Start off the day in best way possible: eat breakfast to the tunes of jazz vibraphonists Mattias Ståhl.

One of Sweden's greatest jazz vibraphonists Mattias Ståhl usually plays in his own Ståhl's trio. In the past in a duo with the late jazz legend Georg Riedel. Often together with the saxophonist Per Texas Johansson or the artist Loney Dear. He has toured the world but stays mostly in Scandinavia these days.

The 2024 edition of For Devs is starting! 

Sweet Baby Inc. is a narrative development company, tackling everything from scriptwriting and narrative design to creative direction and casting support. But if you've heard of them recently, it's likely because of the ongoing hate campaign focused on SBI's commitment to diverse perspectives and their work in cultural consulting. But what does it really mean to try to support diversity and inclusive storytelling, and how do we practically apply it to game and narrative development-- without falling into the trap of tropes, checklists or boring tokenism? And how does a team weather a storm of online trolls and misinformation while pushing ahead with both their work and values intact? Listen to Sweet Baby Inc. CEO Kim Belair talk about her experiences and methodologies, and get deeper insight into the world of both narrative and authenticity in a conversation with long-time collaborator Bernice Chauly, Senior Writer & Cultural Advisor at Avalanche Studio Group.

Leveraging Unity's latest tech stack, we brought Demeo, an immersive tabletop role-playing game from Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Flatscreen to the Apple Vision Pro Spatial Computing while maintaining cross-platform support and all the characteristics that define Demeo as a social game. What is PolySpatial? What tools to use? The considerations to have between bringing an existing project to Apple Vision Pro versus starting a new one.

Many developers often ask "How does one become a creative director?". While that question has countless answers, in this intimate fireside chat Harry Krueger will share thoughts from his own 15-journey in the industry: how he grew from being a Gameplay Programmer in smaller games, to directing the critically acclaimed AAA title Returnal, and how these learnings have paved the way for his future endeavors. The discussion will cover many key topics such as the nature of leadership, finding and championing one's own creative voice, identifying and seizing opportunities, and all the learnings and challenges one must endure on their path to achieving their creative goals.

In this session, we speak to the developers behind Content Warning, the game where you film your friends doing scary things to become SpöökTube famous. Content Warning became a topic of discussion when it was released for free on April 1st this year leading to 6.7M steam owners and 1M sales in the first two weeks. In this panel, we sit down with the project's developers to learn more about how they ended up here.

Dive deep into the world of creating a new game based on the original one with a case study of a level from the world-famous game "Silent Hill 2 Remake". Whether you are a game developer yourself, want to be one, or simply work with these people in your daily work, this talk will introduce you to our approach of working with such a title and provide key information on important elements for the Remake. Join me on the journey through the mystery of the remake to learn from people who worked on one of the most anticipated games of the year.

Calling all visionary game developers! Are you ready to harness your creativity and the unparalleled engagement power of games to shape a better world? Join us for the Playing for Peace Idea Incubator, where we'll collaborate to design innovative strategies that use gaming to fund and promote young people to build peace across the world.

In this dynamic session hosted by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation and the United Nations Global Compact, you'll have the chance to:

• Collaborate with a diverse community of forward-thinking developers and peace advocates.
• Explore how game narratives, character journeys, and in-game mechanics can promote values of peace, empathy, and conflict resolution.
• Be part of groundbreaking ideas that merge your passion for gaming with real-world impact, creating opportunities for global good.
• Walk away with concrete, actionable steps, and potential partnerships to turn your creative visions into reality.

Join us for the Playing for Peace Idea Incubator, where we'll kick off a collaboration to design innovative strategies that use gaming to fund and promote young people to build peace across the world.

Read more about Investing and Partnering with Youth for Peace (IPYP) here >

This is an exploration of Peter's 30+ year career in the gaming industry, from producing his own games on the Atari home computer and founding a game studio with friends in Norrköping in the 90s, to his current role leading the Xbox Game Camp program, which empowers underrepresented groups worldwide to pursue careers in gaming.

It started as a solution to a huge 3D printer not being delivered assembled. And turned into a prototyping space for Mocap and Photogrammetry, part of an interface between the games and the real world. A day can be anything from altering a mocap suit to modeling a custom rig for holding the polarizing filters on a camera. Or manufacturing a full-size exosuit. Or making muppet versions of the founders for the Christmas party. Or… pretty much anything you can think of. Nils Lind, Senior Set Up Technician at Sharkmob talks about his odd but happy little workshop.

How does one build a nice environment in a community for gamers and how is it to be the person between the community and developers? How does one handle toxicity and different age groups between gamers and how to keep a good work-life balance?

In this cozy talk, Hanna Fogelberg (Landfall), Anna Erlandsson (The Gang) and Jeremy Fielding (Stunlock Studios) share their experience about being a community manager and how to balance being the friendly voice with saying no.

This is a look at how best to integrate your composer(s) into your team and demystify their role and everyday work for all to see. What benefits could come from welcoming your composer as a natural part of your pipeline and team milestones? We will examine the ins and outs of the music we made for League of Legends, Aragami 2, and Metal: Hellsinger, from how it was made to steps that were taken for a more seamless integration. 

This session is for those who are curious about the behind-the-scenes of game music, who would like inspiration on interactive music and some technical know-how for their own game, and those who would like to see improvements in communication between the island that can be the composer and the rest of game development departments.

This session is divided into three parts and focuses on the games industry's impact on climate change and how companies can reduce their carbon footprint. 

We will introduce a new tool that helps studios easily calculate their emissions. We’ll also listen to voices from studios with experiences in implementing greener policies, offering practical advice and inspiration for others to start making sustainable changes. 

Join us to learn how the industry can work towards a more sustainable future!

Play, Create, Calculate – the Why and How of tracking and reducing your climate impact

Sustainability consultants from U&We present the newly released toolbox for calculating and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from game development, as part of the Vinnova funded project, Sustainability in new digital industries (Susindi). They will talk about why tracking your carbon footprint is important, and how you can do it with different levels of ambition and resources. Understanding the emissions of your own organization and in the value chain leads to the next part: identifying actionable steps to reduce your carbon footprint.

But, what can you do then?

A studio's journey of taking small steps for a more climate friendly business - because small are better than none.

Reducing the environmental footprints in games 

Game making, like many other things, is not always black or white. Most decisions we make affect different elements of the game and the team. 

Join a Game Designer and a Software Engineer from DICE to learn how we measure things, not in black or white – but not looking in multiple dimensions. This impacts how we set up goals and what “success” looks like from different perspectives.

We want to raise the conversation for people to look at decision making in any creative field as multi-faceted and hopefully take that back to their own teams to drive more interesting discussion about what success looks like to their teams.

Would you like to know how the Space Force One crash site location was created, what challenges the environment artists encountered, and how they managed to blend awesome gameplay, an interesting story, and memorable art? This talk is a breakdown of the artists’ work on one of the most memorable locations in Phantom Liberty. It will highlight the main stages of their work, explain what the main goals and challenges were, and show some behind-the-scenes insight into production at CD PROJEKT RED.

This session explores the complex art of level design in match-3games, focusing on Farm Heroes Saga. What's the secret behind keeping players engaged after thousands of levels? How do you navigate the possibilities and create an enjoyable experience? and why is it important to understand the pivotal role progression and flow play in match-3 games? Hear more about the key principles behind one the worlds biggest mobile games.

Player choice can captivate players and transform their game experiences, giving them the power to influence virtual worlds and shape immersive stories. However, a high level of player choice does not necessarily equal a compelling narrative experience.

Every studio, game, and even developer takes a different approach to building a memorable narrative experience. To discuss this labyrinth subject, Liquid Swords has gathered some of the game industry’s top experts to share their experiences and approaches to player choice in game narrative.

Moderator: 

Lawrence Narrative Lead at Liquid Swords

Panelists: 
Ian Thomas, Narrative Director at The Chinese Room 

Ash McAllan, Game Director of Live Ops for Generation Zero at Avalanche Studios Group 

Johnnemann Nordhagen, Senior Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy

Kim Belair, CEO at Sweet Baby Inc.

Developing THE FINALS not only included building a destruction system in Unreal Engine that can cover everything from small props to large buildings, we also needed it to look good.

We use various approaches to create debris, broken surfaces, soot and smoke to create visual interest and persistent changes in our environments.

Here we look at some of the challenges we encountered and solutions we implemented, what worked well, and what we learned from things that didn't.

Home Sports is an upcoming multiplayer game that can be played only in mixed reality. Hear from Clarisse Blondy and Linnéa Granlund—the game’s producer and the game's tech lead —as they share their extensive experience leading this game from inception to launch. Learn about the game’s design and technical decisions, plus how it utilized features such as boundaryless, multimodal, colocation, shared anchors and avatars to create a super accessible pickup and play party game for everyone.

This session is all about mentorship. Listen to mentors and mentees share how mentorship has enriched their career experiences and led to personal growth. The panel consists of mentors and mentees from the King & Swedish Game Industry Scholarship, Valeria Matos and Astrid Vahlström, and Paula Ingvar, who is ambassador for the scholarship, as well as from Jenny Brusk, founder of DONNA and one of the organisers of the CEO mentorship program All In.

From the Caribbean to the Wastelands, Christofer Sundberg has seen it all. Blowing up expensive stuff, open world exploration, beating big bosses – in business as in game design. Just Cause, Mad Max, Hunter: Call of the Wild, Rage 2… you have played the games. Now meet the man behind them in a fireside with Per Strömbäck.

Join us for an interactive session where we invite game developers to come together to brainstorm and share ideas on how to use games as a powerful medium to contribute to environmental sustainability. This session is an opportunity for creators to discuss innovative ways to integrate themes of climate awareness and ecological responsibility into their crafts.

We are most importantly game developers and players. As developers, we always want to improve the player experience. But how can we work towards a model where your discipline is the area of craft expertise but not the only reason you are in the room?

This session highlights how we can leverage all of our expertise and life experience to work together more seamlessly to get better results.

Led by the Studio Head of Creative at DICE, the idea behind this model of working has grown out of long-time experience in audio, but also from working in depth with almost every other discipline.

This multiple award-winning singleplayer horror game has an innovative game style that contrasts light and shadow, features musical surprises and gameplay that transcends dimensions. Welcome to this panel where members of the development team will deep dive into the collaboration between Audio, Lighting and VFX of Alan Wake 2.

Games give us a unique capacity to feel, reason, evoke emotional responses or form relationships. Which is the very definition of humanity — How do we give this back to our developers?

How do we make games while still honoring humanity in the process?

Challenging the status quo of how we make games is key. Making games is hard, and we have defaulted to a mindset where making them no matter the emotional or physical cost is the norm.

For an industry who's products have brought so much joy to so many people, we need to consider how to give it back to our developers, and with that, make games with humanity.

Some last words before we head over to the dinner and party!

Get a sneak peek of the upcoming yearly report on the Swedish Games Industry.

The official after-party

When the conference ends, Night of the devs begins. Not only will the whole conference be there, but we are inviting the rest of the game industry to have a good time with you. 

🍹 Meet your peers over a drink and just enjoy yourself! 

🎵 Music by Club Killers, Fjortisper, Curt Lundberg and more.