Programming and Tech

Technical development and design go hand in hand. This talk goes into detail about how to work with UE4’s default systems to create technology that enables scalable content development in a way that will keep your design team happy.

Unreal Engine is a vastly powerful tool that can be used to make incredible high-fidelity games. However, the engine has some fundamental workflow challenges. Binary assets, merge conflicts and refactor debt plague advanced development projects.

At RocketWerkz we've developed a system similar to the Gameplay Ability System that has alleviated many of these issues. Using datatables, run-time generated components, JSON and more we’ve prepared for huge amounts of content while still playing nice with our backend.

As well showing how the tech works to solve collaboration problems, we’ll show examples of how great design workflow leads to happier developers and why it's the tech team’s job to empower creative decisions.

Talk: Programming: The First Few Years

Speaker: Liam de Valmency

Getting a job as a programmer in the games industry for the first time can be overwhelming, especially if you haven’t worked on a larger team before.

This talk focuses on how to adjust and make the most of your early days in the industry; things to focus on, how to continue to grow, and why writing code is just a small part of working as a games programmer.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Technical Direction for One

Speaker: Alex Holkner

Regardless of whether you’re the sole developer on an indie game, leading a small group of programmers, or the technical director overseeing multiple engineering departments, you will face the

same problems and decision points in the choice and use of technology on your projects.

By the time your game has shipped, you will have made hundreds of decisions around coding standards and best practices, use of testing and automation, continuous integration and deployment, release processes, client and server technology, and middleware selections. As the technical expert on the project you will likely have also had to make decisions around IT issues such as version control, backups, hardware and software purchases, and security.

Besides developing a game, you will find yourself building bespoke tools for engineers, designers, artists, producers, QA and customer support, and processes to go along with them.

If you’re a solo developer or head of a small team, ideally your decisions are setting up your studio for growth and sustainability; whereas if you’re already leading a large team you are already well aware of the difficulty in maintaining high productivity with so many hands on deck.

Drawing on his experience leading both large and small teams, Alex will explore these issues and provide guiding principles for technical directors at all levels of experience, with a particular focus on risk assessment and mitigation, and setting up processes and practices up-front that can scale as a team grows.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Buildbots and Testbots are an innovative set of tools engineered by Mighty to help developers go from build to test using ‘zero touch’ tech and automation. Technical Director, Ben Britten and Senior Programmer, Matt Ditton will explain how Mighty went about building the ultimate companion to strong quality assurance procedures, that has been used in-house for over 5 years on more than 10 titles.

Made up of the Builder, Testbot and the Autotester, each provides a step towards more efficient deployment and testing on multiple capable platforms; mobile, PC/Mac, or console. Learn the secrets to get your production pipeline streamlined and set up with QA automation.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Ship it: An incomplete server-side checklist

Speaker: Luis Van Slageren

A pragmatic guide to shipping an online multiplayer game without lighting the server room on fire.

Join me as I walk you through my incomplete list of tasks and things to be considered when architecting your server environment, or at the very least before you push that big red button.

This talk will cover

- Continuous integration and deployment

- Load testing and automated tests

- Monitoring, alerts and Incident response plans

- Disaster recovery, and user data

- Updates, maintenance and security

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Getting the horse to drink: Optimising a high fidelity console game for mobile platforms

Speaker: Megan Bowra-Dean

PikPok's Rival Stars Horse Racing was initially developed at a fidelity level suitable for current generation console platforms. However we also planned to publish a version for mobile platforms that got as close to the console experience as possible. Here's how we achieved that with Unity's recent performance advances and a lot of elbow grease.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: So you want to make a multiplayer game?

Speaker: June Rhodes

Multiplayer games are huge and have great potential for long term retention of players, and that leads to ongoing revenue for a studio, but to achieve this, you need to make sure your multiplayer experience is excellent. You won’t get that just throwing whatever library you can find on the asset store and hoping for the best. This talk will teach you how to implement multiplayer from the ground up, allowing you to make sure your online player experience is the best it can be.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Machine Learning for Boardgame AI in Race for the Galaxy

Speaker: Theresa Duringer

Race for the Galaxy uses a temporal difference neural network to power its AI.  This knowledge-free system does not require human input to generate training data, which makes it extremely efficient for a small team with limited resources.

Even though our AI has trained on just over 30,000 games, because of this reinforcement learning model which uses predictive data to hone itself at the turn level, it has effectively benefited from over a million turn events.  The neural network we use actually has twelve bifurcations, each to support a specialized configuration of players, expansion content, and game preferences.

For each of these twelve, we support two flavors of neural network function, one to predict an opponent’s next move, and one to evaluate the board state, which is used when the AI simulates forward to choose its next move.  This talk will speak to how the Race for the Galaxy neural networks are architected, and how and when developers should use similar models.  

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk:  Shipping, Ports, and Other Naval-based Parts of Game Development

Speaker: Neil Forbes-Richardson (Wargaming)

Developing games is difficult work, before even thinking about what platforms the game is intended to be played on. Shipping you may encounter problems with various hardware differences, input devices, fullscreen & windowing, different OS versions, and even other applications interfering with your game!

This talk will go over some of the technical problems we've encountered, how we've solved (or worked around) them, and what trade-offs sometimes have to be made to get game out.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Engineering Live Ops on Call of Duty: WWII

Speaker: Josh Caratelli

Post-launch support can bring a host of tough engineering challenges to a development team; some of which can be foreseen and others which can’t. However, with the appropriate planning and best practice engineering principles in place, the issues which arise can be mitigated or outright avoided.

This presentation covers a variety of engineering practices used at Sledgehammer Games both pre and post-launch for Call of Duty: WWII to ensure the best possible experience for both the players and the development team.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Monitoring Performance on Massive Games

Speaker: Tony Albrecht

Monitoring the performance of your game as you build it is relatively easy, but how do you do that with a game that has already been released? And has millions of players? On thousands of different hardware configurations? Is the average FPS enough? This talk will dig down into how we do this on League Of Legends - how we do it, why we do it and what benefits it gives us. We'll start with simple metrics and progressively refine them as we discover problems until we have something that makes intuitive sense.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au