Silvia Wipfler

Warhorse Studios

From Dream to Dream Job: how to get a job in the games industry

Character Artist at Blizzard, Level Designer at CD Projekt RED, Narrative Designer at Naughty Dog - everyone of us has their dream job. But how do we actually get it? Skill, passion and dedication are a good start, but this is not enough. It's also about asking the right questions, meeting the right people and grasping an opportunity by the forelock when it's at hand. This talk teaches you how to appear on recruiter's radars and how to become a top candidate. Attending game events and conferences, on- and off-line networking and portfolio building are the key topics.

Gregor Eigner

Mi'pu'mi Games, CEO

Seven Years

The talk will focus on the history of Mipumi and its way to introduce processes and workflows to identify innovation and original ideas. How Mipumi established an own unit working on original IPs and which prerequisites had to be established to create "The Lion's Song", our first self-financed and self-published game, recently released on Steam. How did company culture support the creation of original IPs and how could it co-exist with the work on AAA brands? These are some questions that we will discuss and explain based on our experiences.

Klaus
Hufnagl-Abraham

projectcircus.com

Motivational Factors in Games

Driving Dynamics of Games, Designing Reward Structures in Games, The Hook Model - With 20+ years experience in interactive multimedia design, the console and PC/Mac gaming industry, Klaus has a broad understanding of virtual entertainment. He's up-to-date with the latest trends in mobile, VR, AR and currently designing and producing innovative 3D games for a leading land-based & online casino games manufacturer.

Matthias Maschek

Lost in the Garden

How we got Lost in the Garden

A short history of how we ended up developing a game for consoles starting from scratch. What we did before and how we used the Austrian ecosystem to fund our first project. Matthias is co-founder and developer at Lost in the Garden, a small independent games studio in Vienna. With his company he is currently working on a hyperfuturistic, omnidirectional racing game called Lightfield. Matthias studied Computergraphics at the Technical University of Vienna and is working on strange Games in his spare time.

Alexander Grenus

stillalive studios

Game Design Workflow at stillalive studios

In this talk Alexander Grenus gives an overview over the game design workflow at stillalive studios. He got involved with game development in 2002. In 2007 he released his first game. Currently he is working for stillalive studios. Together with Julian Mautner he leads a team of 12 people as project manager and designer. In 2015 they released their first game Son of Nor on Steam. Prior to that, he worked on mods and various game projects as artist, producer, level- and game-designer. Besides the game industry he also worked as artist for architecture and product visualization, as editor for CGmag and as AutoCAD designer for medical engineering.

Michael Lankes

University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria

Presence in Co-located Playful Interactive Environments

This presentation will address the phenomenon called "presence" in the context of gaming and playful activities. It will focus on co-located interactive environments in large display settings that allow the interaction between multiple actors. Inhabiting and modifying these spaces is granted via natural mapped interfaces that incorporate technologies such as position trackers as well as mobile & VR devices. Several design challenges arise when conceptualizing and creating experiences within the context of co-located and interactive playful environments: the issue under consideration regarding the talk will be the feeling of "being there" experienced by players.

Peter Oberrauner

Rarebyte

The Illusion of Control

In this talk, Peter will give useful insights on how to implement gameplay mechanics for games played by live masses at trade shows. By taking Rarebyte's latest racing game as an example, he will point out important game design decisions that lead to an immersive experience, even for unskilled players. He will also discuss the need of support systems that allows for exciting races between unequally skilled players.

Lorenz Jaeger

ICG, TU Graz

Locomotion in VR

This talk will review the current approaches to enabling players to move through a virtual world while wearing a VR headset. I will compare the various approaches in respect to handling motion sickness and maintaining immersion for the player and end up with dos and dont's. Lorenz Jaeger is working as a project assistant, researcher and software engineer at the Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision (ICG) at the Technical University of Graz (TU-Graz).

Arno Franzl

Freelance

Crunchtime - How not to

Everybody knows the beast that crawls in and finds a comfortable place during the final phase of a project: crunch time. It makes you consume coffee like there is no tomorrow, bring your sleeping bag to work and neglect your social life if you have one at all (since this isn't your first crunch time). So how to we tame that beast to for a healthy work / life balance. I have been on the receiving end of that phenomenon and I have handed out some of them myself. And since I am pretty lazy I started to cultivate an interest for strategies and tools to tame that beast and avoid its breath of stress as good as possible. Its all about the other side of creativity, its about management.