creative New for 2009 - Evolve 2009 Conference

Keynotes

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE
Grand Theft Auto Creator Announced as First Keynote Speaker



The creator of legendary titles Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, and founder of Realtime Worlds (one of the most successful developers in Europe) - is the event’s first prestigious keynote speaker. David Jones, who has been in the video game industry for over two decades, will share his thoughts on how to make a game successful, drawing on his experience from the award-winning and record-breaking Crackdown through to Realtime Worlds’ upcoming online title All Points Bulletin (APB), the hotly tipped online action game.

  • Speaker: David Jones, CEO & Creative Director, Realtime Worlds

ART KEYNOTE
The Art of LittleBigPlanet - A Big Medley

Kareem and Mark discuss the process of setting a visual style that is both versatile and cohesive. The talk will touch on a broad range of subjects, from the desire for LittleBigPlanet to be a collage of visuals mixing the ancient with the contemporary; how the look and functionalities of LittleBigPlanet are highly integrated; and how cutting-edge visual technology was used to serve the vision of user-generated content.


AUDIO KEYNOTE
The Runtime Studio in Your Console: The Inevitable Directionality of Game Audio

When it comes to adaptability, visuals are a decade ahead of audio in games.  3D assets, real-time lighting, shadows, texture maps, particle effects, and procedural animation, provide the processes for a highly adaptable visual environment.  By contrast, fully mixed wave files, common in the majority of games today, are like 2D art; you can only see one side.  They're big and clunky and typically pre-processed.  Yet there's a desire and need to hear sound and music from all perspectives, from many directions, in various surroundings, and in different contexts.  In order to effectively react and adapt to a non-fixed game timeline, audio content must be authored and kept in smaller component parts until runtime, when they are assembled and mixed.  So take your entire music studio and sound design suite, including mixers, synths, samplers, DSP, mics, speakers, etc; virtualize everything and make it adequately efficient, then drop it all into your game authoring environment.  Stir in a non-linear DAW, the right game ties, and some mixing intelligence, and there you have it; a complete run-time studio, ready with the flexibility to turn on a dime to meet the needs of the game. 

  •  Speaker: Guy Whitmore, Director of Audio, Microsoft Game Studios


BUSINESS KEYNOTE
Out of the Box(ed Product): Thinking for an Online Age

Jeff will speak about the challenges developers face as they move beyond the box product and single player models and into online and multiplayer models.  The evolution of thinking and process from box revenue to other forms of monetization can be daunting and much more difficult than it seems.  How do you turn a product into a service and how in the world do you monetize your product for the long term?  Jeff will share lessons learned from Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online as he pulls the audience "out of the box".

  •  Speaker: Jeff Hickman, Executive Producer, Mythic Entertainment 


DESIGN KEYNOTE
Building LEGO Worlds - online, offline, and everything in between

While TT Games continue to build on the success of "LEGO Star Wars" with new multi-platform LEGO games, "LEGO Universe" is a Massively Multiplayer Online game in development at NetDevil Studios in Colorado. Together, Jonathan Smith from TT Games and Ryan Seabury from NetDevil will jointly explore the similarities and differences between their approaches to the infinite and ever-changing world of LEGO play. With audiences moving more freely than ever between "online" and "offline" game experiences, how are genre expectations changing on both sides? This session will draw upon audience and user-testing research, market analysis, and lots of specific LEGO gameplay examples. It will be relevant for anyone interested in online gaming, MMO development, working with licensed properties, or a younger audience.


EVOLVE KEYNOTE
Resetting the Game

Dave Perry began his career where the industry got going, with side-scrolling games for consoles made for kids. Today your mum is as likely to play games as her grandson, the platform could be an iPhone, a console or a Facebook application, she could be paying through advertising, subscription, per download or via micro-transactions - and she's probably not playing a platform game. Where is she taking us? David Perry is one of the few luminaries in the business and commonly gets in trouble for speaking his mind, so get ready for a no-bull guide to the future.

  • Speaker: David Perry, Creative Director of Acclaim Games

 
EVOLVE KEYNOTE
The Long Tail and Games: How digital distribution changes everything. Maybe.

You've heard it all before: digital distribution and the Long Tail are going to fundamentally change the way that platform holders, publishers, and developers do business. It will decrease the importance of hit games, make niche titles wildly profitable, replace marketers with recommendation engines, and finally give quality content the success it so richly deserves... maybe. This lecture will explore the current realities of the Long Tail, and how you can succeed given those realities.

 
MOBILE KEYNOTE
Moving games to a new beat: The development of Nokia's Dance Fabulous

At last, mobile devices are getting the sort of personalized content that a take-everywhere device deserves. Nokia's Mark Ollila explains how the developer of Dance Fabulous incorporated a phone owner's music collection into its rhythm action gameplay and hooked into N-Gage Arena's passionate community of users to reach an untapped audience.

  • Speaker: Mark Ollila, Director of Technology & Strategy and Head, Nokia


PRODUCTION KEYNOTE
Bridging the Gap Experiences Learned with Agile Project Management Across Multisite, Multicultural and Multilingual Projects

This session will give an overview of common challenges faced when implementing an agile method in a large organization. Specific challenges connected with shared projects on multisite, bridging geographical distances, cultural differences and language barriers, will also be addressed.,The session is based on Ubisoft's own first hand experiences learned with Agile project management across multisite, multicultural & multilingual projects as well as Hansoft's experience working with agile implementations in more than 20 countries worldwide.