The boss animations in MIO: Memories in Orbit

If we’ve done our job right, you’ve died fighting this boss. And if we’ve really done our job right, you’ll know why—and you won’t get caught off guard by the same attack a second time. In this talk, I’ll walk you through our process for developing MIO’s boss fights, from the initial concept to the final implementation. We’ll discuss tools, animation tips, combat design, and VFX, focusing on our goal of making these battles as fair as possible.

Sam Barlow is the founder of Half Mermaid Productions and a director and writer of games that push the boundaries of interactive narrative. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories psychologically profiled its own players; Her Story reinvented the detective genre for the YouTube generation, and Telling Lies explored the conflict between government and intimacy via lives lived over video calls. In 2022 he released his most ambitious project yet, IMMORTALITY, a horror story about 20th Century filmmaking, art and death. IMMORTALITY won the BAFTA for Best Narrative and was the first indie game to receive a perfect 10/10 score in Edge Magazine. Barlow is currently working on two horror projects, codenamed Project C and Project D.

Stories without Boundaries, Treating Your Narrative as an Open World

Laura Fournier is a senior gameplay producer on Helldivers 2 (Arrowhead Game Studios). She’s been helping production teams for 12 years and she’s always liked to share her thoughts and production methodolgies in order to offer studios the perfectly tailored solution for them.  

Helldivers 2 Live production: The Art of Letting Go

After 20 millions copies sold and updates every six weeks for the past 2 years, Arrowhead Game Studios learnt how to do Live production at the same time as getting high quality content out. At the heart of this process: fast decision making in a complex environment. This talk by senior live producer Laura Fournier aims at summarizing the Democraticaly Managed Production process and the Reinforcements needed along the way. 

A former lead developer and game designer, and a founding partner at Motion Twin, I’m currently working with Devolver Digital as a solo developer on an ambitious martial arts roguelite project called Tenjutsu. I enjoy sharing my experiences and have regularly had the opportunity to lead talks and workshops, which have generally received excellent feedback.

In it, I explain the thought process I use when designing the fundamental building blocks of gameplay for Dead Cells and Tenjutsu (both roguelites). Overall, I believe it’s possible to simplify the management of balance, randomness, and game development by simulating the presence of a “game master” who oversees the progression of a player’s game session. This approach is directly inspired by Left 4 Dead 2 (Valve), which implemented it years ago with the famous Director. I’ll explain how this concept can be adapted to specific elements of a project.

Having started in the fast-paced world of mobile gaming PR for giants like Tencent and MiHoYo, I moved to Evil Empire in 2022 to bridge the gap between the studio and the Chinese market. From driving Dead Cells’ ongoing success to launching The Rogue Prince of Persia and coordinating the Triple-i Initiative, I oversee all aspects of Evil Empire’s presence in China.

Chinese Marketing: A Practical Guide for Solo Devs to Publishers

Don’t be intimidated by China—skip the abstract strategies and get a real-world playbook. From navigating the complexities of Chinese social media to handling the practicalities of local publishing, this session delivers hands-on insights to help you bridge the gap (and avoid some bad reviews?). Expect actionable tips, quick wins, and concrete advice on managing your community and successfully launching your game in China—drawn from real experience working on Dead Cells and Brotato.

Building the Invisible: The Hidden Mechanisms of Team Cohesion

Specializing in indie games, I’ve been working in video game marketing for 16 years. I often work with limited budgets, so I like to try new things, share my experience, learn from others, and never rest on my laurels.

Releasing a game with a marketing budget of less than €5,000

I’ve been a video game programmer for over 20 years. I started at Ankama, where I helped launch Dofus, followed by numerous projects and just as many roles: generalist, network programmer, engine programmer, and lead programmer. After 10 years, I moved to Montpellier to work at Wild Sheep Studio—the studio co-founded by Michel Ancel and former Ubisoft employees—as a network specialist. Five years later, after suffering from burnout, I rebuilt my career in education at the Créajeux school in Nîmes, then returned to production for the independent developers at Piece of Cake Studios.

Unreal Engine for Small Teams: The Technical Reality—A Postmortem (on Bugs) for DarkHours

Insights into using Unreal Engine for a cross-platform cooperative multiplayer project by a team of 10 people, including 2 programmers. A look at some of the programming bugs that arose—some of which we expected, and others… not so much. A chance to take a realistic look at the programming skills required in this context.

Sacha, freelance UX/UI designer and indie game developer. I’m developing my own game and helping studios tackle their UX/UI challenges. I look forward to meeting you and chatting!

Playtests: Why Is Player Feedback Misleading?

Do producers dream of dynamic screenwriters?

Jordi Asensio, 42, trained in film, has been developing games since he was 13. He spent 10 years at Cyanide as a cinematic director, writer, and game designer (A Game of Thrones, Styx 1 & 2, Blood Bowl 2, Call of Cthulhu). At the same time, arcade and fighting games shaped his vision of action games. As co-founder of Guard Crush Games and lead game designer at Dotemu, he has created modern beat ’em up classics such as Streets of Rage 4 and Absolum. “Making a game is all about emotions: visceral, sensory, instinctive. The game feel comes first.

Making a beat ’em up is easy

With over ten years of experience in the AA sector, I have been leading the Production team at Tactical Adventures since the studio’s inception. I strive to create a work environment for our team that fosters excellence and values people, so we can deliver ambitious projects that spark our players’ imaginations.

How to Optimize the Quality of Your Releases Leading Up to Launch Day for an AA Studio Using Unreal

Feedback on the release management strategy implemented for the Solasta 2 Early Access release.

In this post, I discuss:
– Studio size (2 production teams, 2 QA teams for release management)
– Competition, aka how we used to do it in Unity (or the joys of cherry-picking)
– P4V constraints (creating branches/determinism of fixes/moving from downstream to upstream)
– The branching and rotation system (managing stabilization and polishing in parallel)
– The use of Jira to support the rotation and automate tracking and communication (FixVersion/Release)
– The specific case of EA: ensuring the release while continuing development

From a macro perspective, this talk is a sharing of experiences regarding releases under P4V, with a focus on an AA studio without a dedicated release manager.

I’ve been working at The Game Bakers for the past 10 years where I had the chance to work on Furi, Haven and Cairn. On Cairn specifically, I spent most of my time trying to facilitate the work of our level design team, setting up the workflow, guidelines and reviews, which meant a whole lot of time spent looking at rocks. I also spent time with the 3C programming team to test, tweak and fine tune the climbing gameplay, which did not mean a whole lot of time asking for unreasonable new climbing features all the time, of course.

Cairn – How to build a mountain

Aline has been working in the video game industry for about ten years. She started out as a freelancer before moving into the mobile gaming industry. She has a versatile background and has held various roles, including working in production, establishing artistic directions, and managing external teams. She is a jack-of-all-trades who has worked closely with a wide range of professionals across the production process.

Tips and tricks for effective communication with your outsourcing teams

Feedback and knowledge-sharing on how to effectively work with external creative teams. A detailed overview of the general approach, including how to welcome teams, write briefs, provide resources, give feedback on visual work, and receive files for implementation.

2 Devs, 12 months development, 5 million players

Jeff has made a name for himself in the game industry working on critically acclaimed titles such as Alan Wake 2 (at Epic Games Publishing) and several entries in the Forza Motorsport series (at Microsoft Game Studios). In the indie space, he helps shape titles across varied genres, such as Going Medieval, Bladesong, Sail Forth, and others. He is a founding member of Mythwright, a UK-based game publisher. As the Design Director there, he supports a broad portfolio of titles, including: Thronefall, Kaiju Cleanup, TerraTech Legion, Deadstick: Bush Pilot Simulator, and several others. Jeff is also the design lead on the upcoming co-op, stop-motion platformer Out of Words and a regular game design consultant for projects in development at Remedy Entertainment.

Thronefall: Stewardship of a “Finished” Game

I am a Game UX and UI Designer at Dotemu, where I worked closely with the game design, art, and development teams on the Absolum, BTA, and Rogue Lite projects. My role was to structure player journeys, analyze behaviors, and anticipate friction points. I also designed the interfaces in collaboration with Maxime Mary and created some of the game’s iconography. During my time at Dotemu, I also worked as a consultant on other projects to help teams implement a UX strategy and create engaging, intuitive experiences for their players.

Trained in game art and interactive design, I have developed a hybrid approach that blends artistic sensibility with user-centered thinking. This dual expertise allows me to create intuitive experiences while ensuring visual consistency with the game’s universe.

My approach is based on prototyping, iteration, and player testing, with a focus on information hierarchy, the pace of interactions, and accessibility.

My goal: to design immersive and memorable experiences where the joy of playing comes first and where every design choice is guided by the user experience.

UX Quest: The Absolum Adventure

In this presentation, I’ll walk you through my journey throughout the production of Absolum, discussing how the process took shape across the various departments: art, game design, and programming. I’ll also outline the challenges we encountered and the solutions we implemented to overcome them.

Born and raised near Lille, I am a massive Mangas, Movies and Video Games fan. I started as a Digital Sales Manager at Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe, managing the European digital business for consoles. I then moved into Marketing for Western titles. In 2021 I joined Kepler Interactive, coordinating campaigns for Scorn, Tchia, Pacific Drive, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in 2025. Since October 2024, I head up the marketing department at Kepler.

Let’s Stop Checking Boxes – Rethinking Differentiation in an Era of Saturation

After more than 10 years in the video game industry, I co-founded Sunny Lab in 2022. I serve as CEO and Creative Director, where I lead The Witch’s Bakery, a magical adventure about a young witch who opens her bakery in the heart of Paris!

The Witch’s Bakery: Post-mortem sincère d’un 1er jeu indie

The Witch’s Bakery’s Unvarnished Post-Mortem. Starting a studio, securing funding, assembling the dream team, establishing the creative direction, managing production and the community… the financial and human realities of an indie project: what worked, what didn’t, the mistakes, the blind spots—all backed up by the numbers!

The revival of Hytale and its Creative Vision

I’m the Marketing Manager at The Game Bakers studio, and I’ve been in charge of the marketing campaign for Cairn since its announcement at the SGF! Previously, I worked in influencer marketing, both at an agency and managing creators.

Cairn – Climbing Mount Visibility

I’d like to present a post-mortem of the Cairn marketing campaign, covering several specific topics:
– Our event strategy, the use of our assets (demos, ads), and optimization using the Steam algorithm. This section will include charts showing the daily changes in Cairn’s wishlists by event.
– a breakdown by source (events, ads, influencer marketing, organic/Steam algorithm) of Cairn’s wishlists, and the areas we chose to prioritize, particularly influencer marketing
– a breakdown of Cairn’s organic and sponsored influencer marketing campaign before and after launch: strategy, budget, contacts, and results

The goal is for attendees to leave the conference with:
– A method for (relatively) reliably forecasting their game’s wishlists based on events and the associated influencer/advertising budget
– A method for approaching organic influencer campaigns
I’m choosing to avoid the topic of advertising, as there are experts far more qualified than I am to discuss it!

After studying game design at Rubika Valenciennes, Jean-Baptiste Oger joined Ubisoft, first in the editorial department and then as Lead Game Designer on Ghost Recon: Breakpoint and Skull & Bones. He then briefly joined the independent studio [2.21] before embarking on an entrepreneurial venture with Sleepy Mill Studio, whose first game, Drop Duchy, was released in 2025.

Drop Duchy: The Secrets to Effective Design That Streamlines Production

Creating a video game—and especially a first video game—is a long journey fraught with obstacles: there are many pitfalls, and the margin for error is often very limited for small independent developers. In this talk, I’ll share the critical decisions we made early on that made our lives easier during the production of Drop Duchy, as well as the approach we took to maximize our chances of success.

After completing his art studies with a focus on animated film, Julian Nguyen-You spent six years working in animated series production. In 2018, he began working with Lizardcube Studio, where he served as art director on Streets of Rage 4 and, more recently, Shinobi: Art of Vengeance.

Lizardcube: The Art of Animation Techniques Applied to Video Games

At Lizardcube, we emphasize animation techniques to enhance the depth and immersion of our game projects. Throughout the development of “Streets of Rage 4” and “Shinobi: Art of Vengeance,” we combined advanced environment design with traditional animation methods. During this presentation, we will explain how to combine the expertise inherited from the animation industry with the creation of 2D video games.

I started out as an animator at a small independent studio (Psychoz Interactive), then moved on to larger companies (Cyanide and later Tactical Adventures) as an animator and eventually as a lead animator. Equally drawn to both the artistic and technical aspects of the field, I frequently switch between animation production and the development of tools and pipelines.

Systematizing morphological diversity: A Tech Anim approach in Solasta 2

The variety of playable characters (dwarves, elves, halflings, humans, etc.) in Solasta 2 presented some interesting technical challenges: adapting meshes (clothing, hair, beards) to all characters, adjusting animations at runtime, and enabling facial editing. Through these three areas, I will share the problems encountered and the technical solutions implemented from a tech-anim perspective: I will detail the logic behind the tools developed, some theoretical methods on the engine side, and the results achieved.

Surviving as an indie game studio for 10 years