PROGRAM

Role models like Lara Croft from Tombraider and Aloy from Horizon are few and sparse in the gaming industry. Looking at the 100 top-selling and major games released since 2017, nearly 80% of main characters are males, while nearly 55% are white. Let that sink in. Is this really representative of the players or the world we live in? If you want to work towards better representation of characters, unlocking creative and innovative stories without the cultural appropriation, and improved representation of employees, then this talk is for you. Lasting and meaningful change is a journey. Let's do this together by combining our efforts, one stone at a time. We can transform the gaming industry into a more diverse and inclusive landscape.

The internet is full of neat little tips on how to get organized, make the best to-do list, and how to timebox your day in order to boost efficiency and maximize your productivity. What most of those articles do not mention however is that the environment in which you perform is more important than how you are set up inside that environment. No matter how organized your calendar, inbox, and Teams are, there is no way to get productive unless the environment allows you to be. In this talk, Jim Hendriks will talk about Systemic Productivity, what productivity actually looks like, why it’s the manager’s / producer's job to make the environment productive, and how this can be achieved.

Whether you're just starting out or a well established studio, the right company culture is key to ensuring a productive, exciting and memorable employee experience. With a positive CC ranking higher and higher in importance on retaining and attracting talent, it's important to build a strong foundation when it comes to your own culture. But where do you start? We'll talk about the small but mighty areas you can focus on to create the right culture, when it can play negatively when it comes to hiring, and when culture can play a role in disengaged teams.

As the Head of the department responsible for evaluating all games that are being considered for publishing at MY.GAMES, Nic and his team have gathered a short list of the main reasons why games don’t get picked up. Exclusively at Indigo he will share the most impactful reasons and how to make sure your next pitch does get picked up by the publisher of your dreams!

Highlighting the trends, evolution, and opportunities in the gaming and entertainment industry in Japan, as well as the challenges and strategies for foreign companies looking to tap into the market.

Arjan, who is Product Director on Unreal Engine's development team at Epic Games, will go over the headlines for what's upcoming for Unreal Engine development in 2023 and beyond, and will touch on the new UEFN product and opportunities it brings for Dutch developers.

Head Crabs and Xenomorphs and Creepers, oh my! Creatures combine real world animals and fantastic ideas. While some creatures are just forgettable cannon fodder to the player, others are key pillars to the appeal and success of an IP. Using examples from media and her career, Molly Heady-Carroll will take you through her methods of designing memorable creatures designed for purpose and how they can maximize the potential of your IP.

In this fire side chat, we delve into the incredible journey of Engine Software, a ~25-year-old video game development studio that started as a 90's indie legend and rose to global triumph. In this captivating conversation with Engine Software CEO Ivo Wubbels, we'll explore Engine’s road to success and how they overcame various pitfalls and challenges as a studio.

Hate it or love it, NFT's and crypto are not going away any time soon. Part of the criticism is the hyped culture and scams. But what if you could play a part in forming this industry and change it into a sustainable way of interacting with digital property? With FGL we set our first steps into web3 2 years ago and we’d like to share with you want we’ve learned.

How do you decide as a studio which game ideas to develop into full games? When is a game ready to ship? In this talk, Eline Muijres shares the lessons learned from developing Howl, a turn-based tactical folktale. You’ll learn about Mipumi’s internal greenlight process for original IP development, as well as turning an original concept into a polished game. Eline highlights how the team dealt with the challenges of balancing game development and building an IP, all the while staying motivated with an unhealthy dose of wolf puns.

3D live-action graphics by way of ghostly volumetric video capture. We filmed our actors performing in a circular setup, surrounded by cameras to capture their every movement from every direction. These characters are then viewable from multiple perspectives as you play. Volumetric video capture plus exquisite performances help tell a visceral & haunting story.

Knife violence amongst teens is a growing issue in the Netherlands. ReAction was developed together with the youth care organization MEE & de Wering, to make youth aware of the risks and dangers of carrying a knife. We will talk about some interesting game design challenges in creating a believable experience. We will explain how we connected the game to deeper issues related to status, bullying, peer pressure and social media. We will also tell more about what it means to work with teens to co-create storyline, voiceovers and motion capture. ReAction was featured in the Telegraaf and in the Jeugdjournaal and is now being used at primary and secondary schools and youth centers across the Netherlands.

Grendel Games biggest adventure in Serious Games was their keyhole surgery training game Underground, which was scientifically proven to transfer the technical skills of laparoscopic surgery in a fun way. As we revisit surgical training with our latest project, we’ve been looking at the perception gap in our customer base and how we can show them that “Gaming is Training”. To do this we’ve been exploring the scientific evidence that looks at the benefits of gaming across a wide range of cognitive, developmental, perception changes and technical skills challenges. So come and join us as we look at how gaming and game play shape human development and learning from birth to death.

Stories have the power to move us like nothing else and I will take you on a journey into the heart of storytelling in video games. With a deep love for stories, I'll explore why we tell stories and how they impact us in ways we never thought possible. Drawing on my own experience of creating emotionally engaging games, I'll share tips, tricks, and rules for crafting unforgettable stories that will touch players' hearts and leave them yearning for more. From finding inspiration to creating satisfying endings, this talk is a love letter to the art of storytelling in all its forms. No matter if you are an experienced storyteller, an amateur writer, a marketer or a studio head, as long as you see the value of telling good stories this talk is for you!

HackShield was released 5 years ago! How did we design a game for kids that is free to play and provides educational value? In this talk Gwen Kampen will share the thoughts and philosophy behind the (re) design of HackShield and how the whole team had to innovate in order to not just build a game, but a movement.

Joost will discuss how the game industry can be understood as imagination infrastructure, how it can help societies imagine better futures and live through what it means to try to achieve them. He will discuss a concrete example that he and his team are building – the game All Rise, a Phoenix Wright-meets-Citizen-Sleeper style of game that lets you take major fossil fuel corporations to court. Using this example, Joost will talk about how to connect games explicitly to activist movements and radical change.

Midgame Fund is a collective of Dutch game developers funding Dutch games for €10k – €150k. In this informal lunch session, organiser and game designer Adriaan will explain how the fund and its agreement work, share some tips and examples of pitch decks, and will answer any questions you may have.

Preach what you Practice. Introducing game studio NeoN Origins - Powered by Mediacollege Amsterdam, where we’re running a hybrid game studio with a 20-man team composed of game development students, educators and professionals. With a co-creation approach that emphasizes mentorship and apprenticeship over traditional classroom teaching, students gain hands-on experience and intrinsic motivation, while building an awesome game-service with us. Join our talk to see how we transform students to reliable young development professionals in the span of one year. Expect: talent & personal development, game education inspiration, and a new way to approach game development.

The science centre GeoFort build the whole of the Netherlands in Minecraft: 1.000 buillion Minecraft blocks! Every house, all the roads, the rivers and even the trees are in this digital 3D world. This is not a silly game: it is a serious game! In this environment young people can easily participate in designing new sustainable buildings or landscapes. In the nearby future they will also be able to experience flooding scenarios in this digital twin of the Netherlands. GeoFort is a science centre where children from 4 till 104 years can explore many themes dealing with the future of our planet by playing games. GeoFort turns the theme 'planetary health' into a challenging game...

For the last 15 years, Kejero has been on a mission to improve adaptive music techniques. Forget about fading stems and switching tracks on the beat. With his 'Better Adaptive Music' approach, the instruments adjust their playing style in realtime, and they start and stop playing in a natural way, as if everything is performed live. In this talk, Kejero shows how a truly seemless adaptive soundtrack can utterly elevate the gaming experience to a new level. And how to break down an incredibly ambitious idea and achieve a AAA result on an indie budget.

In today's digital landscape, trusting online content has become a growing challenge for companies. With the current AI boom, there's a wave of disinformation ready to hit the internet during the coming elections. Hugo will share helpful tips and solutions for content owners. Discover how to protect your content and stay one step ahead by monitoring and proactively identifying and addressing instances of content misuse.

In this talk, Käy Vriend will discuss how procedural substance tools, specifically the Substance suite, can speed up the art production process. The Substance suite includes Substance Sampler, Substance Painter, and Substance Designer, which can be used to create seamless scan-like materials, smart materials that conform to any mesh, and tools that save time on modeling or sculpting. Käy will showcase some of the possibilities that studios currently have with the Substance suite and explore how AI can be integrated to further streamline workflows and enhance procedural tools.

You run an indie studio, great! You are dealing with money issues, deadlines, production delays, demanding publishers, getting the team aligned on the studio’s vision. How do you cope with all that? By being an efficient manager, dealing with problems head-on and don’t build any management debt. We are here to share lessons from our own management journeys and provide you with the four essentials you need to do to get ahead of the game.

Laurens Rutten founded CoolGames in 2010 in the Dutch Game Garden in Utrecht. CoolGames is now a profitable studio with almost 50 game professionals operating from the Herengracht in Amsterdam. In his session, Laurens will talk about how raising venture capital can help grow your company from an ambitious but immature start-up doing mini-games for the web, to an internationally active scale-up with big game development budgets. He will address the benefits of bringing professional investors on board, without disregarding the downsides of giving up some control as a result. In particular Laurens will talk about many of the potential pitfalls when your growth is also externally financed. To prevent you from making the same mistakes that he did.