A Recap of For Devs 2024
What a day! And what a night. First of all, thank you all for coming and contributing to the lovely atmosphere of the day. This conference is all about the game devs – both on stage and in the audience.
Big thanks to our sponsors Liquid Swords, DICE, Game Town and Landfall! 💛
A huge thank you to all of our wonderful, sharp and amazing speakers, without you there wouldn’t be a conference at all. 👏
The day started out with nice vibes when jazz vibraphonist Mattias Ståhl accompanied the breakfast area with some lovely soft tunes. Did you spot the game soundtracks hidden in the music?
At 09:30 sharp we all gathered at the Main Stage for the opening of For Devs 2024 where we revealed the launch of our first report on environmental sustainability ‘Code, Climate, Creativity – Game Development and the Green Transision’. Guests were free to grab a copy of the report throughout the day and read about the carbon footprint of Swedish game companies, how to calculate your own carbon footprint, and examples of how games can contribute to sustainable development.
The first talk of the day was the keynote held by Kim Belair, CEO and Founder of Sweet Baby Inc. – a narrative development company who unfairly and unjustified has been (and still are) the target of an online hate storm focusing on their commitment to diverse perspectives and their work in cultural consulting. An expertise that the industry is requesting to a high extent and that is important for a global and multicultural industry like ours. After the keynote presentation, Kim was interviewed by long-time collaborator Bernice Chauly, Senior Writer and Cultural Advisor at Avalanche Studios Group about narrative and authenticity.
This set the tone for the rest of the day which included a variety of talks, panels and round table discussions about skill sets, technology, design and more – with a read thread about humanity in game development that trickled down throughout the day.
Before heading into the first breakout sessions of the day, it was time for a break. Guests could grab their coffees and fika with a sound backdrop of sweet vibraphone tunes all day long.
The first breakout sessions included Anna Oporska-Szybisz from Bloober Team who talked about how she and her team made the impossible possible: a successful remake of the iconic game Silent Hill 2 in her talk ‘The Mystery of the Remake’.
The Landfall team formed a panel consisting of CEO Wilhelm Nylund, Co-founder Petter Henriksson, Co-founder Philip Westre, Programmer Zorro Svärdendahl and Animator Erik Skog and revealed their secret to success in ‘Content Warning: How a Game Made in 6 Weeks has Reached 10M Players’.
David Filipe, Engineering Manager at Resolution Games showed how they brought an immersive tabletop role-playing game to Apple Vision Pro in his talk ‘Pen & Paper RPG on a Shiny Helmet? – Bringing Demeo to Apple Vision Pro’.
Harry Krueger came in from Helsinki to share his 15 years long experience as a Creative Director with examples from working on Returnal and more, in a fireside chat together with Dataspelsbranschen’s Daniel Torbjörnsson.
And just like that it was time for some food. During the lunch break guests had the opportunity to try out some innovative digital instruments from Teenage Engineering. We loved seeing you get creative.
After lunch, we had five breakout sessions happening simultaneously:
Industry veteran Peter Zetterberg, now Head of Xbox Game Camp, shared his personal experiences from 30+ years in the industry in his talk ‘Triple-A: Atari, Addiction and Acquisitions’.
Nils Lind, Senior Setup Technician at Sharkmob shared how he works with prototyping for Mocap and Photogrammetry and more in his talk ‘The Sharkmob Workshop, Digital to Physical and Back Again’.
Guests could join the round table discussion ‘Playing for Peace: Unlocking the Creative Power of Game Devs to Strengthen Young Peacebuilders’ and collaborate to design innovative strategies that use gaming to fund and promote young people to build peace across the world, moderated by Deputy Director Sigrid Gruener from Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation.
Community building, toxicity amongst players and balancing being the friendly voice with saying no was discussed in a panel talk between Hanna Fogelberg, Head of Community at Landfall Games, Anna Erlandsson, Community Manager at The Gang and Jeremy Fielding, Community Manager at Stunlock Studios.
We also got to hear from Music Composer & Technical Audio Designer at Two Feathers Elvira Björkman about how to best integrate your composer(s) in her talk ‘How to Onboard Your Music Composer – Unique Applications and Pipelines of Music in Games’.
Then it was time for some more coffee and vibraphone tunes before we started the next batch of breakout sessions:
In the talk ‘The Game Industry’s Impact on Climate Change – Footprints and Tools’ you could hear from three different perspectives:
how you track and reduce your climate impact by sustainability consultants Amanda Möttönen and Anna Larsson from U&We.
an example from Avalanche Studios Group presented by DEI & Sustainability Manager Sara Ponnert.
an exploration of key approaches to reduce game’s environmental footprint with PhDs from Uppsala University Ossian Nordgren, Mike Hazas and Per Fors.
‘Tetrilemmas of Game Making’ by Game Designer Raunaq Singh Sokhi and Software Engineer Emelie Fuller from EA DICE, taught us to look at success from different perspectives and learn how to measure things in multiple dimensions.
Senior Environment Artist at CD Projekt Red, Anna Bulavina, came all the way from Poland to talk about how the Space Force One crash site location was created, what challenges the environment artists encountered and more in her talk ‘Level Art on Fire – Creating Dogtown’s Crash Site in Cyberpunk 2077:Phantom Liberty’.
We also heard from Anton Johnsson, Senior Level Designer at King, about the complex art of level design in match-3 games in his talk ‘How to Maintain Player Interest Across Thousands of Levels’, which was based on his experiences working on Farm Heroes Saga.
Liquid Swords put together the panel ‘Player Choice in Game Narrative’ with panelists Ian Thomas, Narrative Director at The Chinese Room, Ash McAllan, Game Director of Live Ops for Generation Zero at Avalanche Studios Group, Johnnemann Nordhagen, Senior Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy Entertainment, Kim Belair, CEO at Sweet Baby Inc. – all moderated by the Narrative Lead at Liquid Swords, Laurence Kennedy.
Then it was time for another break!
The next sessions included a talk from Mikael Linderholm, Technical Art Director at Embark Studios, named ‘Art Directing Mayhem’, about the process of developing the destruction system in Unreal for THE FINALS.
Resolution Games own Linnéa Granlund, Tech Lead, and Clarisse Blondy, Producer, shared their extensive experiences leading the development of one of their newest games in the talk ‘Building a Mixed Reality Party Game, Home Sports’.
We also heard a panel discussion about ‘The Power of Mentorship’ featuring King & Swedish Games Industry Scholarship mentor Valeria Matos, Senior UI Designer at King, and her current mentee Astrid Vahlström, a UX Design Student, together with the General Manager for Candy Crush Saga and Ambassador for the mentorship program, Paula Ingvar and long time advocate for mentorship, Project Manager at Science Park Skövde and Founder of DONNA, Jenny Brusk.
Christofer Sundberg, Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Liquid Swords, sat down together with Per Strömbäck in a fireside chat to talk about his extensive career in a session named ‘How to Blow up Everything and be the Last Man Standing’.
Guests got the chance to dig deeper into sustainability in the interactive round table ‘The Transformative Power of Games – Voices and Dialogues for Sustainability’ with our Head of Sustainability Marléne Tamlin together with Sebastian Schlyter, Executive Producer for Cities: Skylines II at Paradox Interactive, Anna Högberg Jenelius, Indie Game Developer at Valiant Game Studio and Kristian Lundquist, CEO and co-founder of Gro Play.
After another short but sweet break, it was time for the last breakout sessions of the day, which were made up of only three choices:
Lydia Andrew, Studio Head of Creative at EA DICE, gave us her insights into how we can leverage all our expertise and life experiences to work together more seamlessly to get better results in her talk ‘We are All Game Developers First – Working Outside a Strict Discipline Delineation Model’.
A trio from Remedy Entertainment, Richard Lapington, Audio Director, Geoffroy Calis, Senior Lighting Artist, and Eline Slingerland, VFX Artist gave us some insights into making one of the most talked about games this year in the panel talk ‘Atmospherics in Alan Wake 2: An Overlap in Audio, Lighting and VFX’, moderated by our own Alexander Milton, researcher at Dataspelsbranschen.
Shila Vikström, Consultant at True Ending, continued the red thread of humanity in game development with her talk ‘Make Games With Humanity’ where she explored how we can make games while still honoring humanity in the process and keep it joyful.
Last but not least we gathered everyone on the main stage one last time for a sneak peek of the upcoming yearly industry report on the Swedish game industry, presented by our Head of Analytics, Johanna Nylander.
Comedian and actor Fjortisper then came on stage to let everyone know it was time to go to the after-party where he later showed up as a DJ.
The after-party, officially known as Night of the Devs started off with a concert from Club Killers playing on the big stage, music veteran Curt Lundberg stood behind the vinyl players in the bar area and Fjortisper ruled the dance floor in the end. And let’s not forget about the mysterious tent with a fortune teller…
We hope you enjoyed For Devs 2024, and got inspired, energized, and full of ideas of how to make even better games! We had a great time with you and we are looking forward to seeing you again next year.
Photos by John Almviken
