression formats per platform… | ||
| Best-Practice Quality Assurance for Small Teams | Jason Imms | 53m |
Starts from the claim that small teams can adopt enterprise QA practices without big budgets and gives concrete steps: set up issue tracking early… | ||
| User Reviews | Darcy Smith | 53m |
Less than 5% of players write reviews (Android ~4%); median playtime before a positive Steam review is 15.5 hours and 6.6 for negative. Storefronts let teams… | ||
| Sensitive Subjects in Serious Games | Jean Leggett, Gabriella Lowgren | 55m |
Shakespeare’s Landlord adapts Charlaine Harris into a 2D point‑and‑click mystery that deliberately avoids graphic depiction, uses diary entries, careful camera… | ||
| Evidence-Based Mental Health | Jennifer hazel | 56m |
Presents the CheckPoint Analyze Accept Act model with concrete tools: CBT labeling of automatic negative thoughts (ANTS), DBT chain analyses and the… | ||
| The Business of Art | Kim Forrest, Philip Mayes | 50m |
Argues that studios must be as good at running a business as at making art, and lays out concrete tactics: use Sensor Tower and PlaytestCloud to validate… | ||
| Inflation - The Quest to Manage The Sims FreePlay's economy | Mavis Chan | 44m |
Seven years of live ops for The Sims FreePlay expose early hyperinflation and later creeping wallet growth; the team measures earnings vs spend by player level… | ||
| 2D or not 2D | Tessa Monash | 34m |
Creates 2D characters by importing a layered Photoshop file directly into Unreal, building a texture atlas, cutting that atlas into flat planes in Maya and… | ||
| UXR Workshop - User Testing in Under an Hour | Anna Brandberg | 54m |
Practical method for running one-on-one user interviews that fit an hour: use a single-page test plan and a pilot run, recruit 5–9 participants, record with… | ||
| UX Design - The Glue That Binds | Anna Brandberg | 49m |
UX work focuses on concrete fixes: use wireframes and rapid prototypes to scope screens, then test on devices before art or code. Need for Speed teaches… | ||
| An Asset Worth a Thousand Words | Damon Reece | 26m |
Argues that modular narrative lets small teams scale reactive content by stitching small story “lots” together; shows working tools like ink and Yarn Spinner… | ||
| Creativity Can Compete | Emily D’Elia | 45m |
Argues that marketing must start in pre‑production by designing a value strategy that ties game design to promotion; recommends choosing one differentiation… | ||
| Unity Tech for Indies | Marko Grgic | 46m |
Shows concrete Unity tooling and results: a simple bundle manager plus asset bundle browser from GitHub, a sample project based on 3D Game Kit, and editor… | ||
| Scaling Web Services for Free to Play | Luis Van Slageren | 54m |
Shows a concrete stack and numbers: customer support runs on Lambda+API Gateway with bug reports auto-posted to Slack and metadata (version, level, receipts)… | ||
| How to sell out | Meredith Hall, Nicholas McDonell | 49m |
Practical playbook: merchandising can be a real revenue stream if done with numbers and logistics in mind. Examples: Alto’s merch drives 60% of annual revenue… | ||
| Delivering Their Vision | Dean Walshe | 53m |
Shows how to turn a property into a playable product by extracting key pillars (what must stay) and building around them, not copying art. Preparation means… | ||
| A Thousand Cuts Down to 5 | Kieron Lord | 47m |
Case study of a GearVR Unity game that hits target 60 FPS by enforcing concrete limits (roughly 75k static tris, 8k dynamic tris, 25 draw calls per eye) and… | ||
| So You're Trying to Support a Medium Sized Studio.... | Jack Knobel | 55m |
Explains concrete automation wins: a Jenkins pipeline calls RunUAT to run Build Graph scripts that batch UBT/UE4 tasks, tag build artifacts and commit only… | ||
| We Could let Silicon Valley Help Us Fix Game Dev. But Will We? | Keith Fuller | 35m |
Advocates adopting concrete people practices from Silicon Valley: schedule 30 minutes every two weeks (ideally one hour weekly) one-on-ones focused on rapport… | ||
| AR Streaming | Andrew Glover, Luke Ledwich | 42m |
Delivers a streamed AR spectator for World of Tanks that renders the full PC visuals at 2k at 60fps to an iPad Pro using Unity, BC1 texture compression, a… | ||
| Pixels and Words | Anna Tito, Blair Leggett | 59m |
Built a WYSIWYG authoring pipeline (initial MVP in Silverlight with a Flash client, later moving to Unity) that lets non-programmers publish interactive… | ||
| Tips from the Trenches | Amy Dallas | 56m |
Lists concrete contract tactics and evidence: fixed bids often underprice games and break collaboration, while time and materials NTE deals preserve… | ||
| Cards Against people Mismanagement | Emilie Poissenot | 50m |
A deck of practical “cards” maps to concrete practices: start conversations with flags (eg. “producer hat on” or “these are ideas”), run regular one-on-one… | ||
| Arrr-chitecting Games and Game Teams | Paris Buttfield-Addison | 52m |
Pirate crews codify governance: crews of ~150–200 elect an elected captain (battle authority) and a quartermaster (operational authority), sign written… | ||
| Build Your Workforce | Mike Blackney | 50m |
Procedural pipelines that produce hand-quality content, not obvious randomness: a debris blueprint that seeds repeatable trash with a changeable random seed, a… | ||
| Platforms are People too | Nick Suttner | 39m |
Claim: a game succeeds on platforms because one person inside cares enough to fight for it not because a storefront algorithm magically notices. Advice… | ||
| Let the player be the performer | Ryan Roth | 41m |
Shows concrete audio techniques: assign magic intervals (root, major third, perfect fourth, perfect fifth, octave) in a single key so any player input… | ||
| Sherlock it Up | Saf Davidson | 53m |
Argues that deliberately built information gaps power game story engagement, showing a working method: a 12-item shoebox prototype of mementos and paper… | ||
| To Serve (For) Human Minds | Matt MacLean | 44m |
A career-retrospective lays out five actionable rules: iron Butler theory (serve players first; creators last), know whom and what you are serving, map team… | ||
| Overcoming your biases to be an effective ally | Jen MacLean | 50m |
Workshop adapts the Ada Initiative IGDA Allies framework into concrete tactics: a behavioral model for when to coach, confront or escalate, language fixes… | ||
| Don't Let Overwhelming Success Overwhelm You | Brendan Vanous | 01h 00m |
PlayFab claims a production backend that already runs 2,000 live games and serves 100 million MAU, built on AWS (DynamoDB, Kinesis) with a PlayStream real‑time… | ||
| Fortifying Your Future | Kate Edwards | 51m |
A practical playbook for industry advocacy: builds a simple website and a Google Form, collects 200+ nominations, sorts them in Excel to publish the 50 over 50… | ||
| nothing matches | ||