2024 Talks
Saturday March 16th, 2024
Here you'll find links to presentations from our speakers!
Astronaut Diaries
Denari is a narrative action game about a boy with telekinetic powers who must fight to save his people from the invasion of an empire.
Denari is currently in development, though it has been exhibited at several conventions from Armageddon to NZGDC and most recently at PAX Australia.
One of the aspects of Denari that players consistently praise is its "combat feel". The tight hack n' slashing and intuitive telekinetic powers are among the highlights of the game. Of course, it wasn't always this way. Denari began as a slow and clunky experience. The stubborn team proceeded to research the topic of "game feel" and iterate on animations, movements, collisions and more for years. These ideas were validated by attending showcase after showcase while watching the average player experience turn from frustration to satisfaction.
In this talk, Shrikkanth, the programmer and designer of Denari, will dive into the principles, tools and techniques used to make Denari's combat feel great!
Torn Banner Studios
Nanite and lumen you say!? It's a little bit of a game changer, so what's different? Castles in Ue5 is a look into some concepts and methods for environment artists working in a Ue5 environment art paradigm. Showcasing some techniques and ideas for managing the new found abundance of polygons, texture and file size shenanigans and kit building.
Amila Nuhodzic | Producer specialized in design thinking
Teams and CultureMoon Candy
How are we designing our teams? How can the way we work be more accessible to others? Amila will share insights on her experience designing accessible processes to accommodate the Moon Candy team.
Liquid Static Studio
An introduction to the diverse range of custom tool creation features in Unreal Engine 5. This talk will explore some practical examples that showcase how these tools can rapidly evolve into indispensable assets for your team and explore some of the essential features introduced in UE5 that help facilitate the development process. The aim is to share valuable insights and help lift the veil on these features, making them more accessible to a wider audience while fostering a community-driven approach to creative game development within UE5.
Sam Batty | Senior Animation Expert
ArtWētā Workshop
There’s a lot to learn about animation, fortunately I’ve packed everything you need to learn into twenty minutes. Not really. But there’s a lot to say and this talk is aimed to provide some concise answers to some of the frequent questions, as well as some tips to hone your technical animation and gameplay animation skill.
Grinding Gear Games
Consistency is one of the keys in making game menus stupidly easy to use. We want to teach as few things as possible, and let players get back to the gameplay.
My goal is to outline a few simple UX ideas in a structured way, that any developer can think about when making UI for their game.
Space Rock Games
The difference between a junior and senior in any field of game development is often murky and varies company to company. What I look for in Seniors and how I define a Senior developer in any field (or "more senior developer") is the ability to tackle problems that don't have a clear solution. In this talk I will cover the ways that I approach problems of all kinds in development and break down the general process I use when tackling issues that don't have clear solutions (at least when we initially approach them).
Mighty Eyes
In this talk we discuss the fundamental tools for profiling and optimization in Unreal Engine and beyond.
First we will look at Unreal Insights, Unreal's primary CPU profiling tool and how we can leverage it to find poorly performing parts of your code. We will then look briefly at how Visual Studio's built in profiling tools can be used to get even more details and drill down into problem areas. From there we will move on to the GPU, discussing fundamentals of how GPUs work, arming us with the knowledge we need to make better descisions when designing efficient materials. We will also look at the various tools available for GPU profiling both inside Unreal and externally.
Beginners Guide to Animation Workflows for UE5
Reuben Terehu Shortland | Tech Animation Wizz
ArtMetia Interactive
Whether you’re already an expert or you’re looking to dip your toes into the wonderful world of game development, it might be worth hearing it from the perspective of a Maya animator turned Unreal programmer. Join Reuben as he discusses game animation in UE5 and how changing your attitude towards different workflows can take you further as a creator!
Game AI Models
Ludmila Miranda-Dukoski | Gameplay Programming Expert
DevWētā Workshop
Many games include non-playable characters (NPCs) that are deeply ingrained with gameplay features. For example, a shopkeeper NPC carries portions of the ingame economy and player progression through the inventory they have available for purchase. NPC behaviour is not mean to emulate natural human behaviour, rather, they are meant to execute their primary functions in a believable way. As such, the way that one goes about coding NPC behaviour will entirely depend on the functionality of each NPC with respect to the player experience. This talk will cover the most common game artificial-intelligence (AI) models used to drive NPC behaviour, and discuss the types of NPCs best suited to each model.