Casual Connect

    Project success rates and game quality rise when QA is integrated into engineering cycles early. Ensuring that QA and development are working toward common quality goals is a critical success factor in producing exceptional games and services. Join us for this interactive discussion led by games industry veteran, Chris Satchell, past CTO for [...]

    You’re in the market to find a publisher once every few years, but publishers are courting developers constantly. How do you stand out? What goes on after you leave the room? How specific should you be, when you don’t really know what you have? What can you do to stand out as the [...]

    How to get your game noticed and reviewed. • Is there such a creature as a typical game reviewer? • Reviewers get hundreds of email pitches a day. What can you do to catch the eye of the reviewer? • Now you’ve caught a reviewer’s eye. How do you get the best review [...]

    Resiliency is key to surviving being an entrepreneur in any occupation but for some reason is even more critical in a game dev startup. Having been down this road a few times (now in 2 different countries) there are several stumbling points that tend to reoccur. We will cover some of the things [...]

    Current methods used for designing serious and educational games rely on humanist theory that places too much emphasis on individual study while denying the proven educational worth of collaborative learning. This talk explores the origins of humanist educational theory within serious games and purposes a solution to the shortcomings it creates. By incorporating [...]

    If you build and launch the greatest app of all time, and no one is around to download it, was it really that great? Don’t be a jerk and think that your job is done when you submit your masterpiece to the app store. There’s a lot more work to do if your [...]

    In the course of designing games for a global audience, there are five key topics or themes that can be consistently problematic for game developers. Come learn more about these 5 key issues that can affect games of any type and in any locale. Delivered at the IGDA Summit @ Casual Connect Seattle, [...]

    Sidhe and PikPok have been using inhouse usability testing for almost a decade, helping make their games accessible, intuitive, less frustrating and ultimately more fun. Initially a “tacked on” aspect of development, usability testing within the studio has grown into a mature process and is now an integral part of all stages of [...]

    Of all the aspects that go into a game, AI is arguably the element that still resembles voodoo to the uninitiated. Whilst off the shelf solutions exist for graphics, physics and so on, good middleware for AI remains effectively out of reach, primarily because no two game worlds are exactly alike and the [...]

    Writing for an ongoing franchise can be difficult; coordinating between sub-branches of that franchise can raise the difficulty level exponentially. As a writer, how do you balance the need for continuity with the necessity of making sure each sub-branch has its own distinct identity? How much crossover is too much, and how much [...]