CONTROL CONFERENCE 2015 • Conference Guide by Control Magazine

2015

WORLD BUILDING FOR MOVIES & GAMES

TIVOLIVREDENBURG / CLOUD NINE • TUESDAY 29 SEPTEMBER 09:30

From Concept To Screen – Drawing To Imagine And Create New Possible Worlds Edvige Faini Concept Artist

10:15 Production Design On SF Classic Gattaca & Others Academy Award Nominee Jan Roelfs Production Designer 10:45 - 11:00 11:00

How The Untold Narrative In ibb & obb Helped Us Shape Their World

Immersive Design: The Narrative Starts With The World Romke Faber Production Designer & Art Director

12:00 The Rise Of Virtual Reality VR/Heroes Adriaan Rijkens VR Developer 12:30 - 13:30 13:30

Two Cases Of World Building: Interactive Comic Ascent From Akeron And Game & Film Challenge De Pont

14:00 Crafting Worlds To Generate Buzz Triumph Studios Lennart Sas Co-founder and CEO 14:30 The screenplay T.B.C. 15:00 - 15:15 Cross-Platform Zombies: Transmedia Storytelling In The Walking Dead

Building A Legend: Why It Took Six Years To Develop This Game Triangle Studios Remco de Rooij Founder & CEO

16:15 - 17:00

Justin Van Der Lek On The Hobbit, Avengers And More: World Building Through VFX Justin van der Lek VFX Artist

17:00 - 17:30

Romke Faber is (assistent) set & production designer and art director for movies such as Nova Zembla and the Blender-movie Tears of Steel. He researches the creation of new worlds as a starting point for creating stories.

VR developer Adriaan Rijkens talks about why Virtual Reality is changing the world and how you can be part of that change. He will talk about the challenges he faced during the development of Cinematic VR and Serious VR Game experiences.

In this session Corine Meijers and Remco Vlaanderen talk about how world-building occurs and is approached in two projects: De Pont and Ascent from Akeron. They will also talk about how Submarine Channel approaches this new means of storytelling and world building. Sharing experiences from the development of the Age of Wonders and Overlord franchises – and other games that didn’t turn out so well – Triumph Studios’ Lennart Sas discusses how treating a game’s features and content as social currency helps develop entertainment that can pique interest, trigger word of mouth and establish a community. Edvige Faini is a Concept Artist for movies and games from Milan, Italy. She will show what content a Concept Artists have to deal with and how we get from a digital drawing to a movie scene on screen. She will use examples from her work on films such as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, 300: Rise of an Empire, Jupiter Ascending and Sin City: A Dame to Kill for. Coffee break

Dan Hassler-Forest Author 15:45 - 16:15

ibb & obb is a game about puzzle solving, atmosphere and the interaction between players. Nobody plays the game for its narrative, yet there is an untold background story. This talk is about that story and how it helped to shape the game’s world.

Lunch break

Submarine Channel Corine Meijers & Remco Vlaanderen

15:15 - 15:45

Jan Roelfs is a two time Academy Award nominated Production Designer. He received his first nod for his fantastic production design on Gattaca. During a live interview we revisit that world and other ones he helped create.

Coffee break

Sparpweed Richard Boeser Game Director 11:30

Edvige Faini is a Concept Artist for movies and games from Milan, Italy. She will show what Concept Artists produce and how their work evolves from a digital drawing to a movie scene on screen. She will use examples from her work on films such as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, 300: Rise of an Empire, Jupiter Ascending and Sin City: A Dame to Kill for.

‘Transmedia’ is a popular buzzword, but what does it mean? To some, it suggests complex stories, expanded via many different media, like Star Wars. To others, it reflects an increasingly digital culture where the difference between media no longer seems to exist. Hassler-Forest will discuss the complexities of transmedia storytelling, using the Walking Dead franchise as a main example. Triangle Studios created the game Cross of the Dutchman, based on the 16th century folk legend of Grutte Pier. It took the studio six year to finish the game. The talk focusses on the hardships of development, and how the studio grew with the project. Topics vary from concepting and development to planning and management. Justin van der Lek (current job: Star Wars Ep. VII) has worked on pivotal scenes for countless blockbuster movies. He presents a selection of these scenes and walks the audience through the creation process. How do these scenes contribute to the world in the movie, what did the director want, and what did the original screenplay say? Drinks

MAIN CONFERENCE TIVOLIVREDENBURG HERTZ / CLOUD NINE / CLUB NINE WEDNESDAY 30 SEPTEMBER Welcome! Welcome to Control Conference 2015. It’s the third edition in, what we strongly believe, will be an ever going series. When we first organised Control Conference, we had a vision of a developer-centric event where like-minded people, professionals and students, women and men, would come together to share their passion for games. Looking at this year’s program, we’re confident that we, again, achieved just that. We have programmers, artists, composers and designers from all over the world, eager to share their story. Ready to relive moments from development hell, or heaven. Tell tales of that one divine moment of inspiration and those long years of hard work to make it all happen. Of sudden success or of heart breaking failure to succeed. Control Conference is all about games. And even more, it’s about the people who make them, and their ideas, talent and inspiration. Eric Bartelson & Matthijs Dierckx Founders of Control and Control Conference

CONTROL Matthijs Dierckx Eric Bartelson Alessandra van Otterlo

IMPROVIVE Roger ter Heide Juney Dijkstra Wendy van de Lagemaat Paul van Heel

NFF Willemien van Aalst Marlou Rutten Martine Bogaart Nasztazia Potapenko Jurriaan Rammeloo Rob Nijman Geertje Veenbergen And many others

THANK YOU: Maarten Brands Ruben Brands Joost van Dongen Martin de Ronde Joost Raessens Rami Ismail Jan Willem Nijman

TIVOLIVREDENBURG Diana Schilperoort Maaike Oudshoorn And many others

COVER ILLUSTRATION Dick Grinwis Grinwise.com

MADE POSSIBLE BY A LOT OF PEOPLE AND ORGANISATIONS. Special thanks to the EBU, the wonderful City of Utrecht and the great Province of Utrecht. We’d also like to thank all our sponsors, you’re great! So thank you Microsoft, Unity, Epic Games, Nintendo, Little Chicken, Amazon, Wacom, LeQuest & Hanze University. Our partners and media partners: FLEGA, DGA, DGG, lvl80, NordicGame, IGDA, 3DHYPE.com, GAME Bundesverband and RESPAWN. And a very big thank you for all the studios and individuals who spent their time travelling to Control Conference to give a talk. You are what this is all about. (c) 2015 Control & Improvive & Creative Makers Network Foundation ctrl500.com controlconference.com control-online.nl

HERTZ 09:00

The Indiepocalypse: Is It Really Coming? Sergey Galyonkin • Founder SteamSpy

Galyonkin talks about The Indiepocalypse, he tries to understand if it is real at all, how it will affect game developers and if it’s the first time we’re experiencing such a situation (it is not).

CLOUD NINE

CLUB NINE

Short Coffee break 10:00

How Music And Sound Can Inﬂuence Your Game’s Direction Jukio ‘Kozilek’ Kallio • Composer Nuclear Throne, Luftrausers, Choice Chamber M

10:30

Elite: Dangerous – Sound In Space

Matthew Florianz • Lead Audio Designer Frontier Developments 11:00

A Visualizing Story: The Ideas Behind The Concept Art Of Dragon Age

Casper Konefal • Key Concept Artist • Bioware Throughout the span of three games, Dragon Age has grown & changed and so have the ideas & processes behind the concept art. Come on an epic journey as Casper Konefal walks you through the ideas behind character design, world building & visual storytelling, as it has come to be known on Dragon Age and at Bioware.

Building a 2D Game Live in Unreal Engine 4

Sherida Halatoe • Tiger & Squid Beyond Eyes: The journey to the E3 stage

During the talk De Jong will demonstrate some of the features of Unreal Engine 4 through building a game live on stage, talking you through Blueprint, the material editor, and the 2D toolset.

Micro Mortem: The Flock, Important Lessons From Risking Everything Jeroen van Hasselt • Creative Director • Vogelsap The Flock: Has it been a failure?

How To Check If The Game Will Break Your Heart? Testing Emotions In This War Of Mine

M G Voiceover A – Z: When, Why And How To Use VO In Your Game

Sarah Elmaleh • (Voice) Actor Gone Home, Skulls of the Shogun, JS Joust, Gravity Ghost & Galak-Z The human voice is often the only non-simulated element in your game, and as such can be a powerful tool of expression & immersion. This talk will cover the basics of when to use voice actors & how to work with them, from script & casting to sessions and rates.

Paweł Czaplarski • QA Lead • 11 Bit Studios Czaplarski will cover the topic of emotions in This War of Mine, and how you can actually test them. After all it’s not checking if a script is running, but something much more complicated and it was a long road to achieve what 11 Bit Studios did.

14:20

Hands-On With Audio Mixing In Unity 5

Microsoft Windows 10 for Game Developers

Frans Kasper • Programmer Abstraction Games This talk will cover Abstraction Games’ technical porting process and the development of the underlying tech created to port Hotline Miami and Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, from a closed-source Mac/Windows-only engine (GameMaker 7) to PlayStation- and Desktop-platforms.

Developing Eﬀective HTML5 Games

Mark Overmars • Director & CTO Tingly Game Tingly created their own underlying HTML5 engine and tool chain. Overmars will share some of the important lessons learned. He will discuss creating eﬃcient code, handling visuals, audio and fonts, working around differences and errors in browsers, and dealing with security issues. P

Martin Tirion • User Experience Evangelist User Experience Evangelist Martin Tirion from Microsoft will talk about the possibilities of Windows 10 for game developers.

C Bitcrunching And Server Mashing For The Awesomenauts Replay System

Joost van Dongen • Co-Founder & Lead Programmer • Ronimo This talk will discuss the technical design of the system for replays and spectator mode in Awesomenauts. The game is a non-deterministic online multiplayer game and the gameplay code changes every month with each patch, so a recording system was needed that would be able to play replays from older versions of the game.

Coffee break G

From AAA Boxed Games To Digital And Episodic Oskar Guilbert • CEO & Founding Partner Dontnod Entertainment

Guilbert will talk about DONTNOD’s transformation from a traditional AAA boxed games developer (Remember Me) to a studio firmly focused on episodic and digitally delivered titles (Life Is Strange).

Early Design Lessons From The VR Frontier

Colin Northway • Founder Northway Games Fantastic Contraption has been designed from the ground-up as a room-scale VR game. We’ve learned some surprising things about making games played in a space that feels real. I’ll take you on a tour of our discoveries so far. What we’ve tried, what didn’t work, and what makes people jump for joy.

How To Design A Prologue For Open World Games

Unity Services – Make The Most Of Your Game Josh Naylor • Technical Evangelist Unity Introduction to the Unity services G

How to Handle Toxic Behavior in Online Multiplayer Games Geert van den Burg • Founder Curve Fever

P Powered by Unity, Nintendo, Microsoft & Epic G Game Design A Art

Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz • Lead Quest Designer • Witcher 3

M Music & Audio T Tools & Engines

Using an example of The Witcher 3 prologue, Tomaszkiewicz describes and explains the process of how it was designed – what were the main design questions and goals, how it used to look like in the beginning and what was changed during development. 17:20 - 18:00

From GameMaker To GameBaker: Porting Hotline Miami

Andy Touch • Unity 5 specialist & evangelist Unity 5 introduces a new Audio Mixer system. Andy Touch will give a hands-on, in-editor demo of all the new Audio Features introduced in the latest version of the Unity game engine; covering in-game sound mixing, grouping, applying effects, audio ducking, fading and more.

15:00 - 15:20

16:20

Adriaan de Jongh Bounden: Make ‘M Move Gijs Hermans • Ronimo Games Awesomenauts: Tips For Making Great 2D Art For Games Geert Nellen • Digital Dreams Metrico: Creating the game that’s impossible to make

Ed Valiente • Business Development Manager • Nintendo Nintendo has enabled indies to self-publish their games for 7 years now, but to some the process to release games on Nintendo eShop on the Wii U and 3DS system appears shrouded in mystery. Valiente will talk about high level business policies and walk you through the process step-by-step.

AAA Artwork From The Attic

Eric Felten • Concept Designer Horizon Zero Dawn, The Division, Star Citizen Working remotely as a concept designer is becoming common place. Felten addresses the steps involved in creating work for AAA-titles from the comfort of his home. Next, he’ll explain the process of creating an image from initial brief, to composition sketch, to final product.

How To Release Your Game On Nintendo eShop

Exploring Mechanics Through Forward Level Design

Daniel Benmergui • Independent Game Designer Nuovo Award-winning Storyteller It often happens that level design is done by thinking of a solution and then crafting a problem around it. But if your game’s design is different from well known genres, how do you come up with good ideas that exploit your mechanics to the max?

15:50

Micro Mortems: Bounden, Awesomenauts & Metrico

Lunch break

13:00

15:20

Micro Mortem: Beyond Eyes, Small Indie on a Big Stage

Sjoerd De Jong • Evangelist Epic Games • Unreal Engine

12:00 - 13:00

13:40

B Business C Code

Drinks

Made possible and selected by Vlambeer! Thank you guys! Thank you: Maarten Brands (Cook and Becker), Dennis Zoetebier & Joost van Dongen

APPLIED GAMES SUMMIT TIVOLIVREDENBURG CLOUD NINE / CLUB NINE THURSDAY 1 OCTOBER

PARALLEL SESSIONS 1: WORKSHOP ( WORKSHOP ROOM NINE ) 14:30 - 16:00 Workshop: Bringing Applied Game Design And Validation To The Next Level Gillian Van De Boer – Visschedijk Researcher & Designer TNO Harald Warmelink Lecturer & Researcher HKU It is November 2012, a shocking statement: “Gartner Says by 2014, 80 Percent of Current Gamified Applications Will Fail to Meet Business Objectives Primarily Due to Poor Design”. Now it’s 2015, and although we’re not sure how the exact figure of 80% is reached, we do know one thing: the hype of serious or applied games is reaching its top. Disappointments are all around us; many applied games do not do what they are promised to do. This workshops helps you prevent disappointments by introducing tools that improve strategic decision making and user evaluation. In an attempt to professionalize this relatively young field of expertise, HKU and TNO worked on a diverse set of tools that help the design and the often neglected phase of validation of applied games. Two of these tools, the ‘Goal Design Alignment (GDA) game’ and ‘Little GEM’ are presented and can be experienced in the workshop. In the GDA game players can analyze the quality of (your own?!) strategic decision making game in a playful way. As the name already suggests, the focus is on aligning the goals you would like to reach with the design decisions you made. With Little GEM (GEM stands for Game Based learning Evaluation Model) it is possible to easily plan and execute your user evaluation. Standardized questionnaires and data-analysis tools are ready to use and based on validated scales and on more comprehensive (experimental) effectiveness studies.

CLOUD NINE 9:00

Facts And Figures On The Dutch Games Industry Christel van Grinsven • Operations Manager DGG Presentation of the facts & figures for the Dutch Games industry, based on the joint research effort: the Gamesmonitor 2015. She will answer questions like: How many companies in the Netherlands are active in the games industry? How many people are employed by these companies?

9:30

Outlook Germany: Playfulness As Key Asset Of Future Communication Thorsten Unger • Managing Director GAME Bundesverband Serious Games & Gamification are eﬃcient tools to generate understanding: playing is engaging, motivating and activating. Playfulness is the key to transform information into knowledge. Unger will provide an outlook of play in which we communicate, work, learn & live based on success stories from Germany.

10:00

Games For Change: Creating Impact Nicholas Furtugano • Co-founder & CCO Playmatics Nicholas will talk about games for change. How to design games so that they really create an impact?

10:30 - 11:00 11:00

CLUB NINE Coffee break

Opportunities And Pitfalls For A Scalable Business Model For Applied Games

Workshop: Prototyping Player Change

Florian Witsenburg • CEO & Owner Tygron enters the market of city planning with a gaming engine based on accurate data and realistic calculation models. 11:30

Nicholas Furtugano • Co-founder & CCO Playmatics In this workshop, Nick Fortugno explores the way that game mechanics can be used for more than entertainment. Fortugno will guide the workshop through a series of design steps to clarify how gameplay and interactivity can be used to teach, instill change, and modify behavior.

The Entertainment Approach: How Entertainment Games Deal With Serious Issues Dealing With Loss Mata Haggis (Sassybot/NHTV) – Fragments of Him ‘Fragments’ revolves around a tragic accident, the life of the victim and his loved ones before and after.

Working with the specific goals of the attendees of the workshop, Fortugno walks the participants through a prototyping process to help them both see how their intent can be manifested through play, and how user choice can be built in a way that by exploring the system, players can learn and change.

Applied Empathy Sherida Halatoe (Tiger & Squid) – Beyond Eyes Translating the protagonist’s blindness to game mechanics and finding an emotional core. Playable Misery Pawel Czaplarski (11bit studios) – This War of Mine During war, there are no good or bad decisions; there’s only survival. The sooner you realize that, the better. 12:30 - 13:30 13:30

Lunch break Keynote: Life is a Game by Ian Livingstone CBE Ian Livingstone CBE will give an entertaining and visual account of his struggles as an entrepreneur in the 1970s when he and Steve Jackson set up Games Workshop, launched Dungeons & Dragons in Europe, and wrote the multi-million selling Fighting Fantasy gamebooks series. From analogue to digital, he will give a brief history of computer games, past, present and future. He will talk about how video games and game-based learning can be used to enhance learning in schools, and the value of computing and digital skills in schools.

14:30

PARALLEL SESSIONS 2: LEARNING, TRAINING & RESEARCH

PARALLEL SESSIONS 3: MEDICAL

Case Study E-Learning Sudan Hester Stubbé • sr. researcher / consultant TNO War Child is working with the Ministry of Education, Ahfad University for Women in Sudan and Dutch applied game developer Flavour. We are co-developing an ICT solution for Education, which provides a creative and fun applied-gaming instruction method, combined with in-community facilitation.

Games For An Impossible Audience: Elderly People With Dementia Sjoerd Wennekes • Co-founder & CEO Active Cues The findings of four years research and development of games to aid elderly people with dementia. From Idea To Medical Pilot, The Startup Way Yosef Saﬁ Harb • Founder Happitech How & why we created the first health game to be approved by the App Store’s Health & Fitness section.

5 Tips For Designing Both Fun & Efficient Applied Games That Will Satisfy You & Your Clients Teresa de la Hera • Postdoctoral Researcher & Lecturer at Utrecht University Finding a balance between fun and efficiency is difficult and time-consuming, it is also the phase in which most wrong decisions are made. De la Hera will go through 5 useful tips that will help designers to find a balance between fun and efficiency and ease communication with clients in this phase of the project. 15:30

16:00

Keep It Small To Make It Bigger (Monkeybizniz) Dimme van der Hout • CEO & Creative Director / Erica Gasataya • Lead Designer How an assignment with a low budget can turn into a bigger project by keeping it small.

Applied Games, A State Of The Industry

Designing For Behavioural Change: Obesity Prevention Made Fun

Tomas Sala • Creative Director Little Chicken Game Company Never in the last 15 years have applied and serious games stood at such a defining crossroad as now. The industry is full off potential, but we need to move beyond small-scale experimentation and homegrown innovation.

Tim Laning • Co-founder & co-owner Grendel Games Grendel’s biggest and most daunting project yet: an obesity prevention game for children and their parents. Working with a major IP, partnering with health insurance industry and universities, this project seeks to bring definitive proof: serious games can add to behavioural change in a fun & commercially viable manner.

The Research Showcase

The Coincidental Start-Up: Navigating The Medical Landscape Hicham Shatou • Founder & CEO LeQuest How a startup has to navigate a landscape of hospitals, manufacturers and insurance companies.

Hosted by: Dr. Teresa de la Hera • Postdoctoral Researcher & Lecturer at Utrecht University & Dr. Joris Dormans • Creator of Machinations / CEO Ludomotion Game Studio

How To Gamify Psychosomatic Fysiotherapy In VR Gert-Jan Brok • CEO Fantazm The development of a new way of therapy using Virtual Reality and gaming mechanics.

What are game researchers actually researching? This is your chance to find out and get in touch with the game scientists. A selection of seven academics will be presenting their research and some of the results.

17:00

Traumagameplay, Development & Validation In Sync/Progress Evert Hoogendoorn • Sr. Gamedesigner IJsfontein & Joost Asselbergs PhD Candidate VU An iterative development process and the academic validation process for a game to prevent PTSD. Drinks

Definitief kleurstelling Cook&Becker C: 15 M: 100 Y: 90 K: 10

R: 190 G: 30 B: 45

C: 100 R: 43 M: 95 G: 57 Y: 5 B: 144 K: 0

Definitief woordemerk Cook&Becker Definitief kleurstelling Cook&Becker