GCAP 2017

Battle Pirates has been a hugely successful game for KIXEYE. How do we manage a team of 25+ developers to provide weekly releases for an always online game? I’ll share with you our development pipeline and process; what works, what doesn’t, and how it has evolved over the last 6 years. You'll come away with ideas for optimising your team, and what the key factors to consider are when constructing your pipeline.

Analytics, Data Science and Machine Learning are buzzwords that get thrown around a lot - but what do they mean? And what do they mean when you're a small indie team trying to get a game out of the door on a fixed (and limited) budget? How can you capitalise on some of the amazing breakthroughs in this field in order to make and support better products and start thinking about your development with an analytical lens - whether you're a Producer, Engineer, Designer or any other role!

Media Molecule makes AAA games with one of the smallest AAA teams out there. They are currently developing the crazy game that is 'Dreams'. Such a huge and unique project is made possible with the continuous support of the internal QA team. Despite a studio size of roughly 50-60 employees it has maintained 5 or more people (currently 8) in QA throughout the development of ‘Dreams’ as well as using external QA services.

QA is commonly thought of as something done near the end of development and specifically in terms of finding bugs which makes it seem counter intuitive to bring QA on earlier in development. At Mm there are QA assigned from the earliest prototype and they serve as more than just bug-finders. The advanced levels of support Mm enjoys wouldn't be possible if QA had a high turn over of staff or if they were only brought on near the end of development or for short periods. At Mm, QA serve as a repository of knowledge on all aspects of the game and the studio reaps many benefits from having QA who have been working on the title for years.

Good QA is an amazing boost to any game development studio and seems under-utilised by studios of all sizes.
So let’s take a deep-dive into the QA workflow, and processes at Mm.
We’ll explore how the QA team enhances all parts of how Mm makes games and take a look at what QA can look like at a studio that has made a long term commitment to internal QA.

Let's face it. If you are a producer in the games industry for any length of time, you will almost certainly find yourself in charge of a chaotic project with an impossible deadline. It doesn't matter how the project got into the state it's in. It's your job to fix it. Fun, right? But getting a project back on track isn't necessarily as difficult or as daunting as it can seem at times. In fact, it can be as simple as reframing the way you're looking at the problem. In this talk, Amy Dallas will explore a mindset that can help one be successful when faced with managing a seemingly impossible project as well as some survival tips to keep you focused when everything seems to be going sideways.