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  • 24 Feb 2024 » Toolsmiths GDC 2024 Guide

    • At GDC 2024, you’re diving into an expansive sea of over 650 sessions, tutorials, and events. With 350 of these containing the word “tool” or similar terms, finding those that align with your expertise and needs might seem overwhelming.

    Here, I have distilled and organized a list of sessions tailored for Game Tools developers.

    This guide is your compass through GDC 2024’s vast offerings. Whether you’re going in person or watching these sessions via the GDC Vault, the curated selection is designed to optimize your experience at GDC 2024, ensuring you engage with the most relevant content for you.

    Note: Several presentations highlighted may not focus exclusively on tools, yet they offer valuable insights and fresh perspectives. Grasping the nuances of how our tools’ users operate is crucial for our tools’ effectiveness and success.

    If you don't have a lot of time or just want Game Dev Tool-centered sessions - don’t miss the Tools Roundtables, and Tools Design Roundtables. These sessions are organized by Geoff Evans, David Lightbown, and Robin-Yann Storm to bring you the best Tool Centered Talks and Discussions from experts around the industry.

    Sessions marked with Toolsmiths icon - point to sessions that you should consider going to because you are 100% guaranteed to find insight as a Tools Developer.

    Keywords & Key Roles

    I have tried to make navigating this list easier by providing helper labels that will hint what Tool Developer roles might be interested in this session. Just use the find feature of your web browser and type one of the following key terms.

    Here is the list of roles that you can use to search:

    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer
    • Pipeline Dev
    • ML Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • Tools QA
    Glossary of Key Roles

    DCC Tool Dev - a software engineer that is focused on digital content creation tools that artists, designers, and other devs use.
    Tool UX/UI Designer - a UX designer, User Researcher that is specializing in Game Development tools and workflows
    Tools QA - a quality assurance specialist who concentrates on testing the features of development tools, responsible for identifying, reproducing, and refining bug reports from users to ensure the reliability and functionality of these tools.
    Pipeline Dev - a software engineer that optimizes and maintains the software and systems facilitating efficient data transformation between different content creation tools and the game,
    ML Dev - a software developer specialized in designing and developing applications powered by machine learning technologies.
    Build Dev - a software engineer with expertise in managing CI/CD processes, ensuring game reliability/quality at scale, handling game packaging, and overseeing various DevOps processes along with the infrastructure that supports these systems.
    Dev Support/Integration Engineer - a engineer/technician that is dedicated to enhancing studio-wide tool efficiency and workflow quality, acting as a central resource for addressing any questions or issues related to tools, game engines, and content setup, with the goal of unblocking and optimizing the work of content creators, tech artists, and engineers (a.k.a. Production Engineer).
    Tool Lead - a software engineer responsible for overseeing the development and integration of tools and pipelines that streamline game production, ensuring teams have efficient workflows and robust systems to support all aspects of game development.

    Furthermore, you can search the list by using the following keywords:

    • Programming
    • UX
    • Workflows
    • Pipeline
    • VFX
    • Visual Arts
    • Production
    • Design
    • AI
    • Procedural
    • Machine Learning
    • Visual Arts

    How to use this list

    • If you are going to GDC, you can follow the links in the list below to create a schedule for yourself. Alternatively, if you already have a plan, you can check and make sure you don’t miss out on anything you would enjoy.
    • If you are not going, you can still look forward to watching sessions that you want to see in the GDC Vault.

    I’m sure that you can find a session that will inspire you to make something great!


    Table of Contents

    Tools Summit

    Unfortuantly there is no Tools Summit this year. 😿

    It will return strong next year! 💪

    Tools Roundtables

    Tools Design Roundtable Day 1: Design & UX
    i

    For Day 1:
    This Tool Design roundtable is about the UX of in-house and external toolsets. Come and meet, discuss, and find out what everyone has been doing with Tool Design in the last year.
    Examples of topics discussed in previous years are:
    1. What user experience techniques have you seen best fit for your toolsets?
    2. Is classical UX applicable in tools, or is it very different?
    3. What differences, if any, have tool service companies seen with their tool designs?
    This years' questions may be different, or similar! Feel free to join, and ask.

    • Programming
    • Design
    • Tool UX/UI Designer
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer


    Tools Roundtable Day 1: Engineering
    i

    These roundtable sessions focus on discussion of best practices, novel techniques, and technical trade-offs for building game development tools and services. Game development tools are constantly evolving, so come to share what works (and what doesn't) at your studio, and listen to others' take on how to keep their creative teams producing awesome games.

    Wednesday: 'Engineering', focuses on tools programming, testing, deployment, frameworks, scripting, automation, extensibility, and telemetry.

    Thursday: 'Assets' focuses on export/import, interchange, persistence, collaboration, search and organization, development models (branching and/or trunking), revision control, and outsourcing.

    Friday: 'Build' focuses on processing assets through to the game in all its forms: build systems, caching, distribution, scalability, optimization, disc mastering and patching.

    • Pipeline
    • Programming
    • QA
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tools QA
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Tools Design Roundtable Day 2: Production & Strategy
    i

    For Day 2:
    This Tool Design roundtable is about the UX of in-house and external toolsets. Come and meet, discuss, and find out what everyone has been doing with Tool Design in the last year.
    Examples of topics discussed in previous years are:
    1. What communication channels do you use to inform users about new tool features? E-mail? Meetings? Videos? Gifs?
    2. What is a ticketing request pipeline that works really well for you?
    3. In what size team did your tool request/ticket pipeline work best?
    This years' questions may be different, or similar! Feel free to join, and ask.

    • Pipeline
    • Programming
    • Design
    • Tool UX/UI Designer
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer


    Tools Roundtable Day 2: Assets
    i

    These roundtable sessions focus on discussion of best practices, novel techniques, and technical trade-offs for building game development tools and services. Game development tools are constantly evolving, so come to share what works (and what doesn't) at your studio, and listen to others' take on how to keep their creative teams producing awesome games.

    'Assets' focuses on export/import, interchange, persistence, collaboration, search and organization, development models (branching and/or trunking), revision control, and outsourcing.

    • Pipeline
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Tools Roundtable Day 3: Build
    i

    These roundtable sessions focus on discussion of best practices, novel techniques, and technical trade-offs for building game development tools and services. Game development tools are constantly evolving, so come to share what works (and what doesn't) at your studio, and listen to others' take on how to keep their creative teams producing awesome games.

    'Build' focuses on processing assets through to the game in all its forms: build systems, caching, distribution, scalability, optimization, disc mastering and patching.

    • Pipeline
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Tools Design Roundtable Day 3: User Research
    i

    For Day 3:
    This Tool Design roundtable is about the UX of in-house and external tool sets. Come and meet, discuss, and find out what everyone has been doing with Tool Design in the last year.
    Examples of topics are:
    1. What user research methods do you use?
    2. Do you have a dedicated user researcher on your team?
    3. What surprises has your research uncovered in the last year?
    This years' questions may be different, or similar! Feel free to join, and ask.

    • Programming
    • Design
    • Tool UX/UI Designer
    • DCC Tool Dev


    Technical Art Roundtables

    Technical Artist Roundtable Day 1
    i

    The role of a technical artists has grown from a clean-up artist and data wrangler to someone who is in charge of complex content creation pipelines and asset tracking systems. Increasingly, the lines between programmer and artist are blurring for technical artists. Tool creation, scripting, shader creation, working with both programmers and artists, and managing workflow are all skills required of a modern technical artist. This roundtable will bring together technical artists from across the industry to share their knowledge, experiences, and tips for being the best at their jobs.

    • UX
    • Programming
    • Visual Arts
    • Workflows
    • Pipeline
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    Technical Artist Roundtable Day 2
    i

    The role of a technical artists has grown from a clean-up artist and data wrangler to someone who is in charge of complex content creation pipelines and asset tracking systems. Increasingly, the lines between programmer and artist are blurring for technical artists. Tool creation, scripting, shader creation, working with both programmers and artists, and managing workflow are all skills required of a modern technical artist. This roundtable brings together technical artists from across the industry to share their knowledge, experiences, and tips for being the best at their jobs.

    • UX
    • Programming
    • Visual Arts
    • Workflows
    • Pipeline
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    Technical Artist Roundtable Day 3
    i

    The role of a technical artists has grown from a clean-up artist and data wrangler to someone who is in charge of complex content creation pipelines and asset tracking systems. Increasingly, the lines between programmer and artist are blurring for technical artists. Tool creation, scripting, shader creation, working with both programmers and artists, and managing workflow are all skills required of a modern technical artist. This roundtable brings together technical artists from across the industry to share their knowledge, experiences, and tips for being the best at their jobs.

    • UX
    • Programming
    • Visual Arts
    • Workflows
    • Pipeline
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    Automated Testing Roundtables

    Automated Testing Roundtable Day 1: Process
    i

    Process
    Automated testing provides a team with more stable software at an earlier point in development, allowing easier scheduling and fast iteration. Yet investing in automated testing has a bad reputation in the industry, where just-ship-it is the mantra. Maybe, as increased budgets and team sizes make stability even harder, its time has finally come.

    On Day 1 we prefer to discuss the people that write the tests and the workflows used to reinforce them. How does the process work in your studio? Are the engineers responsible for automated tests, or QA? Are QA silo'd or integrated? What could be better? What doesn't work?

    These roundtables bring together people of all experience levels and budgets to discuss how they currently, or would like to, use automated testing of any form. See autotestingroundtable.com (https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/lW7GCn5YzpclwQoRYu9OGtV?domain=autotestingroundtable.com) for more details and to join our discord!

    • QA
    • UX
    • Programming
    • Workflows
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • Tools QA
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer


    Automated Testing Roundtable Day 2: Legacy
    i

    Legacy
    Automated testing provides a team with more stable software at an earlier point in development, allowing easier scheduling and fast iteration. Yet investing in automated testing has a bad reputation in the industry, where just-ship-it is the mantra. Maybe, as increased budgets and team sizes make stability even harder, its time has finally come.

    On Day 2 we prefer to talk about introducing automated testing to an organization. Do you have a culture or a codebase that doesn't currently embrace automated testing? Are you having trouble getting people on-board, or maybe it was very easy and you can share why? Grand failures are just as interesting as successes!

    These roundtables bring together people of all experience levels and budgets to discuss how they currently, or would like to, use automated testing of any form. See autotestingroundtable.com (https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/lW7GCn5YzpclwQoRYu9OGtV?domain=autotestingroundtable.com) for more details and to join our discord!

    • Programming
    • QA
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • Tools QA
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer


    Automated Testing Roundtable Day 3: Implementation
    i

    Implementation
    Automated testing provides a team with more stable software at an earlier point in development, allowing easier scheduling and fast iteration. Yet investing in automated testing has a bad reputation in the industry, where just-ship-it is the mantra. Maybe, as increased budgets and team sizes make stability even harder, its time has finally come.

    On Day 3 we prefer to discuss the many faces of automation, from locally-run functional and unit tests, to server-driven continuous integration, and even external device farms. How do you do automated testing in your team? What works well for you? More interestingly, what didn't work and why?

    These roundtables bring together people of all experience levels and budgets to discuss how they currently, or would like to, use automated testing of any form. See autotestingroundtable.com (https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/lW7GCn5YzpclwQoRYu9OGtV?domain=autotestingroundtable.com) for more details and to join our discord!

    • Programming
    • QA
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • Tools QA
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer


    Universal Scene Description Roundtable

    The Universal Scene Description (USD) Roundtable
    i

    USD stands for 'Universal Scene Description', and it is a 3D file format Pixar created over a span of many years and movies, and was released open source to the public in 2016. Although technically it is more of an API than a file format, which is an ongoing discussion into the terminology and use of USD.

    In this session, attendees can gather to talk about USD. Come and meet, discuss, and find out what everyone has been doing with USD.

    Questions can be submitted during the roundtable. For example, these may include topics such as:
    1. What are issues you have bumped into when implementing USD into your pipeline?
    2. What would be required for USD to be more widely adopted?
    3. How can studios, and vendors, best share Schemas?

    Questions can be oriented towards technical issues, design, and artistic workflows.

    • Pipeline
    • UX
    • Visual Arts
    • Workflows
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer


    Open Source Roundtable

    Open Source Game Development Rountable (Presented by the IGDA)
    i

    In 2023, there have been 'disruptions in The Force' around aggressive re-licensing in both the tabletop and digital realms from Hasbro and Unity, with both back-pedaling substantially on those efforts after user reaction to the changes. Hasbro ended up re licensing some aspects of their IP under Creative Commons and Unity brought in former Red Hat CEO and Open Organization author Jim Whitehurst as an interim CEO. In the meantime Godot, The Open 3D Engine and Blender have all seen growth in interest around their tools in part due to this turmoil. During this round table, the floor is opened for discussion around ways to better communicate, and ideally increase, the role of Open Technologies and practices within the Industry.

    • Advocacy
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer


    UX

    Improving Your Tool UX Design by Removing the Faults of 'Sensible Defaults'
    i

    When we make game development tools it is very easy to pick what we think is a 'sensible default', and have all users deal with it. We think those defaults makes sense, and work for most users. However, even a cursory look at DCCs such as Unity, Unreal, 3dsMax, Maya, and Blender shows us that this is wrong. Unity, Max, and Maya have the hierarchy on the left side of the screen, while Unreal and Blender have the hierarchy on the right side of the screen. The same differences can be found between all of them when it comes to toolbars, the 3D view, the property panel, and the asset browser. There is no 'sensible default' for any of those panels in the UI, yet we often hear they 'should' be on the left or 'should' be on the right.

    What do we have to unlearn, to improve the UX of our tools?

    • Design
    • Programming
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Programming


    UIPainter: Tile-Based UI Rendering in One Draw Call
    i

    Every game editor needs a user interface. It is how we allow developers to create content for the game in a visual way. A good UI renderer has clear-cut constraints, like drawing nicely anti-aliased primitives, yet programmers have vastly different approaches to rendering game editor UI.

    In this session, Wessel Mast, Tools Programmer at Guerrilla, will tell you about how Guerrilla's editor 'Decima' renders UI: how it uses a tile-based renderer, commonly used in light culling, SSAO, depth of field and more, for drawing complex UI in an efficient manner and how it manages to draw thousands of primitives like rectangles, lines and curves in a single draw call using signed distance fields.

    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev


    Upgrading the Snowdrop Engine for the Massive World of 'Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora'
    i

    Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is Massive Entertainment's largest and most complex world to date. This session describes the changes made to the Snowdrop engine to support a huge world densely filled with procedurally generated objects, as well as the optimizations necessary to support online co-op server hosting and local servers for offline play.

    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Where Story and Tech Meet: 'Cyberpunk's' Quest Editor in Action
    i

    Learn about the narrative systems of REDengine 4, the engine used to create Cyberpunk 2077. This session will showcase changes and improvements made to the engine based on previous systems, and how the simple wish to create everything a designer can dream of influenced the tools design for the narrative department. The presentation will illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of complex visual scripting tools based on different engine and tool iterations, and provide tips and guidance when creating your own narrative engine setup for your games.

    • Programming
    • Design
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    Nanite GPU Driven Materials
    i

    This advanced technical talk takes a deep dive into Nanite's novel GPU driven material pipeline.

    A high-level overview is presented, detailing all of the core components and explaining how they fit into the overall design.

    This talk also covers low-level technical details, including how artist-authored materials drive the rasterizer, how final shading is evaluated, an innovative variable rate shading technique, and some challenges of GPU driven rendering.

    Additionally, this talk discusses several learnings and optimizations that were discovered during the development of these components.

    • Pipeline
    • Programming
    • Pipeline Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev


    Large Scale GPU-based Skinning for Vegetation in 'Alan Wake 2'
    i

    Alan Wake 2's forests and vegetation of the Pacific Northwest carry the atmosphere of the horror survival genre almost like a character on their own.

    This talk showcases Remedy's new GPU-based skinning pipeline, built to handle detailed and dense environments that are mostly comprised of dynamically animated vegetation geometry. To match the team's ambitions in geometric fidelity and complexity of motion, they also developed a new GPU-based animation system that could animate skeleton rigs at runtime via compute shaders.

    The talk provides a look under the hood at the techniques used to hit performance targets, create feature rich systems for artists, and enable full representation in the Northlight engine's raytracing implementation.

    • Pipeline
    • Procedural
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Applied Mesh Analysis: Automating Distant-City LODs in 'Marvel's Spider-Man 2'
    i

    The New York City of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is roughly twice as large as that of earlier titles in the series. At the same time, new quality and performance constraints required the creation of additional distant city LODs. The manual distant-LOD geometry pipeline of Marvel's Spider-Man and Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales was no longer viable. This lecture describes how Insomniac Games transitioned to automated distant-LOD geometry generation. In particular, it covers in-depth the applications of fundamental mesh analysis concepts (dual meshes, the Euler Characteristic, curvature estimation, etc...) to several difficult problems (beyond standard reduction and remeshing) that arise from the unique constraints regarding distant city LODs present in Marvel's Spider-Man 2.

    • Pipeline
    • Procedural
    • Programming
    • QA
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Pondering Orbs: The Rendering and Art Tools of 'COCOON'
    i

    This talk details the graphical techniques developed for COCOON, the debut title of Geometric Interactive, founded by Jeppe Carlsen, lead gameplay designer on LIMBO and INSIDE.

    Rendering the game's beautiful worlds within worlds takes a few tricks—from thick billowing froxel fog and spherical harmonics volumetric lightmaps, to a host of visual effects like crystalline Voronoi bridges, SDF shoreline ripples on water, and warping through ponderable orbs.

    Mikkel Svendsen presents how these features, tools and effects were implemented and shipped on the game's target platforms, how they contributed to the game's look, and how it all works together with an MSAA-friendly rendering pipeline by carefully considering the gotchas of fitting these features and effects with that.

    • Programming
    • Visual Arts
    • Pipeline
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Pipeline

    Building Game Worlds with OpenUSD
    i

    The complexity and size of the game worlds is ever-increasing and tools need to meet that demand. At Remedy, we have been working on new tools and tech stack to allow us to build worlds faster and with more detail than ever before. At the core of our solution is Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) by Pixar which provides a powerful composition engine as well as a format compatible with the DCCs. In this presentation, we share how we integrated OpenUSD into our tools and engine, what kind of technical and user experience challenges we have faced, and show examples how we have tackled those while having two major game projects using it throughout the development.

    • Pipeline
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Real-time World Editing Technology in Northlight
    i

    Requirements for game worlds are ever-increasing, being more realistic, more interactive, and larger than ever before. This means that there is a ton of content to be authored, but also large amounts of data to pass through pipelines and workflows to the engine runtime. Remedy has been working on a new data pipeline and technology stack for the Northlight engine that allows us to optimize entity data for authoring at edit time, and performance at runtime, while keeping near-instant iteration times for world editing workflows. The fundamental parts of this technology are OpenUSD for authoring, and Northlight's transformative live-edit pipeline that enables entity modifications to be applied to a running game process on the fly. In this presentation, Sebastian shares how we keep the editor and runtime data representations separated, how the data is transformed, and how the real-time editing between the editor and runtime works in practice.

    • Pipeline
    • UX
    • Programming
    • Workflows
    • Tool UX/UI Designer
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    DELTA FORCE WORLD CREATION: Cross-Platform Art Pipeline and Tools (Presented by Tencent Games)
    i

    Delta Force is developing top-tier experiences to gamers for all platforms and its' development team is working across multiple platforms in the short term to achieve it. This session will give a detailed introduction to a set of In-house art pipelines and tools that cover various modules ranging from Digital Content Creation (DCC) to the Engine including art assets solutions, OpenWorld infrastructure/Biome integrations, and more. The team and processes take great consideration to achieve the high fidelity and design density required to hit the high-end graphics PC gamers crave while accounting for maintaining a high level of performance on mobile devices.

    • UX
    • Programming
    • Visual Arts
    • Workflows
    • Pipeline
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer


    Unified Cross-Platform Dev Pipeline In DeltaForce Hawk Ops (Presented by Tencent Games)
    i

    Delta Force is preparing to deliver top-tier experiences to gamers for all platforms. This session will cover an efficient production process while pursuing exceptional development quality as TiMi Studio Group readies for the release of a new edition to a classic FPS franchise. This talk will summarize the valuable experiences learned through the development process of Delta Force regarding various aspects of cross-platform production including asset management, open world solutions, auto scalable 3C, adaptive UI framework and the performance tracking tools we build for better tracking during the unified development process.

    • Pipeline
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer
    • Pipeline Dev

    Version Control & Files

    MergeBot: Activision's Merge and Resolve Infrastructure
    i

    Source control is one of the foundational elements in a software's lifecycle. Unfortunately, not all source control systems handle code merges and conflict resolution gracefully, particularly in a game development environment with numerous large files scattered across branches that must be kept in sync. This talk serves as a postmortem on a tool that emerged from our ongoing struggle to smoothly integrate Perforce changelists between streams, all while ensuring it doesn't disrupt our continuous development pipeline. The presentation will delve into the architecture of the tool, the challenges encountered while making it as hands-off as possible, the complexities involved in the file resolution process, which needed to be universally accessible, and a discussion of the compromises we had to make while developing and customizing the tool to suit our needs.

    • Pipeline
    • Postmortem
    • Programming
    • QA
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tools QA
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer
    • Pipeline Dev


    Scaling Git Workflows for Game Development
    i

    Game development studios often face a dilemma when choosing version control systems—specific requirements like exclusive file locking can limit options, while common solutions remain financially out of reach for up-and-coming studios. Surprisingly, even with widely used solutions, many projects struggle to adhere to the 'not rocket science' rule of software engineering: maintaining a code repository that consistently passes all tests.

    Join Vikram in this session as he delves into the challenges of version control in game development and explores how modern git tooling, coupled with strategic workflow adjustments, can pave the way for a cost-effective solution. Discover practical insights to start utilising modern DevOps practices with your projects.

    • QA
    • UX
    • Programming
    • Workflows
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer


    Build


    Compile Score: Slay the C++ Build Time Dragon
    i

    Build times have been affecting productivity and iteration times since the dawn of programming. Developer improvement efforts have been based on guesswork so far considering the compiler has always been a closed box. 'Compile Score' allows us to peek inside and dissect how the compiler digests the code empowering the engineer to make targeted improvements and identify the real bottlenecks.
    This presentation covers how to extract, interpret, and act with the provided data, as well as go through C++ best practices to keep the dependencies healthy. It also goes through the setup in Santa Monica Studio to get up to date information automatically to the whole team.

    • Programming
    • Build Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev


    AI/ML in Testing

    Machine Learning Summit: Taming the Beast: Leveraging Machine Learning to Curb the Cost of Continuous Integration
    i

    Continuous Integration (CI) is a common practice in modern software organizations. It plays an especially important role for AAA game development, where thousands of build jobs are submitted daily. However, the size and complexity of video games tend to inflate build size and duration, leading to a slower CI and longer feedback time. To provide faster CI feedback, studies have explored optimization techniques that can skip steps, and sometimes the entirety, of build jobs. This talk presents an overview of these techniques and highlights their costs and benefits. Then, it introduces RavenBuild Dev, a novel ML-based technique tailored for video games. Contrarily to existing approaches, RavenBuild predicts build outcomes for both code and data submissions, providing full coverage for a game development CI. RavenBuild skips passing builds and therefore reduces the CI cost, up to 43%, while ensuring that failing builds are properly anticipated.

    • Machine Learning
    • Machine Learning Summit
    • Build Dev
    • ML Dev


    AI Summit: Building ML Bots at Ubisoft La Forge: From Research to Production
    i

    In this presentation, Ubisoft La Forge's explores the approach to developing ML bots, designed to simulate human players in our games. These bots are not only integral to enhancing player experiences, particularly for onboarding in multiplayer games, but also play a crucial role in Quality Control (QC) testing across our expansive open-world titles. They delve into specific examples to demonstrate how these bots, underpinned by cutting-edge machine learning (ML) technologies, are collaboratively integrated into game development. This synergy between production teams and innovative ML applications is pivotal in upping game quality and pushing the boundaries of technological advancement in gaming.

    • Machine Learning
    • AI Summit
    • QA
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • Build Dev
    • Tools QA
    • ML Dev


    Levelling Up: How AI's Transformative Role in Level Automation Production Adds Business Value in 'Candy Crush Saga'
    i

    Anna Hernandelius, Product Director in Candy Crush Saga, together with Sahar Asadi, Director AI Labs at King, present King's journey in implementing and using AI to create business value; from A/B testing to high speed AI level testing to enhance the player experience. The session will look at the role of AI in business transformation within the games industry and how the technology is helping us in our mission of Making the World Playful.

    • Business & Marketing
    • Programming
    • QA
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • Build Dev
    • Tools QA
    • ML Dev


    Automation, Automated Testing, and QA

    Machine Learning Summit: 'SaGa Emerald Beyond': Balancing Battle with Reinforcement Learning AI
    i

    Battle system is one of the most vital parts of SaGa and costly to balance due to the huge volume of the game. We present a machine learning (ML) framework to help us balance the battle system of the latest title of the series under development, SaGa Emerald Beyond, with Reinforcement Learning (RL). We show how our game designers use the AI to help their daily work, the challenges, the detail of our in-house algorithm, and the engineering backend to deliver the system. Also, our system and algorithm are generally applicable to other games and address major key challenges on implementing reliable ML system within general production line. With this system, we can evaluate more than 700 stages in one day and find critical bugs, speeding up the QA process significantly.

    • Machine Learning
    • QA
    • Machine Learning Summit
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • Build Dev
    • Tools QA
    • ML Dev


    Machine Learning Summit: Analyze Your Bugs Automatically: Root Cause Analysis with Causal Models
    i

    Existing ways to find bugs including client logs, server monitors, and feedbacks from user community. Finding a bug is far from satisfactory. What we need to know is dive into the mechanism and dig out the factors that cause the bug. That is why we need root cause analysis. Existing bug root analysis requires a data science engineer diving into the game logs, analyzing the data of many variables and factors, even playing the game in person to reproduce the bugs. Those efforts could be time-consuming and labor-consuming. We will introduce casual analysis and explain how causal models can help with root cause analysis and improve user experience.

    • Machine Learning
    • Machine Learning Summit
    • ML Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Tools QA


    Testing Empowered: Integrating ML-Based Playtesting in a Team with Limited QA Capacity
    i

    Playtesting is a crucial aspect of modern game development. However, small-to-mid-sized teams often face difficulties in meeting their testing demands due to limited QA resources.

    In this talk, Sun Jeong discusses how he and his team built and harnessed a machine-learning-assisted automated playtesting solution to fulfill the testing requirements for the launch and live service of an action-packed roguelite game, Frame Arms Girl: Dream Stadium.

    He talks about the technical details of the automated playtesting stack, introduces various detailed use cases and the workflow used to debug and discover valuable design insights, and shares the tips and lessons learned during the development of the stack under dynamic and unstable production settings.

    • UX
    • Programming
    • QA
    • Workflows
    • Machine Learning
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • Tools QA
    • Build Dev
    • ML Dev


    Automated Testing of Shader Code
    i

    Rare has a rich culture of writing automated tests for their game and engine code. The 'Sea of Thieves' project has hundreds of thousands of automated tests that exist to validate behaviour and to ensure that bugs are kept to a minimum, as they continually deliver an ever-changing experience to players. Among this large test suite, are tests that validate and verify shader code. This session explores the technologies that Rare currently uses to write tests for their shader code, both on 'Sea of Thieves' and on their upcoming game, 'Everwild'. Throughout this session Rare discusses two forms of testing shader code:

    1. Screenshot Comparison
    2. Shader unit tests

    They go through the pros and cons of both types of tests, as well as delving into the implementation of their shader unit testing framework to discuss the design goals of the system.

    • Programming
    • QA
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • Build Dev
    • Tools QA


    Technical Art

    Visual Effects Summit: Fracture Animation Techniques
    i

    Fracturing your geometry is only the first step in your destructible asset pipeline. There are many different techniques to animating these fractured assets. This talk covers several different ways we can animate the fractured pieces in engine. By avoiding the need of baking out a simulation, we can allow for faster iteration time and dynamic input from gameplay. During the first half of the talk, we focus on using custom UV sets to add animation inside of a material. Then we cover how to animate the pieces with Niagara by using its Mesh Renderer for mesh flipbooks. All the techniques are covered using Houdini for source art generation and Unreal for the game engine.

    • Visual Effects Summit
    • Procedural
    • Pipeline
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Visual Effects Summit: Procedural Cinematic Symbiotes in 'Marvel's Spider-Man 2'
    i

    Symbiotes take various forms and play a significant role in Marvel's Spider-Man 2. These symbiotes are rendered in highest fidelity during the game cinematics. Insomniac created a variety of workflows to make symbiotes. These workflows had to be robust enough to convey life-like motion, fast enough for users to iterate within a production timeline, and performant enough to run at sixty frames per second.

    This presentation breaks down the creation process of cinematic symbiotes in Marvel's Spider-Man 2. The presenters walk through custom procedural tools created to facilitate art directable effects, the export process, and the custom engine systems implemented. The presenters dedicate special attention to showcasing a novel real-time meshing system used extensively in the rendering of Symbiotes in Marvel's Spider-man 2.

    • UX
    • Programming
    • Procedural
    • Workflows
    • Visual Effects Summit
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Animation Summit: Technical Animation Pipeline of 'Fort Solis'
    i

    Dive into the technical animation pipeline and workflow built for 'Fort Solis,' an indie title created by a small team all within a little over two years. This presentation covers the building blocks of the 'Fort Solis's' character skeletons with approaches that offload deformation calculations to runtime rather than a baked approach, our artist-friendly workflow to face rig development and creation, our animator-first tools and pipelines that empower animators to do what they do best (animate!) and how state-of-the-art technologies inside of Unreal Engine 5 helped breathe life into the characters and truly blurred the lines between cinematic and gameplay through motion matching locomotion. Finally, the session is rounded off with the many character and animation optimisations required to hit 60 frames per second on PlayStation 5. The many hurdles, and lessons learnt will be shared from trying to push the animation envelope with an indie-sized team and resources.

    • UX
    • Programming
    • Workflows
    • Animation Summit
    • Pipeline
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Technical Artist Summit: Build Your Own Particle System
    i

    Shaders are most commonly used to define the appearance of model surfaces - but they can do a lot more! In this session, Ben will show how to construct a full-featured, performance-friendly particle system using only a node-based shader tool such as Unreal's Material Editor or Unity's Shader Graph.

    Attendees will learn how to make particles face the camera, move, rotate, and scale as well as control particle movement and rotation. They will learn how to control particle color and opacity, as well as how to fade out particles where they intersect with scene geometry.

    Even more features can be added to provide more control, or removed to increase performance. Artists can have full control over a particle system they build themselves and Ben will show them how in this session.

    • Technical Artist Summit
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Technical Artist Summit: GPU based Foliage-Interaction for 'Ark: Survival Ascended'
    i

    Step into the immersive world of 'Ark: Survival Ascended' as we delve into our new GPU-based foliage interaction system. Our presentation outlines how we've combined UE5's Nanite technology with a custom force-injection system to create truly dynamic open-world environments. Explore how millions of Nanite-based assets—from trees to grass—interact in real-time with players, NPCs, weapons, visual effects and even each other. Our process leverages tools like SpeedTree 9 and Houdini for asset creation and data encoding, significantly optimizing computational loads. You'll get insights into our custom compute shader pipeline, dynamic memory allocation, and how forces are injected into multiple volumetric render targets to achieve the fully dynamic open multiplayer world of 'Ark: Survival Ascended'.

    • Pipeline
    • Technical Artist Summit
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Technical Artist Summit: Using Generative AI as a Tool for Tech Artists
    i

    Generative AI is shaking up the industry, so like any other emerging technology we, as tech-artists, can ride the wave and bend our curious eye at its challenges, promises, and time saving nature. All to fold the best parts into our workflows, pipelines, and processes.

    Daniel Ocean is an Associate TechArt Director at Ubisoft currently working on XDefiant – a competitive arena shooting pulling from all the Ubisoft gaming franchises and engines, both old and new.

    The session includes an evaluation of generative AI and its current place in production – both generally and within Ubisoft. Daniel takes a look at the novel and different ways AI is, and will, solve pain points for artists and designers through examples. Additionally, we look practically at how to create training data for custom GenAI, image-based, tools using Houdini. With a focus on the importance of owning the input training for tools as much as the output of the generation.

    • Technical Artist Summit
    • UX
    • Programming
    • Procedural
    • Workflows
    • Pipeline
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Technical Artist Summit: Procedural Tool Development for 'Marvel's Spider-Man 2'
    i

    Marvels Spider-Man 2 employed over a dozen procedural systems in creation and population of its open world and many more in support of destruction, breakables, effects and characters. The power of procedural systems in production is widely recognized and it's hard to name a studio that isn't taking advantage of them. It allows efficient, rapid generation and iteration of a vast amount of content in game development. Unfortunately, the development of production ready procedural systems themselves can be far from an efficient process. This presentation uses successful and less than successful examples from Marvel's Spider-Man 2 production in a guide to development and implementation of procedural systems from inception.

    • Procedural
    • Technical Artist Summit
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Building a User and Developer Friendly Cross-DCC Animation Pipeline
    i

    This session provides insights into the technical artist team's development of a lightweight, highly reusable and artist-and-developer-friendly Cross-DCC animation pipeline. Fleming Lin from LIGHTSPEED STUDIOS will introduce two key pipeline frameworks: Protostar and NodeZoo. The presentation includes a demonstration of versioning strategies, data-driven rig generation, and the implementation of universal toolkits tailored to diverse projects at LIGHTSPEED STUDIOS.

    • Pipeline
    • Procedural
    • Programming
    • Visual Arts
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    From Firefighters to Service Providers: Technical Art as a Service
    i

    Technical art has grown from a niche discipline into a critical component of big enterprise game studios. How does this evolution of this component change the way we approach how technical art operates at a procedural level? In this talk, we'll discuss the following:
    - How Legends Of Runeterra uses systemic analysis to support multiple satellite offices around the world with a small core technical art group operating as a service team.
    - Explore strategies for maintaining global pipelines that cross borders, languages, and time zones, and give concrete examples of how we've used our lessons to change the way we operate.
    - Finally, we'll also discuss how we've adopted Continuous Deployment development practices to unify the ability for our TAs to contribute to a shared tooling solution between projects.

    • Pipeline
    • Programming
    • Visual Arts
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Embracing Art Performance on 'Diablo IV'
    i

    Performance: a word that conjures up many emotions for the average game-artist and can often breed conflict in production. But with the right approach, optimization can be something that the team embraces as part of the development process.

    Diablo IV shipped to critical acclaim in its technical strength and performance across a wide variety of hardware, but the journey to get to that point was full of trial-and-error, teamwide initiatives, and no shortage of hard work. Join Senior Technical Artist Evan Edwards as he talks about a cultural approach to optimization, and how developers can make performance less of a dirty word on their teams.

    • UX
    • Visual Arts
    • Workflows
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Machine Learning

    Machine Learning Summit: Introduction & Real-time Neural Textures for Materials Compression
    i

    We present a novel neural material compression technique that is designed to take advantage of hardware accelerated texture compression formats. This approach leans on a multiresolution set of block compressed (BC6H) textures that is subsequently decoded by a small neural network. In practice, our method is integrated into the current pipelines in two stages. At production stage, we use deep learning to jointly learn the texture set and the decoder network. At runtime, we sample the learned textures and then reconstruct the material information by inferring neural network in a shader.

    • Machine Learning
    • Pipeline
    • Machine Learning Summit
    • ML Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Machine Learning Summit: ChatAvatar: Multi-agents Enhanced 3D Character Creation in 'Earth: Revival'
    i

    LLM has substantially accelerated the pace of game development. Recently, they successfully apply LLMs in the game 'Earth: Revival', for offline production of game NPCs and online creation of player characters.This talk will delve into how multi-agent systems assist in the creation of avatars within 'Earth: Revival'. The most recent LLM of ByteDance will also be introduced. The details of driving agents across multiple tasks will be described. The cooperating agents increased the art team's speed in character creation by 50%.
    This multi-agent includes the Dialog Agent, Brain Strom Agents, and Prompt Agent, etc. In addition, they also apply three generative AI modules, including SD for character original painting generation, DreamFace for text/image-to-avatar conversions, and Rodin Search. Furthermore, a text-to-face entrance can be directly experienced by players in 'Earth: Revival.

    • Machine Learning
    • Procedural
    • Machine Learning Summit
    • ML Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Machine Learning Summit: Fictional Speech Synthesis to Avoid the Risk in Generative Contents
    i

    In creating interactive digital content including characters, text-to-speech technology is a promising option to flexibly respond to arbitrary user input. We propose a method of applying text-to-speech technology to generate speech in a fictional language that the user has never heard before. We will share with attendee how this method can generate a pronunciation language for a fictional language that fits the worldview and creates an immersive experience, as if the user is listening to the language spoken in that world. We will introduce the simple but effective approach to synthesis fictional language speech, and explain the possible application in games.

    • Machine Learning
    • Machine Learning Summit
    • ML Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Machine Learning Summit: From Photo to Expression: Generating Photorealistic Facial Rigs
    i

    In the presentation the speaker discusses how machine learning can improve facial animation in the gaming industry. A showcase on their solution using in-house facial rig, FaceRig, and will demonstrate how blendshapes can be automatically created to suit various character identities. The presentation covers: FaceMixer, which can generate blendshapes from a neutral input, and FaceOptim, which automates the creation of blendshapes and animations from scanned expressions or 4D animation. The presenter also introduces FaceBot, a solution that generates photorealistic face textures and meshes with expressions that can then be fed back into the previous system. By combining FaceBot with FaceOptim or FaceMixer, users can generate high-quality rigged faces for game characters with minimal effort. Future developments include incorporating FaceAnim animation, allowing for more organic and realistic facial animation.

    • Machine Learning
    • Programming
    • Machine Learning Summit
    • ML Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Machine Learning Summit: Introduction & Training Human-like and High-performance Basketball AI Bot for 'Streetball Allstar'
    i

    'Streetball Allstar' is a 3v3 street basketball game that attracts players with its real-time competition and fairness. AI bots play an important role in the game. Firstly, they assist beginners in learning and improving, providing examples of exceptional skills and teamwork. Secondly, AI bots serve as teammates or opponents, increasing the diversity and competitiveness of the game. Most importantly, AI bots ensure fair competition, fill the gap when there are not enough players and match players of different tiers with highly customized parameters. In terms of training, we combine reinforcement learning and imitation learning, allowing AI bots to learn a wide range of strategies and simulate human thinking and behavior patterns, possessing human-like qualities and human-AI interaction while also having rich strategy diversity. Through dynamic difficulty control, we can control the operation level of the AI accurately and reasonably, adapting to different skill levels. With the client-side deployment solution, AI bots are decoupled from the core logic of game, improving response speed and ensuring data security. In our demonstration, AI bots have shown outstanding performance in various aspects such as difficulty switching, accurate response, strong adaptability, human-AI interaction, and high stability, receiving enthusiastic praise from both players and our customer.

    • Machine Learning
    • QA
    • Machine Learning Summit
    • ML Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Machine Learning Summit: 'Naruto Mobile': Optimization for Large-scale Reinforcement Learning in Fighting Games
    i

    Naruto Mobile is a popular Fighting Game with over 100 million registered players. AI agents are deployed to the game for various applications such as level challenges. Although deep reinforcement learning is an excellent approach to creating agents with diverse strategies, it is difficult to apply to Naruto Mobile--a game that is built on a pool of 300 characters with unique skills. A traditional approach of self-play training at such a scale may require substantial training costs and time. This talk presents a new training approach to improve agents' generalization ability and optimize massive-scale self-play. The proposed algorithm has already been employed by Naruto Mobile to create agents, which have been used in more than 300 million human-AI fighting matches. To the best of our knowledge to date. This is the first time that deep reinforcement learning has been employed by a commercial fighting game.

    • Machine Learning
    • Machine Learning Summit
    • ML Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Machine Learning Summit: Would You Like Fries with That? AI-assisted Recommendations in Development
    i

    While we're flooded with generative AI approaches, we intend to show a different possibility to facilitate ML for better and faster gamedev: AI-assisted game design. AI-assisted development is barely emerging, usually as recommendations in programming IDEs. We tried a similar approach to build tools for game designers in three areas: level design, narrative, and game object design (game mechanics related). In this talk, we will show which areas benefited the most, with very promising ML recommendations to ease the designers' work, and what algorithms are showing the most promise despite being really low effort. We will share where, from our experience, ML will not deliver good results anytime soon and how we went from a hardly working system to what seems to be a promising tool.

    • Machine Learning
    • Programming
    • Machine Learning Summit
    • ML Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Procedural

    Facing Our Failures: Creating 3D Environments from a 2D Legacy for 'Darkest Dungeon II'
    i

    In this session, Red Hook Studios' Lead Environment Artist, Marielle Fox, will discuss the pillars of Darkest Dungeon 2's environment art creation and how the art team established their unique workflow.

    She will share the experiences of the team and the challenges they faced while trying to transition the 2D art style of the first Darkest Dungeon game to 3D for the sequel. They will cover various methods that the team experimented with, and how, through a few failures, they managed to develop an elegant solution that fit the project's needs and resources perfectly.

    This presentation will also discuss various rendering and procedural generation techniques that Red Hook developed and maintained, in order to achieve the look and tone of various 3D worlds in the style of Darkest Dungeon.

    • UX
    • Visual Arts
    • Procedural
    • Workflows
    • Pipeline
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    'Marvel's Spider-Man 2': 10 Years of Procedural Content Creation
    i

    A look at the evolution of procedural content creation at Insomniac Games across multiple 'Marvel's Spider-Man' titles culminating in 'Marvel's Spider-Man 2.

    • Visual Arts
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer
    • Pipeline Dev


    AI-enhanced content authoring


    Converging Game Design and AI: New Frontiers and Pitfalls
    i

    Although it's a hot topic now, AI and machine learning have existed in and outside of games for many years! To fully grasp the power of AI to transform game development, we have to understand how it works and where it's best put to use.

    Hilary Mason, Co-Founder and CEO at Hidden Door, gives attendees a peek behind the hidden door of AI's current integration into game development. In this session, she outlines the current state of AI as a game dev tool and explains its strengths and shortcomings. Hilary then presents potential solutions for common AI challenges—such as filtering out bad outputs and carefully handling the ethics of AI's use of copyrighted material.

    She then discusses how to assemble the ultimate AI game development dream team, merging the powers of man and machine to create entirely new gaming experiences.

    • Machine Learning
    • Programming
    • Design
    • QA
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    GiiNEX: Generative AI Game Engine (Presented by Tencent AI Lab)
    i

    This session introduces GiiNEX, Tencent's generative AI game engine, offering comprehensive AI solutions to enhance game development and operations across MOBA, FPS, MMO, and other game categories. GiiNEX excels with its AI bot services and AIGC tools. A highlight of the session will be a detailed case study on the AI bot's application, specifically in the 'Challenge Wukong' gameplay mode of Honor of Kings, demonstrating how these AI bots significantly boost player engagement. Additionally, the session features AIGC tools such as 'Automatic 3D Virtual Scene Generation', 'Scenario Editor', and 'UGC Editor'. These tools streamline content creation, empowering developers and UGC creators to build immersive game worlds and design level maps efficiently.

    • Business & Marketing
    • Procedural
    • Programming
    • ML Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    Modernizing Games with NVIDIA RTX Remix and Generative AI (Presented by NVIDIA)
    i

    NVIDIA RTX Remix, a graphics modding platform for remastering classic games with path traced lighting, modern PBR Assets, DLSS, and Generative AI was released in January, 2024. It is a first of its kind modding tool that allows modders to capture game scenes into OpenUSD format, making them easy to manipulate. RTX Remix allows you to replace a game's meshes, textures, materials, lighting and even renderer. It offers modders access to generative AI Texture Tools to revamp old game textures in higher resolution and with physically accurate properties. The final output -- a stunning mod that rivals modern games in looks and technology. We build Portal With RTX using RTX Remix, and modders are creating Half Life 2 RTX using the tool. Join our session to learn how we built RTX Remix, how it works, and what we've seen the community able to do with it.

    • Programming
    • Visual Arts
    • ML Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    MotorNerve：A Character Animation System using Machine Learning (Presented by Tencent Games)
    i

    This presentation will introduce to you a character animation system using machine learning, dubbed MotorNerve, which implements two core character animation functions: locomotion control and transition animation generation. First, by combining Motion Matching and Learned Motion Matching technologies, MotorNerve achieves high-quality, low-consumption locomotion control while speeding up the tuning process for Learned Motion Matching. Secondly, MotorNerve also implements an inhouse Motion In-Betweening (MIB) algorithm, which uses a variational autoencoder to encode leg movements, significantly improving the foot skating problem of existing methods. This method, a joint work by Zhejiang University and TiMi Studio Group, a Tencent Games studio, has been published in SIGGRAPH 2022. MotorNerve applies MIB to interactive animation scenarios, generating high-quality transition animations while saving the project costs.

    • Machine Learning
    • Procedural
    • Programming
    • ML Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    Innovation Unleashed: High-performance UE5 Mobile Rendering and Next-gen Character Creation Pipeline Powered by Machine Learning (Presented by Lightspeed Studios)
    i

    The bar of quality and performance on next-gen platforms has been raised once again with Unreal Engine 5. However, a significant gap has emerged between these advanced features and their mobile counterparts. In this presentation, we will explore how the presenters addressed the challenge of developing high-quality UE5 mobile games involving the implementation of multiple optimizations and creation of new mobile rendering pipelines.

    Similarly, MetaHuman by Epic revolutionized character creation technology, yet challenges in performance and customization persist. This session will introduce a groundbreaking character creation pipeline designed for crafting high-definition, animation-ready characters that enhance the immersion in the next-level metaverse. The creators will showcase a novel system, built upon multimodal machine learning techniques, that empowers both artists and gamers to generate hyper-realistic avatars seamlessly from photos, sketches, or even text within seconds.

    • Machine Learning
    • Pipeline
    • Programming
    • QA
    • ML Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    How Generative AI is Transforming Game Development, Discovery and UGC (Presented by Roblox)
    i

    The latest AI and LLM (Large Language Models) innovations have paved the way for completely re-imagining the game development process, driving the discovery of new games, and making safer gaming experiences. What was a weeks-long process of creating the first playable prototype can now be achieved within a day. We will explore how developers can leverage AI for everything from texturing 3D models to generating and debugging code and arranging 3D scenes. We will also explore how AI is being used at Roblox to help drive the discovery of new games and match players to the right content. And how AI is helping to create safer and more civil gaming experiences. Lastly, we will showcase how AI enables a new generation of User-Generated Content (UGC) with a conversational interface and how these capabilities will empower developers to make more engaging experiences where their users participate in the creation process.

    • Procedural
    • Programming
    • QA
    • ML Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe

    AI

    AI Summit: Making the Most of NavMeshes in FPS games: From 'Crysis 3' to 'Hunt: Showdown'
    i

    The Navigation System and NavMeshes in Cryengine have gone through significant changes in the past decade. In this session, we present the new major features added to the NavMeshes since their introduction during the development of 'Crysis 3'. We also share details about each added feature in chronological order, what problem each feature solves, what challenges we needed to overcome, how it was implemented and how it is used specifically in Crytek's latest game 'Hunt: Showdown'. We also show, whenever possible, what the performance implications of each feature are.

    • AI Summit
    • QA
    • DCC Tool Dev


    AI Summit: Level Generation With Large Language Models
    i

    Can LLMs generate video game levels, among the many other things they can do? This session provides an overview of how to generate game levels with large language models, including but not limited to GPT-3, GPT-4, and Llama. Various strategies based on prompting, finetuning, and bootstrapping are discussed. The talk is accessible and some of the ideas are immediately actionable.

    • Machine Learning
    • Procedural
    • AI Summit
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • ML Dev


    AI Summit: Modularize Your AI Tools to Create Behavior Instead of Code
    i

    When authoring behavior for game AI we must reason about a broad range of systems and their associated data. Commonly, this reasoning is formulated by means of visual scripting languages and behavior trees (among others). These tools often introduce challenges for reusability, and managing data dependencies in complex worlds.

    In this talk, Sam Fay-Hunt demonstrates a framework to modularize game AI concepts into compartmentalized, reusable components. This system is highly suited to reasoning about, and describing properties of, environments or situations. He describes the core pillars of its design, and how it can be used to augment existing behavior authoring systems to empower designers to incorporate powerful concepts such as quality, danger, or utility into decision making.

    • AI Summit
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    AI Summit: From Text to Gameplay: Generative AI's Influence on Behavior Trees
    i

    Behavior trees have been a cornerstone of game AI for years, but what happens when you infuse them with the power of generative AI? Join Pierre Dalaya and Trevor Santarra as they explore the remarkable synergy between large language models (LLMs) and behavior tree authoring. Discover how these cutting-edge techniques can revolutionize your game development process by generating behavior trees and code, seamlessly integrating modern AI convenience into a familiar tool set. This talk showcases how generative AI techniques can supercharge your gameplay authoring tools, providing you with a whole new level of efficiency and creativity. Don't miss this opportunity to explore the future of game AI!

    • UX
    • AI Summit
    • Programming
    • Workflows
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    AI Summit: Practical Utility AI
    i

    Utility theory is a common method for handling decision making in games. Much has already been said about it, but most resources focus on theory rather than the nuts & bolts of actually building the system. This session solves that by focusing on implementation with only a light touch on theory.

    The session starts by dissecting the architecture of a utility system, breaking down core concepts such as considerations, utility curves, and decision hierarchies. The session also examines the importance of data in tuning utility systems, offering insights into how designers manipulate data, curves, and more. Attendees discover essential tools for debugging utility systems and learn to navigate potential challenges and performance concerns.

    The session concludes with a live demo, showing the full process of adding a new decision into the game, from design to implementation.

    • AI Summit
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev


    AI Summit: Endless Stories: Utilizing AI to Power a Content Creation Engine
    i

    Generative AI, when combined with traditional game development techniques, can allow for a new generation of games, ones that possess truly infinite worlds that dynamically respond to player inputs. Drawing upon decades of work as a data scientist and her current role leading Hidden Door, Hilary walks attendees through the process of integrating AI into traditional game development. Within the talk, Hilary will address AI's shortcomings and ethical concerns, as well as outline an action plan for attendees to use as they explore incorporating A into their game development workflows.

    • Procedural
    • UX
    • AI Summit
    • Workflows
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    Audio

    Audio Summit: Challenges and Opportunities in Designing and Developing Audio Tools
    i

    This talk offers valuable insights into the design and development of audio tools, showcasing the importance of user-centered approaches, collaboration, and iterative processes in creating tools that enhance the productivity and creativity of sound designers and content creators. The talk emphasizes the iterative nature of tool development, where user feedback and collaboration play a vital role in refining the tool's functionality and workflows. It highlights the importance of continuously adapting and improving tools based on user experiences to maximize productivity and creativity. Additionally, some arguments for showing the value of investing more in audio tools are presented.

    • UX
    • Programming
    • Audio Summit
    • Workflows
    • Pipeline
    • Tool UX/UI Designer
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Mixing, Music, and Mods: 'Cyberpunk 2077' Audio Technical Pipelines
    i

    The music and mixing systems of Cyberpunk 2077 give Composers and Sound Designers the power to author their content, but also stands as a 'director' between the player and the multitude of audio cues that naturally emerge from the life of Night City.

    In this talk, Colin Walder, Engineering Director, Management & Audio, and Giuseppe Marano, Staff Engineer, Audio at CD PROJEKT RED, present an overview of the music and mixing tech developed for Cyberpunk 2077, and how creativity was put into the hands of the players through the audio modding system. They discuss the challenges involved in authoring dynamic transitions within a vast and dense open world, how to overcome the limitations of an area-based pipeline, and how to design a system that allows for injecting audio hooks into quests, scenes and dynamic encounters.

    • Pipeline
    • Audio
    • Tool UX/UI Designer
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Visual Arts

    Art Direction Summit: Lights of Dogtown: Narrative Lighting in 'Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty'
    i

    This session promises to be a journey that invites you to explore the historical process of crafting the Cyberpunk 2077 visual language through the interplay of light and color. Yet, it delves even deeper into the narrative-driven aspects of art-directing lighting within the 'Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty' world. Throughout this session, Jakub guides the audience through a process of gathering references, conducting in-depth analyses of the open world and quest narratives' unique requirements, and creating a coherent vision of per-location lighting. From there, Jakub transitions into the art of color scripting, an integral step that places a strong emphasis on evoking and enhancing the emotional impact of the game.

    • Art Direction Summit
    • Tool UX/UI Designer
    • DCC Tool Dev


    Art Direction Summit: Deciphering Dogtown: How We Built the Last District of Night City
    i

    This session brings the environmental art behind Dogtown closer to you. It shows how different that district is from Night City and with that, presents all the challenges this project had in store for us and how we overcame them. It goes through the process of creating Dogtown from a graybox phase up to a polished quality, and the improvement of the elements we were not very happy with in 'Cyberpunk 2077' from the environment art point of view.

    This talk also addresses technical pipelines and explain how we worked with Dogtown to create this heavily dense district in an optimized manner, going through how some of the pipelines were enough, yet others were improved quite a lot, and others created from scratch. Attendees will learn what lessons we drew from 'Cyberpunk 2077' and how we implemented that knowledge to create a better gaming experience

    • Art Direction Summit
    • Pipeline
    • Tool UX/UI Designer
    • DCC Tool Dev


    Independent Games

    Independent Games Summit: Critical! Combat Presentation Tools for 'Darkest Dungeon II'
    i

    Darkest Dungeon cast an intimidatingly large shadow over it's sequel with it's signature presentation style and strong visual identity. Darkest Dungeon II transitioned the series from 2D to 3D with the goal of maintaining the same distinctive visual style and presentation but pushing the bar as high as we could go. This talk will cover, in detail, the approaches, challenges, and trade-offs made in pursuing this goal. In particular, the challenge of achieving a robust presentation pipeline as one programmer with many artists to support.

    Discover how the visual communication of features was gravely important for keeping everyone on the same page. How rapid previsualization influenced the way tools were built for sequencing animations and visual effects. Missteps that caused wasted time and lessons learned.

    Aspiration unites the hopeful!

    • Pipeline
    • Independent Games Summit
    • Programming
    • Tool UX/UI Designer
    • DCC Tool Dev


    Other Roundtables


    Refactoring Systems at Scale Roundtable (Presented by the IGDA)
    i

    In the ever-evolving landscape of game development, maintaining and improving existing systems is as crucial as building new ones. Refactoring, the process of restructuring code to enhance readability, maintainability, and performance, becomes increasingly complex when working at scale. This technical roundtable delves into the challenges and best practices of refactoring large and intricate systems in game development, providing a platform for developers to exchange insights, strategies, and real-world experiences.

    • Advocacy
    • Programming
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer
    • Build Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    AI Roundtable Day 1: Deep Dive with Experts
    i

    The AI Roundtables session provides discussion-based sessions on Wednesday and Friday and a Q&A format session on Thursday. The Monday session starts with a discussion of machine learning versus regular game AI and then goes on to topics from the audience. The Thursday session is Q&A; bring questions and help answer questions and expect a larger number of topics to go by. The Friday session is completely driven by topics from the audience. The moderator helps to make sure that everyone gets a chance to speak and to keep the topics moving.

    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev


    External Development (Outsourcing) Roundtable Day 1
    i

    External Development, or Outsourcing as it is commonly referred, plays a huge role in the game development industry and with it comes a huge amount of challenges. The External Development Roundtable is a moderated forum discussion surrounding external development topics which are mainly generated by the participants. Whether it's team/leadership buy-in, career growth, best practices, vendor relations, etc. this roundtable will provide a forum for questions, ideas and solutions from industry peers on the front lines of external development. Attendees from all experience levels and disciplines are welcome and will benefit from the discussion. Attendees are strongly encouraged to participate in the conversation.

    • Pipeline
    • Visual Arts
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer
    • Build Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev


    Animation Roundtable Day 1
    i

    The Animation Roundtable aims to bring all disciplines together under a common cause- how to best implement and improve the field of animation in game development. The following questions are among those that will be addressed:

    Where is the line between aesthetics and gameplay? Who should be directing the animation in a game? Who owns each part of the animation pipeline after export? How can all disciplines work together better, to bring the best looking and feeling animation to their game? What are the expectations of animation? Of the player? What new technologies are available or coming online that can help animators excel at their jobs, and what challenges will those technologies bring? What is your best tip or trick that you think everyone needs to hear? What mistakes have you made that you think others can learn from? How can we all give and take feedback better, from all disciplines?

    In addition, this roundtable discussion will focus on helping newcomers by dedicating the last part of each session to them, encouraging questions to help them get started (or jump-started!) in their animation careers.

    • Pipeline
    • Visual Arts
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    Visual Effects Roundtable Day 1
    i

    The tools and techniques of Real Time VFX have changed dramatically over the past few years. There are now extraordinarily powerful desktop GPUs, rapidly advancing mobile GPUs, compute shaders, complex particle sims, mesh-based effect techniques, and advanced post processing and compositing tools. The new consoles have matured and are showing what they're capable of, and VR/AR/XR continues to impact the industry. It's an incredible time in Real Time VFX.

    Join this roundtable to hear from other VFX artists, learn about their successes and failures, compare pie-in-the-sky ideas, and share your favorite tricks.

    Day 1: General topics and revisiting ground broken in the VFX Summit earlier in the week. (Jason Keyser and Gabriel Boileau)

    Day 2: VFX through an Artistic Lens, focusing on attendee questions about the artistic aspects of VFX. This may include art education (as students or veterans), art direction, and more. (Jason Keyser)

    Day 3: The Technical Lens for creating VFX, guiding the conversation through such as graph based effect authoring, effect lighting and optimization, new mesh based techniques, VR/AR/XR, and more. (Gabriel Boileau)

    • Programming
    • Visual Arts
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    Game Audio Programming Roundtable Day 1: Game Integration
    i

    Wednesday: 'Audio Programming Roundtable: Game Integration'
    This roundtable session will focus on tools and techniques for integrating with game engines. Topics will center around technology choices, game audio engine design, and tool design. Newbies and experts are welcome to come and share their wisdom.

    Thursday: 'Audio Programming Roundtable: Low-Level Topics'
    This roundtable session will focus on low-level topics such as DSPs and mixing. Topics will center around algorithms, interesting effects to implement, and integrating those effects into workflows. Newbies and experts are welcome to come and share their wisdom.

    Friday: 'Audio Programming Roundtable: Free-for-all'
    In this roundtable session we will cover any topics that we didn't get to in the previous two days. We will also have a Q&A session where your questions can be answered by expert audio programmers. Newbies and experts are welcome to come and share their wisdom.

    • Workflows
    • UX
    • Programming
    • Programming
    • Audio
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Visual Effects Roundtable Day 2
    i

    The tools and techniques of Real Time VFX have changed dramatically over the past few years. There are now extraordinarily powerful desktop GPUs, rapidly advancing mobile GPUs, compute shaders, complex particle sims, mesh-based effect techniques, and advanced post processing and compositing tools. The new consoles have matured and are showing what they're capable of, and VR/AR/XR continues to impact the industry. It's an incredible time in Real Time VFX.

    Join this roundtable to hear from other VFX artists, learn about their successes and failures, compare pie-in-the-sky ideas, and share your favorite tricks.

    VFX through an Artistic Lens, focusing on attendee questions about the artistic aspects of VFX. This may include art education (as students or veterans), art direction, and more.

    • Programming
    • Visual Arts
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    External Development (Outsourcing) Roundtable Day 2
    i

    External Development, or Outsourcing as it is commonly referred, plays a huge role in the game development industry and with it comes a huge amount of challenges. The External Development Roundtable is a moderated forum discussion surrounding external development topics which are mainly generated by the participants. Whether it's team/leadership buy-in, career growth, best practices, vendor relations, etc. this roundtable provides a forum for questions, ideas and solutions from industry peers on the front lines of external development. Attendees from all experience levels and disciplines are welcome and can benefit from the discussion. Attendees are strongly encouraged to participate in the conversation.

    • Pipeline
    • Visual Arts
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer
    • Build Dev
    • DCC Tool Dev


    Animation Roundtable Day 2
    i

    The Animation Roundtable aims to bring all disciplines together under a common cause- how to best implement and improve the field of animation in game development. The following questions are among those that will be addressed:

    Where is the line between aesthetics and gameplay? Who should be directing the animation in a game? Who owns each part of the animation pipeline after export? How can all disciplines work together better, to bring the best looking and feeling animation to their game? What are the expectations of animation? Of the player? What new technologies are available or coming online that can help animators excel at their jobs, and what challenges will those technologies bring? What is your best tip or trick that you think everyone needs to hear? What mistakes have you made that you think others can learn from? How can we all give and take feedback better, from all disciplines?

    In addition, this roundtable discussion focuses on helping newcomers by dedicating the last part of each session to them, encouraging questions to help them get started (or jump-started!) in their animation careers.

    • Pipeline
    • Visual Arts
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    Animation Roundtable Day 3
    i

    The Animation Roundtable aims to bring all disciplines together under a common cause- how to best implement and improve the field of animation in game development. The following questions are among those that will be addressed:

    Where is the line between aesthetics and gameplay? Who should be directing the animation in a game? Who owns each part of the animation pipeline after export? How can all disciplines work together better, to bring the best looking and feeling animation to their game? What are the expectations of animation? Of the player? What new technologies are available or coming online that can help animators excel at their jobs, and what challenges will those technologies bring? What is your best tip or trick that you think everyone needs to hear? What mistakes have you made that you think others can learn from? How can we all give and take feedback better, from all disciplines?

    In addition, this roundtable discussion focuses on helping newcomers by dedicating the last part of each session to them, encouraging questions to help them get started (or jump-started!) in their animation careers.

    • Pipeline
    • Visual Arts
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    AI Roundtable Day 3: Open Discussion
    i

    The AI Roundtables provides discussion-based sessions on Wednesday and Friday and a Q&A format session on Thursday. The Monday session starts with a discussion of machine learning versus regular game AI and then goes on to topics from the audience. The Thursday session is Q&A; bring questions and help answer questions and expect a larger number of topics to go by. The Friday session is completely driven by topics from the audience. The moderator helps to make sure that everyone gets a chance to speak and to keep the topics moving.

    • Machine Learning
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev


    Visual Effects Roundtable Day 3
    i

    The tools and techniques of Real Time VFX have changed dramatically over the past few years. There are now extraordinarily powerful desktop GPUs, rapidly advancing mobile GPUs, compute shaders, complex particle sims, mesh-based effect techniques, and advanced post-processing and compositing tools. The new consoles have matured and are showing what they're capable of, and VR/AR/XR continues to impact the industry. It's an incredible time in Real Time VFX.

    Join this roundtable to hear from other VFX artists, learn about their successes and failures, compare pie-in-the-sky ideas, and share your favorite tricks.

    The Technical Lens for creating VFX, guiding the conversation through such as graph based effect authoring, effect lighting and optimization, new mesh based techniques, VR/AR/XR, and more.

    • Programming
    • Visual Arts
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    Commercial Game Engines


    State of Unreal (Presented by Epic Games)
    i

    Join us for a first look at what's in store for the future of game development. Learn about the latest advancements in our tools, hear news from our partners, and find out how you can take even more advantage of Epic's ecosystem.

    • Special Event
    • Programming
    • QA
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    UEFN Roadmap (Presented by Epic Games)
    i

    Join us as we share the current state of Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) and discuss future development plans. This presentation will guide developers and studios through the latest capabilities they can leverage to engage the Fortnite audience. It will include tips on how to get started within the Fortnite Ecosystem, as well as discussing current limitations.

    • Programming
    • QA
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    Verse Update (Presented by Epic Games)
    i

    A look at the latest Verse features and what's coming soon to the language and framework.

    • Programming
    • QA
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    Using UEFN to Build New Genres (Presented by Epic Games)
    i

    Join us as we discuss building new genres in Fortnite by leveraging UEFN features to expand the Fortnite Ecosystem. Explore new and upcoming tools through sample projects and community highlights. Leave feeling inspired to build games that look and feel unique.

    • Programming
    • Design
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    Advanced UEFN Features (Presented by Epic Games)
    i

    A look inside the new advanced UEFN features workflows and Verse APIs, which dramatically expand the power users have to construct content in UEFN.

    • UX
    • Programming
    • Workflows
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    Unity Developer Summit: Unity 6 and Beyond: A Roadmap of Unity Engine and Services (Presented by Unity)
    i

    This is the can't-miss session of GDC 2024. Join Unity to discover the latest developments in the Unity Engine and how they're supported through additional tools and services to maximize your creative freedom and efficiency, while enabling you to produce gorgeous, immersive games that will wow players over and over.

    In just an hour, we show you how to achieve fantastic graphics fidelity and flexibility through rendering pipelines, shader/VFX Graph, and AI tools like Muse. In addition, with new tools like Multiplayer Center and Multiplayer Playmode, you get a head start on streamlining your multiplayer development. And of course we haven't forgotten that a lot of you work in teams, so learn about some great collaboration tools such as Unity Cloud (with Azure) and Muse project-aware chat. Finally, we know it's all about platform reach – so we have you covered there, too.

    • Pipeline
    • Programming
    • QA
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    Unity Developer Summit: Crafting Beautiful Natural Environments with Unity and SpeedTree (Presented by Unity)
    i

    Have you seen The oasis, our photorealistic URP sample? Go behind the scenes with the experts that crafted it and learn new ways to create eye-catching environments, ranging from vegetation to sky. This session walks you through how the shaders were made, how to create a beautiful sky, and how to build a Sago Palm including procedural structure and leaf canopy clusters.

    • Visual Arts
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    Unity Developer Summit: 20 Productivity Hacks to Make You a Unity Ace (Presented by Unity)
    i

    Ready to up your productivity and make you and your team run as an efficient, well-oiled game-creation machine? Then this session is for you. It's packed with at least 20 hacks, tips, and tricks to get the most out of the Unity Editor and Runtime. You learn how to use Frame Debugger, profilers, and device simulators as well as how to set up custom hotkeys, advanced search and query building in-Editor, splines, object pooling, Muse Chat, material variants, and more. Don't miss this – you may find that gem of a trick to accelerate your workflows more than you could have imagined.

    • Career Development
    • UX
    • Workflows
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    Unity Developer Summit: Unity Muse: Accelerating Prototyping in the Unity Editor with AI (Presented by Unity)
    i

    In this session, learn how Unity Muse – a collection of AI-powered capabilities – helps make creating in the Unity Editor faster, less complex, and more flexible. With natural-language prompts, you can chat to produce usable code, troubleshoot issues, and enhance your scenes with generative art, textures, animations, and much more. Get ready to enhance your current workflows and speed prototyping with Unity Muse directly in the Unity Editor.

    • UX
    • Design
    • Workflows
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    Unity Developer Summit: Bring Order to DAM Content Chaos with Unity Cloud (Presented by Unity)
    i

    Its expensive to create and challenging to transform 3D content across multiple pipelines and applications. Just finding and using the right content can be a huge source of lost time and broken workflows. In this session, we discuss the unique challenges of 3D digital asset management (DAM) and how the new Unity Asset Manager can help organize your content across the studio and get great-looking games to market faster.

    • UX
    • Programming
    • QA
    • Workflows
    • Pipeline
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe
    • Pipeline Dev

    Design

    Level Design Summit: Urban Planning in Games
    i

    This session goes through all the basic steps of city creation. It explains why urban planning is important for game environments and how it can be useful for creating readable and distinguished urban space. The talk also helps to understand how to transfer from a real city to a game city, whether this is a realistic city or a fictional one. Everything that is said in this talk works both for big open world cities in AAA projects and smaller non-open world cities with linear gameplay.

    • Level Design Summit
    • Pipeline
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    Level Design Summit: Building Before 'Blockout': Better Communicating Your Design Before Placing Blocks
    i

    This session will cover techniques that designers can use to improve how they communicate their designs.

    The session will begin with a brief introduction to the speaker, a few situations a designer might find themselves in, and a touch on how all design, including level design, is the ability to communicate ideas to an audience.

    We'll then dive into a short description of how the speaker has developed their own personal list of materials they use to better communicate their ideas.

    Each material will be presented with a problem space to solve, the visuals and/or text that a designer can utilize to solve it, and applications of said visuals or text.

    Once all materials are covered, an example level will be shown that was built using the techniques shared.

    The speaker will close the session with questions.

    • Level Design Summit
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    Level Design Summit: Hyper-Modular Structures: Sins of a Level Designer
    i

    The shortcomings and challenges of modular workflow for large-scale map production are often overlooked in favor of its alluring ease of execution and in-built optimization. This session aims to highlight the difficulties of adopting a modular workflow for relatively smaller and inexperienced teams and demystify some of the unrealistic expectations that come with it.

    Investing a significant amount of time into engine tooling, runtime optimizations, and project maintenance utilities, the returns aren't always justifiable for the resources put into it.

    • Level Design Summit
    • UX
    • Programming
    • Workflows
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    Prototyping Games in Figma: Leveraging Variables and Expressions
    i

    In this talk, I will present a tech demo that pushes the limit of Figma's new features, including variables, logic, and formulas. With Figma's new features, we will essentially be using Figma like a more powerful Twine. Prototypes can be easily strung together into a series of mockups that animate, follow logic, and imitate real-time interactions. This is especially useful for artists who want to design games, since the software is a lot like Photoshop or Illustrator.

    • Programming
    • Design
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool UX/UI Designe

    Production & Leadership

    Cinematic Workflow and Pipeline of 'FINAL FANTASY XVI'
    i

    Good workflow and pipeline are essential in the development of AAA titles. This session explains the steps to design the workflow and pipeline for FINAL FANTASY XVI.

    Eitaro Iwabuchi, Lead Technical Artist at Square Enix Co., Ltd., details the method of transferring data from MotionBuilder to Maya and the tools utilized to support their workflow. The workflow is designed with a combination of tools that have been used internally for other projects and tools that were developed from scratch exclusively for this project.

    Other specialized tools used for the making of cut scenes, systems for voice placement, and tools for cameras creation will be covered—and concludes with the data flow and their progress management method with a customized ShotGrid API.

    • UX
    • Programming
    • Workflows
    • Pipeline
    • Production & Team Leadership
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Pipeline Dev
    • Build Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer


    The Pillars of Hell: Achieving the Artistic Vision of 'Diablo IV'
    i

    This talk is dedicated to giving an inside look into the Art Direction of Diablo IV and how the Diablo art team developed a shared vision for one of the biggest games of 2023. This talk features John Mueller, Art Director for Diablo IV. He shares 5 processes utilized by the team to engage and grow a shared vision for one of gaming's biggest franchises.

    • Visual Arts
    • Production & Team Leadership
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer
    • Tool UX/UI Designe


    Leaders Working at the Heart of the Team 2024
    i

    Join four industry leaders as we explore leadership in four quick 10 minute microtalks. This years talks will cover: Studio Culture, The Artist-Art Director-Creative Director Pipeline, Leading with Empathy: Finding the Balance Between Being Human and a Leader, and Cross Discipline Equality: How to Generate Innovative Ideas and Solutions.

    • Pipeline
    • Production & Team Leadership
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer


    Building the 'Minecraft' Creator Platform Block-by-Block
    i

    Minecraft has a long history of user-generated content and has formally supported Add-Ons on the Bedrock product since 2015 which enabled the Minecraft Marketplace to launch. With over $500 million in gross revenue and more than 1.7 billion downloads since 2015, hundreds of professional creators have built a career making content that engages our player-base. This session explores the platform's journey since 2020, discussing the development of its formal Creator API, tooling solutions, new gameplay features, and how we've evolved community engagement. We'll chart the creator's evolution from player to hobbyist to professional and discuss how Mojang Studios is supporting creators' evolving needs.

    • Production & Team Leadership
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Tool Lead/Engineering Producer
    • Tool UX/UI Designe



    Not Just a Task Tracker Roundtable: Resolving Conflict and Increasing Team Productivity as a Producer (Presented by the IGDA)
    i

    As a game producer, you wear many hats, and one of the most critical roles is that of a mediator and motivator. Conflict resolution and fostering team productivity are crucial aspects of game production that often go hand-in-hand. In this roundtable, we explore strategies, tools, and best practices for producers to navigate conflicts, boost team morale, and enhance overall productivity, drawing from the collective wisdom and experiences of game producers in the industry.

    • Advocacy
    • Programming
    • DCC Tool Dev
    • Dev Support/Integration Engineer
    • Tool UX/UI Designer


    Real-Time Content Creation with Path Tracing Visuals in UE5 (Presented by NVIDIA)
    i

    The session presents RTX features and how they impact content creation in UE5. We will cover technical aspects of real-time path-traced direct lighting and how it is leveraged with Lumen enhancements and optimizations to obtain fully dynamic scenes.

    • UX
    • Visual Arts
    • Workflows


    Next-Gen Tech Forum: Own Your Creative Power: AI Workflows that Accelerate Production & Respect Artists' Process (Presented by Invoke)
    i

    This session will explore the impact of integrating AI image generation into existing creative workflows for game development. We will demonstrate how AI image generation technology can be securely incorporated into production pipelines, while providing artists and designers the same level of creative freedom and control that they are accustomed to. We will showcase practical examples from creative teams who are leveraging their own proprietary content and intellectual property.

    Additionally, we will address critical ethical and legal issues such as the use of copyrighted material, the automation of creative tasks, and implications for job security within the industry. This session aims to offer a balanced perspective, demonstrating how AI can be a powerful tool in the creative process while acknowledging and addressing the challenges it presents.

    • Special Event
    • UX
    • Programming
    • QA
    • Procedural
    • Workflows
    • Pipeline

    Next-Gen Tech Forum: Reimagine the Future of Gaming with Google AI (Presented by Google)
    i

    Join us for a keynote from Google's leading AI minds as they delve into the transformative applications of Generative AI in the gaming landscape. This session brings together senior executives from Google Cloud, Google Play, and Labs, offering unique perspectives from across the gaming ecosystem, development and business management lifecycle.

    This 1 hour session includes:
    - A Fireside Chat with Google's Cloud, Play, and Labs AI experts
    - Open Source AI development tool overview for games including Keras, TensorFlow, JAX, and more
    - Introduction of Google Cloud Gen AI services supporting scalable architecture and quick-to-deploy design patterns for games

    • Programming


    Google Developer Summit: Building Multiplatform Games with Flutter (Presented by Google)
    i

    Today, Flutter is used in more than 1M apps from small studios to large companies like Lotem and PUBG who are building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase. Casual games have become a big part of the Flutter ecosystem with the Casual Games Toolkit, a collection of free and open source tools, templates, and resources to make game dev more productive with Flutter.

    • Programming


    Build the Next Break Out Game with Helix Core Cloud' – Turnkey Version Control for Teams Under 50 (Presented by Perforce)
    i

    Whether you're an indie team of three or a mid-sized studio, building a game today means dealing with expanding dimensions of scale, such as large file sizes and number of assets.

    Scalable version control is a necessity for efficient development and global collaboration, but it can be hard for small teams to get up and running. That's why Perforce launched Helix Core Cloud — a Perforce-managed and hosted offering of their industry-leading version control platform, Helix Core.

    In this talk, Perforce CTO Brad Hart will introduce Helix Core Cloud and provide a primer on what scalable version control means within the context of digital creation efficiency and the changing landscape of game development.

    • Programming


    Using AI To Bring Your Game Characters To Life (Presented by NVIDIA)
    i

    NVIDIA has created AI models which are ideal for the implementation of Smart NPCs in games. In this session we'll present NVIDIA's Audio To Face technology, which uses AI to generate facial animation based on speech input as audio – especially useful in real-time for games where dialogue and speech are synthesized, not pre-canned. We'll explain how anyone developing smart NPC tools or experiences in Unity can integrate A2F in their own projects via new plugins.

    • Programming


    Advances in Ray Tracing Developer Tools (Presented by NVIDIA)
    i

    As Ray Tracing continues to propel photorealistic rendering to new heights, the tools that drive this development have become more complex and powerful. In this session, we'll look at the improvements that have been made over the past year to tools like Nsight Graphics and Nsight Aftermath that help streamline your workflow and deliver breathtaking experiences to gamers worldwide. For the first time you'll see the brand new Ray Tracing Shader Debugger in action. There will also be a real world example of how the Shader Profiler has helped to profile and optimize complex ray tracing shaders by the NVIDIA DevTech pros.

    • UX
    • Programming
    • Workflows


    The AI Revolution: An Expert-led Discussion on Generative AI's Potential in Gaming (Presented by EPAM)
    i

    Want to discover how AI technology is revolutionizing the gaming industry? AI's impact extends beyond immersive gameplay and lifelike characters; it enhances personalization, optimizes game development and provides secure gaming experiences.
    Hear from executive leaders in the gaming space about the impact of generative AI in key areas such as game production, productivity and content. This panel offers a deep dive into how Gen AI is reshaping game development, enhancing creative processes and revolutionizing player experiences.
    This conversation is a must-attend for developers, designers and strategists eager to stay at the forefront of gaming innovation. Embrace the chance to learn, question and connect with the pioneers at the helm of the gaming revolution.

    • Business & Marketing


    Game Optimization With The Radeon™ Developer Tool Suite, and Shader Instrumentation With GPU Reshape (Presented by AMD)
    i

    In this two-part session, we will first present the latest enhancements in the Radeon Developer Tool Suite, a rich set of GPU profilers and analyzers and a recently-added GPU crash analysis tool. We will show how developers can use the tools to optimize game performance and get insights into how games are running on AMD Radeon GPUs. We will also present a completely redesigned Radeon Developer Panel and show how it can be used to quickly obtain the data to feed into the other tools in the suite.
    Next, Miguel (Striking Distance Studios) will present GPU Reshape, a just-in-time instrumentation framework with instruction level validation of shader operations. We discuss the challenges with instrumenting across multiple intermediate representations, and how a unified model was achieved through a custom intermediate language featuring seamless bi-directional translation. We'll take a deep dive into current validation methodologies and what the future of instrumentation may look like.

    • Programming
    • QA


    Branch Smarter to Build Award Winning Games with Perforce Helix Core (Presented By Perforce)
    i

    Building an award-winning game is complicated; your branching strategy shouldn't be. With projects spanning thousands-to-millions of files, limitations of your versioning system should not dictate how you set up your branches or make you think twice about implementing methodologies such as 'branch per bug.' Perforce Streams helps teams keep things simple, allowing you to design and automate development and release processes in Helix Core. In a recent survey, 73% of organizations agreed that Helix Core is best-in-class for visualizing your development workflow and preventing common issues like merge conflicts or broken builds. Streams easily organizes changes throughout your project's lifecycle, guiding teams through branching and merging with no external tools or scripts required.  In this talk, we'll introduce a new way to achieve lightweight branching via Sparse Streams. This latest feature in Helix Core will enable your team to branch smarter to build better games, significantly reducing the amount of metadata produced. With benefits like increased developer velocity and lower data storage requirements, Sparse Streams solves the need for lightweight branching for both development and release scenarios. Join Director of Product Management, Brent Schiestl and Senior Software Engineer, David Lewak as they demonstrate how lightweight branching can: -Save your team time and resources. -Significantly reduce the amount of data stored per branch. -Quickly add new branches without paying the metadata population cost.

    • QA
    • UX
    • Programming
    • Workflows


    QA Bots for Everyone (Presented by modl.ai)
    i

    Traditionally, Quality Assurance (QA) in the gaming industry hasn't had access to sufficient tools and technology. In this presentation, Christoffer Holmgåd will discuss some of the most pressing automation needs identified by QA teams. He will also share two case studies of how Rogue Snail and Die Gute Fabrik used AI to automate game playing for an action game and a narrative game, respectively. The presentation will dive into common QA challenges that automation can address and the implementation of game-playing AI bots. Additionally, it will explore the resulting impact on the game development process.

    • Production & Team Leadership
    • Programming
    • QA


    Check out the other guides from previous years:

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  • 17 Mar 2023 » Toolsmiths GDC 2023 Guide

    • At GDC 2023, you’ll find yourself searching in a vast ocean of over 700 sessions, tutorials, and events. While 386 of these contain the coveted keyword “tool,” (or other variants), sorting through them all to pinpoint the ones that cater to your needs can be quite a daunting task. On this page, you will find a compiled and curated list of sessions that will serve as your ultimate Tools dev guide to navigating the waters of GDC 2023. Whether you’re attending in person or planning to watch the latest session on the GDC Vault, this list will ensure that you make the most out of your GDC 2023 experience.

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  • 18 Mar 2022 » Toolsmiths GDC 2022 Guide

    • There are around 600+ sessions/tutorials/events at GDC 2022, finding the sessions that a tools developer would be interested in takes time. Below you will find a list of sessions that can be used as a guide for your tools developer GDC 2022 experience, whether you plan on attending or you will be viewing after the fact.

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  • 24 May 2021 » GameDev Tools Weekly - Issue 15 — May 24th, 2021

    • GameDev Tools weekly made by Victor Stepanov



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  • 17 May 2021 » GameDev Tools Weekly - Issue 14 — May 17th, 2021

    • GameDev Tools weekly made by Victor Stepanov



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  • 10 May 2021 » GameDev Tools Weekly - Issue 13 — May 10th, 2021

    • GameDev Tools weekly made by Victor Stepanov



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  • 03 May 2021 » GameDev Tools Weekly - Issue 12 — April 3rd, 2021

    • GameDev Tools weekly made by Victor Stepanov



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  • 26 Apr 2021 » GameDev Tools Weekly - Issue 11 — April 26th, 2021

    • GameDev Tools weekly made by Alexander Pirogov and Victor Stepanov.

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