The Develop Conference sessions are being added all the time.  Please check back for new sessions and speaker information.

The tracks are built around threads of relevant sessions, covering all the main development professions, to ensure every delegate's time is well spent. Click here to see a list of sessions for each track: Coding, Design, Production, Business, Audio,The Next Wave and Art.

You can also view a complete list of all sessions in alphbethical order, click here all sessions.

Coding

Advance Programming Techniques on PlayStation Portable
Igor Makaruks, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Animating Emotion
Ken Perlin, New York University, · Theme: Profiting from Technology · Lecture

Developing with PSSG, a PlayStation 3 optimised cross platform engine

Richard Forster · Theme: Profiting from Technology Lecture, 60 minutes

Lost in translation: The coder’s guide to team communication

Simon Carter & Louise Copley, Lionhead Studios · Theme: Profiting from Technology
Lecture, 60 minutes

New Techniques for Lighting: From Theory to Practical Implementation
Chris Doran , Geomerics · Theme: Profiting from Technology · Lecture, 60 minutes

PlayStation 3: A Parallel Universe
István Fábián, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
Theme: Profiting from Technology · Lecture, 60 minutes

Pros and Cons of Developing Your Own Middleware
Andrew Oliver, Blitz Games
Theme: Winning with Technology · Lecture, 60 minutes

Software engineering: Games programming for large scale projects

Jeremy Chatelaine, Electronic Arts · Theme: Production and Pipelines

Lecture, 60 minutes

Game Design

ARG: immersive gaming for the mass market
Adam Martin, MindCandy · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Lecture, 60 minutes

Design by democracy: How to keep your vision - while taking on board everyone else's
Peter Molyneux, Lionhead Studios · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Lecture, 60 minutes

Design DNA: 10 new game designs ideas from the past 12 months worth stealing

Margaret Robertson, Edge magazine · Theme: Winning with Creativity

Lecture, 60 minutes

Designing new kinds of games for the masses

David Amour, Relentless Software, Paulina Bozek, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe,  Rob Kay, Harmonix · Theme: Winning with Creativity · Panel, 60 minutes

Games design room 101:  Four designers each consign a game design horror to the dustbin

Mike Goldsmith, Future Publishing · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Lecture, 60 minutes

Hacking Through the Jungle: Interactive Storytelling Made Easy and Profitable

Ernest Adams
Theme: Winning with Creativity · Lecture, 60 minutes

Theme: Making Money making Games · Lecture, 60 minutes

Global Directions: A Holistic View of Game Development

Jason Della Rocca , IGDA.org
Theme: Making Money making Games · Lecture, 60 minutes

HR: How to keep the good ones
Andrew Eades , Relentless Software
Theme: Making Money making Games  · Lecture, 60 minutes

I’m with the brand: Developers as the stars

Alison Beasley, Lincoln Beasley PR, Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive, Chris Lee, Freestyle Games, Mark Ward, Bastion
Theme: Making Money making Games · Panel, 60 minutes

Leveling the Playing Field

William Latham, Games Audit · Theme: Making Money making Games
Lecture, 60 minutes

Money for Non-Suits
Jonathan Smith, TT Games Publishing & Nicholas Lovell, Lodestar Partners
Track: Business · Theme: Making Money making Games · Lecture, 60 minutes

Audio

Audio Programming, Tools & Techniques For NexGen AAA Games

Andy Mucho, RockStar, Nick Wiswell, Bizarre Creations, Nick Laviers, Electronic Arts UK

Theme: Profiting from Technology · Panel, 60 minutes

Buy now, pay later!

Dave Ranyard, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Sergio Pimentel, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Theme: Production and Pipelines
Lecture, 60 minutes

The Future of Audio in Interactive Entertainment: A Personal Vision

Marty O'Donnell · Theme: Winning with Creativity Keynote, 60 minutes

PS3 Audio: Meet The Team

Jason Page , Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
Theme: Profiting from Technology · Panel, 60 minutes

Recreating Reality

Kenny Young, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe · Track: Audio
Theme: Winning with Creativity · Lecture, 60 minutes

Many a bad design decision has been made under the banner of "what would happen in reality". This presentation will examine why the use of implausible sound is one of the most effective tools available to you when trying to create an immersive gaming experience.

Next Wave

Creativity led production: How to bring new ideas into line

Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Q Entertainment · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Lecture, 60 minutes

Lights, Camera... Where Movies and Videogames Meet
Rob Fahey, GamesIndustry.biz & Andrew MacDonald, DNA Films
Theme: Next Wave · Lecture, 60 minutes

The Opinion Jam: Twelve speakers. Three minutes each. One winner
Ste Curran · Theme: Next Wave

Lecture, 60 minutes

Production

Buy now, pay later!

Dave Ranyard, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Sergio Pimentel, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe · Theme: Production and Pipelines
Lecture, 60 minutes

Managing The Creative Process
Chris Keegan, Climax Handheld · Track: Production · Theme: Production and Pipelines
Lecture, 60 minutes

Working with Hollywood: The Storytelling Professionals
Mark Green & Peter Edward, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
Theme: Production · Lecture, 60 minutes

Art

Bridging the Uncanny Valley: Style versus Realism in future games

Steve Boxer · Track: Art · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Panel, 60 minutes

Creating Real Drama in Real-time
Hugues Giboire, Ninja Theory · Track: Art · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Lecture, 60 minutes

Coding

Advance Programming Techniques on PlayStation Portable
Igor Makaruks, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe · Track: Coding
Theme: Profiting from Technology · Lecture, 60 minutes

This technical presentation will cover the latest development news about PSP (PlayStation Portable), the new portable entertainment system from Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. The presentation will provide a brief overview of the system architecture, discuss advance rendering techniques and finally give developers an insight into the new peripherals due to be released this year.

Animating Emotion
Ken Perlin, New York University · Track: Coding · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Lecture, 60 minutes

Will computer games ever be able to convey the sense of psychological buy-in that we  expect from movies and novels? In the future, will games ever be able to evoke emotional  depth, psychological complexity and empathy for  characters?  To achieve these goals, at least two capabilities will be required: a) true psychologically engaging non-linear narrative and b) interactive virtual actors that can  really act. 

This talk will focus on the second of these two problems.  We will explore ways that virtual actors can modulate their facial expression and body language to convey happiness, despair, interest or disinterest, as well as  emotional conflict.  How can an interactive character make you care?  There will be lots of cool demos.

Developing with PSSG, a PlayStation 3 optimised cross platform engine

Richard Forster · Track: Coding · Theme: Profiting from Technology
Lecture, 60 minutes

PSSG is a high level, game oriented, cross platform graphics engine and tool set, optimised for PlayStation 3. This talk shows how a simple game was developed for PlayStation 3 using PSSG's extensive library of APIs and tools. Although the game was developed in a short timeframe by a tiny team, PSSG enabled optimal use of PlayStation 3 hardware resources.

The game uses the high level interface exposed by PSSG to leverage the SPUs and ensure competitive performance for scene graph, animation and rendering. Meanwhile the tool set provides a simple and automated path for importing and processing art assets.

The audience will take away an understanding one of the higher level components of the PlayStation 3 SDK and how they simplify PlayStation 3 (and other platforms) development while maintaining excellent performance. They will also gain some insight on optimising and refactoring for SPUs.

Lost in translation: The coder’s guide to team communication

Simon Carter & Louise Copley, Lionhead Studios · Track: Coding · Theme: Profiting from Technology
Lecture, 60 minutes

With development teams getting ever bigger and working on even more complex games, good lines of clear communication between the different game development disciplines is vital.  Programmers have a reputation (undeservedly so!)  for not communicating well or communicating in such a technical way that no one can understand what they are tried to say!   Simon Carter of Lionhead Studios (who incidentally has programming background) will demonstrate the reasons why regular and clear communication is essential to a trouble free development process. Studio Head Louise Copley (who does not have a technical background) will highlight common mistakes made by team members and explain how systems have been put in place to ensure that their team communicates as well as possible   Louise and Simon will use anecdotal examples of good and bad communication and also detail techniques and systems that have now been put into practice at Lionhead.

New Techniques for Lighting: From Theory to Practical Implementation
Chris Doran , Geomerics
Track: Code · Theme: Profiting from Technology · Lecture, 60 minutes

Few, if any, problems in gaming have attracted as much attention over the years as that of accurately lighting a scene given arbitrary light sources. The complexity of the problem is immense; the lighting equation governing all computer graphics describes a massively information-heavy scenario where every element of a scene can act as an emitter and potentially contribute to lighting the scene. Formulating the problem directly from this equation would involve vast matrices of transfer coefficients that are impractical to compute at real-time rates. But as computational power increases new techniques become available that has previously been dismissed as too expensive. In this talk I review recent developments from the fields of spherical wavelets, pre-computed radiance transfer, and surfel-based radiosity. A consistent theme runs through this work: that of formulating the problem in a clear physically-motivated manner and then organizing approximations to the ‘exact’ solution in a systematic manner. The talk includes practical examples of these algorithms, illustrating their strengths and limitations.

PlayStation 3: A Parallel Universe
István Fábián, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
Track: Code · Theme: Profiting from Technology · Lecture, 60 minutes

We are increasing the performance of our computing systems, but not exactly the way it's been originally expected: the megahertz (or shall we say gigahertz) myth is now indeed just a myth taking next generation computing into an entirely new direction. PlayStation 3 is one of the first next generation systems to move in this direction utilising the revolutionary Cell Broadband Engine developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM to provide massive computing power consisting of multiple cpu cores on a single chip.

The PlayStation 3 provides a parallel architecture that requires advanced, multi-processing aware applications in order to make the most of the hardware and software design available. This presentation demonstrates the new challenges for developers when developing for multi-processing systems as well as techniques used to solve these problems.

Pros and Cons of Developing Your Own Middleware
Andrew Oliver, Blitz Games
Track: Code · Theme: Winning with Technology · Lecture, 60 minutes

With the growing complexity of gaming platforms and ever rising consumer expectations it is now a requirement for game developers to have access to a substantial arsenal of reusable tool and cross platform engine technologies, providing both a solid code foundation and optimal artist workflow.  This lecture contrasts the development and support of proprietary tools and technology with the deployment of third party off the shelf middleware solutions.

Independent UK developer Blitz Games is known for its industry leading game development technologies and well placed to give an inside view on the benefits and drawbacks of supporting a significant R&D investment.  Blitz CTO Andrew Oliver outlines key objectives and requirements of cutting edge games tools and technologies.  The talk provides a development post mortem of the Blitz technologies, along with an overview of the principle commercial middleware options.  The session concludes with an evaluation of the pluses and minuses of bespoke solution development versus third party middleware, finishing with the question – “Given the option, would we do it all over again?

Software engineering: Games programming for large scale projects

Jeremy Chatelaine, Electronic Arts · Track: Coding · Theme: Production and Pipelines

Lecture, 60 minutes

Programming video games for large scale projects can be daunting at first - there is so much going on that you may feel like you are a small cog in a big machine. Some may be willing to slow down the pace of the machine to cope with it, but if you follow a few simple rules, you may actually enjoy the fast progress made by a large team and still feel like you are in control.

In a large team, some people rely on management to assist them and others rely on communication. Without a doubt, these are important parts of large scale projects but what can a programmer do in his/her daily work to support a project like this? Optimising your workflow and pipeline may be a good start, simple and clear code design would certainly help too, but these may just be the tip of the iceberg.

This talk will provide you more than coffee and pizza usually do to support your productivity in an extended crunch period. It will give you guidelines and rules of thumb along with real examples that will make your project run more smoothly and will hopefully help you reduce that crunch time period at the end of every project.

Game Design

Design by democracy: How to keep your vision - while taking on board everyone else's

Peter Molyneux, Lionhead Studios · Track: Design · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Lecture, 60 minutes

After years of fighting omnipotent programmers and recalcitrant artists, games designers have finally carved out a solid role for their profession at the heart of the development team. But equally, games design has come of age at a time of unparalleled pressures. Not only must designers balance marketing's views on trends on the high street with their CEOs desperate desire for original IP, there's also a million hardcore voices on the Internet scouring every press release, and commenting on your every design decision. How does a games designer cherry pick the best input from these disparate sources and reject the rest - whilst keeping the team and the community on board?

Design DNA: 10 new game designs ideas from the past 12 months worth stealing

Margaret Robertson, Edge magazine · Track: Design · Theme: Winning with Creativity

Lecture, 60 minutes

What if, instead of having to spend days resolving some particular design problem you could be ‘inspired’ instead by a solution another game has already found? What if that game wasn’t a triple AAA, 98% classic which everyone else has already stripped bare of ideas? What if it was something odd, or overlooked, or otherwise actually pretty rotten that meant those ideas were still fresh? And what if you didn’t even need to go to the effort of playing them yourself, but could rely on Margaret Robertson, deputy editor of Edge, to fill you in on some of the neatest design shortcuts of the last year.

Designing new kinds of games for the masses

David Amour, Relentless Software, Paulina Bozek, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe,  Rob Kay, Harmonix
Track: Design · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Panel, 60 minutes

With eight million PlayStation 2s sold in the UK alone – not to mention all the PCs, mobile phones, PSPs and others out there – it’s fair to say that games platforms are fast becoming ubiquitious. Why so many new titles still target the same old hobbyist-gamer demographic remains a fierce topic of debate. But this panel will focus on one critical aspect: the design challenges of making games that appeal to - and can be controlled by and enjoyed by - people who don’t actually play many games.

Games design room 101:  Four designers each consign a game design horror to the dustbin

Track: Design · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Lecture, 60 minutes

New game design ideas can spread like avian bird flu: unchecked and even unwanted, they can nevertheless infect every upcoming title before they've even proven their worth. Equally, new generations of games often push on carrying old features from a bygone age, like redundant DNA. For instance, should end of-level-bosses be given the shove, and do sandbox games need missions anymore? but what features or design ideas do our four expert game designers think past are their sell-by date?

Hacking Through the Jungle: Interactive Storytelling Made Easy and Profitable

Ernest Adams
Track: Game Design · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Lecture, 60 minutes

The debate about interactive storytelling rages on, throwing up creeping vines of verbiage bound to bog down all but the most determined. On one side, radical theorists are claiming that only a perfect social simulator will do; on another, a few hardcore ludologists say we shouldn't try it at all. "Everybody knows" adventure games are dead and "everybody knows" what happened to Wing Commander IV, but "everybody" is wrong. In this lecture, Ernest Adams hacks through the jungle of common wisdom and entrenched opinions to show why a) interactive storytelling is a financial necessity for all but the smallest games; b) it doesn't have to cost as much as you think; c) it's not nearly as hard as it looks.

Track: Business · Theme: Making Money making Games
Lecture, 60 minutes

New game design ideas can spread like avian bird flu: unchecked and even unwanted, they can nevertheless infect every upcoming title before they've even proven their worth. Equally, new generations of games often push on carrying old features from a bygone age, like redundant DNA. For instance, should end of-level-bosses be given the shove, and do sandbox games need missions anymore? but what features or design ideas do our four expert game designers think past are their sell-by date?

HR: How to keep the good ones
Andrew Eades , Relentless Software
Track: Business · Theme: Making Money making Games
Lecture, 60 minutes

Motivating staff in the games industry is getting harder. As each title sucks up more and more people it's not easy to stamp your identity onto a game. This used to be fulfilling enough. The job used to be the motivation. Relenltess Software has put job satisfaction back into the equation proving you don't need pizza-fuelled crunches to make a million-selling game. This session will cover the policies that Relentless has put in place that promote the good habits needed to make video games on time.

I’m with the brand: Developers as the stars

Alison Beasley, Lincoln Beasley PR, Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive, Chris Lee, Freestyle Games, Mark Ward, Bastion
Track: Business · Theme: Making Money making Games
Panel, 60 minutes

Bill Gates has said that if he was down to his last dollar he’d spend it on PR.  Like Bill, an increasing number of developers are recognising the need for PR.  It can be a valuable tool in winning contracts and attracting the attention of publishers, IP owners, potential investors and end users. The key to great PR is in its management but how do you select an agency?  How do you place a value on the coverage?   Is there really no such thing as bad publicity? Where do you draw the line between vapourware and a tantalising glimpse of something cool? The panel, including Miles Jacobson (Sports Interactive), Chris Lee (FreeStyleGames), Mark Ward of Bastion discuss the value and effective management of PR for development studios.

Leveling the Playing Field

William Latham, Games Audit · Track: Business · Theme: Making Money making Games
Lecture, 60 minutes

Again and again we hear the phrase “the games development business model is broken but few alternatives are ever put forward. With a third of all console and PC games being “canned” in Development and only one in ten games making any profit for publishers and the other nine making losses. With multi billion dollar publishers relying on a small handfull of products to make profits, it does appear that the current system is flawed and high risk.. William Latham (Develop Magazine columnist, Developer CEO of the award winning PlayStation2 game THING, CEO of Games Audit) explores new business development models to replace the old and put the creative geniuses back in the driving seat again.

Themes include “company restructuring around game IPs”, “the Grand National with snipers”, “keep your IP or quit”, “mistrust and more mistrust”, “the five takeaways and the coffin shop”, “how to look glamorous to investors”, “the adoption of the film world process” and “games development middleware”.

Money for Non-Suits
Jonathan Smith, Traveler's Tales & Nicholas Lovell, Lodestar Partners
Track: Business · Theme: Making Money making Games · Lecture, 60 minutes

So you always wanted to “make games” – and now you’ve got responsibility for multi-million pound projects. You’re outsourcing, budgeting, dealing with contracts and looking at share prices... but how much do you really know about money and how it works? Not the common-sense money of paychecks and overdrafts, but the alternate universe of finance, tax and corporate funding?

From VAT to valuations; from cashflow to capital gains, Nicholas Lovell, (Managing Director, Media Corporate Finance at Lodestar Partners) and Jonathan Smith (Development Director at TT Games) give a rapid-fire introduction to financial concepts and issues affecting games development. Stuff you need to know, or that you’ll need to know before long. Stuff that’s just too important to leave to the suits…

Audio

Audio Programming, Tools & Techniques For NexGen AAA Games

Andy Mucho, RockStar, Nick Wiswell, Bizarre Creations, Nick Laviers, Electronic Arts UK

Track: Audio · Theme: Profiting from Technology · Panel, 60 minutes

The extra power of the new consoles offers an opportunity to turn games into a true dramatic medium which, arguably, is the biggest step forward that next-generation consoles offers us. But how can we take every nuance and subtlety an actor can deliver and turn it into a believable performance in real-time within the constraints of a game? This is a goal that many have attempted but no one has successfully achieved so far.

Buy now, pay later!

Dave Ranyard, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Sergio Pimentel, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe · Track: Audio/Production · Theme: Production and Pipelines
Lecture, 60 minutes

The traditional model of game development usually involves hiring a team of talented individuals to create all the content before the game is released. From characters to vehicles to environments – this is both clunky and high risk: all the assets are paid for up front and if the product is canned or bombs, the time and money spent creating the assets is wasted.

What if there was some other way that would minimise this risk? Why not license the assets with a royalty and share the risk with the licensees? This means smaller teams, faster product turnaround and most importantly: lower cost game development. Take a look at successful games such as Singstar & Buzz: Both have relatively straightforward game mechanics and much of the content is licensed assets.
The Music Industry has a number of assets which can be utilised: Music/lyrics/video/master recordings/press shots.

This talk will go into the benefits of this approach, in particular for music and will also highlight ownership issues on assets such as press shots and their respective uses. In addition, the talk will address points on how to negotiate the music licensing jungle.

The Future of Audio in Interactive Entertainment: A Personal Vision

Marty O'Donnell · Track: Audio · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Keynote, 60 minutes

This talk will cover my answers to the following questions: What do I mean by “Interactive Entertainment”? How will changes to non-interactive entertainment affect our industry? How is non-linear audio different from linear and how is it the same? How do I implement my aesthetic vision? How will the proliferation of home theater systems and ear buds change my approach to audio? What about cell phones and iPods? What does “the remix generation” mean to me? What will change and what won’t? How should we all create and implement content? What’s the role of middleware for audio creators? How will IP exploiters and IP creators work together? And, perhaps most importantly, will better audio sell more games?

Expect audio examples and some slight humor. Expect to leave my talk a better person.

PS3 Audio: Meet The Team

Jason Page , Sony Computer Entertainment Europe · Track: Audio
Theme: Profiting from Technology · Panel, 60 minutes

A unique chance to hear the story of how four UK audio techs landed the most important gig of their career, how they are harnessing the power of PS3 and are defining nexgen audio. (When they're not in the pub)

Recreating Reality

Kenny Young, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe · Track: Audio
Theme: Winning with Creativity · Lecture, 60 minutes

Many a bad design decision has been made under the banner of "what would happen in reality". This presentation will examine why the use of implausible sound is one of the most effective tools available to you when trying to create an immersive gaming experience.

Next Wave

Lights, Camera... Where Movies and Videogames Meet

Rob Fahey, GamesIndustry.biz & Andrew McDonald, DNA Films · Track: Next Wave
Theme: Next Wave · Lecture, 60 minutes

British film producer Andrew Macdonald has facilitated the creation of some of the UK's most successful movies - including Trainspotting, The Beach, and 28 Days Later. In an on-stage interview, he will discuss the funding models used in the film industry, his plans for a videogame based on 28 Days Later, and how the film and games industries can work together to mutual benefit.

The Opinion Jam: Twelve speakers. Three minutes each. One winner.
Ste Curran · Track and Theme: Next Wave

Lecture, 60 minutes

We've all had it: conference fatigue. Sitting and watching people fill up their allotted timeslots can't always be interesting forever; some speakers are amazing, some are less than amazing, and after a while sessions start to feel like playing Russian roulette with a gun loaded with tedium. What if this one turns out to be another guy with grand designs that can be summed up in a single sentence, padded out with a pointless powerpoint presentation, degenerating into a dreary Q&A session?
 
It won't. This is the antidote to all of that, a quickfire battle of wit and wisdom, a conference condensed. Twelve speakers will rise to the challenge of punctual presentation, delivering radical ideas on the state and future of the games industry. They'll speed through their points with punchy passion and abbreviated eloquence, say everything they need to within a three-minute timeslot, then sit down to a chorus of boos or cheers. Whoever gets the best reaction from the unlikeliest proposition wins.

Production

Buy now, pay later!

Dave Ranyard, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Sergio Pimentel, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe · Track: Audio/Production · Theme: Production and Pipelines
Lecture, 60 minutes

The traditional model of game development usually involves hiring a team of talented individuals to create all the content before the game is released. From characters to vehicles to environments – this is both clunky and high risk: all the assets are paid for up front and if the product is canned or bombs, the time and money spent creating the assets is wasted.

What if there was some other way that would minimise this risk? Why not license the assets with a royalty and share the risk with the licensees? This means smaller teams, faster product turnaround and most importantly: lower cost game development. Take a look at successful games such as Singstar & Buzz: Both have relatively straightforward game mechanics and much of the content is licensed assets.
The Music Industry has a number of assets which can be utilised: Music/lyrics/video/master recordings/press shots.

This talk will go into the benefits of this approach, in particular for music and will also highlight ownership issues on assets such as press shots and their respective uses. In addition, the talk will address points on how to negotiate the music licensing jungle.

Managing The Creative Process
Chris Keegan, Climax Handheld · Track: Production · Theme: Production and Pipelines
Lecture, 60 minutes

This session brings together two competing management ideas; both strive to allow maximum creativity whilst ensuring the production proceeds smoothly, however the two approaches could fairly be described as diametrically opposed. One is heavily process oriented whilst the other eschews any kind of formalised processes. During the course of the session we aim to explore a wide range of production issues under the spotlight of these two competing philosophies.

Working with Hollywood: The Storytelling Professionals
Mark Green & Peter Edward, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
Track and Theme: Production · Lecture, 60 minutes

We've all had it: conference fatigue. Sitting and watching people fill up their allotted timeslots can't always be interesting forever; some speakers are amazing, some are less than amazing, and after a while sessions start to feel like playing Russian roulette with a gun loaded with tedium. What if this one turns out to be another guy with grand designs that can be summed up in a single sentence, padded out with a pointless powerpoint presentation, degenerating into a dreary Q&A session?
 
"The creation and execution of storylines in Videogames have come a long way in only a short space of time. Many developers will remember writing a game's story, maybe even doing the voice acting or perhaps deciding on all the camera angles and cinematic cuts themselves, but things are changing. Now games are reaching out into the Film and TV industries, hiring professionals for each of these roles and more.

Licensed projects like '24™: The Game' bring on board, not only the cast, but a number of the crew in order to develop a videogame that matches the cinematic and story-telling levels set by the original TV show or film. Hollywood's Actors, Voice Directors, Scriptwriters, Cinematographers, Composers are all being utilised. Now, for the first time, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's London Studio is creating an original IP, PlayStation®3 game, in which the high quality gameplay is finally matched by the presentation of the story - written, acted and directed by Hollywood professionals.

This talk will cover the experiences of working closely with Hollywood that were gained by SCEE's Cambridge and London Studios whilst working on games for the PS2 and PS3.

Art

Bridging the Uncanny Valley: Style versus realism in future games graphics

Hugues Giboire, Ninja Theory · Track: Art · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Panel, 60 minutes

Abstract to follow.

Creating Real Drama in Real-time

Hugues Giboire, Ninja Theory · Track: Art · Theme: Winning with Creativity
Lecture, 60 minutes

The extra power of the new consoles offers an opportunity to turn games into a true dramatic medium which, arguably, is the biggest step forward that next-generation consoles offers us. But how can we take every nuance and subtlety an actor can deliver and turn it into a believable performance in real-time within the constraints of a game? This is a goal that many have attempted but no one has successfully achieved so far.

With the help of an actor involved extensively in CG performance and a premier film post-production house, Ninja Theory has been attempting to solve this problem. With demonstrative materials, the talk will cover in detail the path taken from on-set mocap performance to real-time execution. It is directed mainly at artists but should be of interest to anyone in development who is tackling the thorny issue of real-time acting.