Event Details
Speakers- Ian Livingstone
- Renato Salas-Moreno
- Henry Falconer
- Abhijeet Ghosh
- Richard Evans
- Darren Grey
- Dimitris Doukas and Marc D'Sousa
- Thomas Matcham
Ian Livingstone
Eidos
Ian Livingstone is one of the founding fathers of the UK games industry. He co-founded iconic games company Games Workshop in 1975, launching Dungeons & Dragons in Europe and the Games Workshop retail chain.He co-created Fighting Fantasy gamebook series in 1982, which has sold over 17 million copies to date. His latest book Blood of the Zombies marked the 30th anniversary of the series.
He designed Eureka, the first computer game published by Domark in 1984, and joined the company in 1992 as a major investor and director, overseeing a merger that created Eidos plc in 1995, where he served as Executive Chairman until 2002. At Eidos he helped secure and launch major franchises including Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
He co-authored the Next Gen review in 2011 published by NESTA, recommending changes in education policy to bring computer science into the national curriculum as an essential discipline. In the Wired 100 list for 2012, he was ranked the 16th most influential person in the UK's digital economy.
He is currently Life President of Eidos, Vice Chair of UKIE, Chair of Playdemic, Chair of Skillset's Video Games Council, Chair Next Gen Skills Committee, Member of the Creative Industries Council, Trustee of GamesAid and an advisor to the British Council.
Life is a Game
Ian will give an informative and entertaining 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. From analogue to digital, he will give a brief history of computer games - past, present and future. He will tell the incredible story of Lara Croft:Tomb Raider, highlighting the value of intellectual property in a digital age. He will explain the need for the teaching of computer science in schools, and the career opportunities within the games industry.
Renato Salas-Moreno
Imperial College, London
Renato is a PhD student in the Robotic Vision group, supervised by Prof. Andrew Davison and Prof. Paul Kelly. Before joining Imperial he worked in the video games industry developing design tools for games like Blur and James Bond: Bloodstone. He is exploring novel methods for semantic understanding of environments in real-time.
SLAM++: Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping at the Level of Objects
Augmented Reality (AR) relies on accurate camera tracking to correctly present overlays on a video stream in real-time. And tracking needs a good map of the scene in order to predict camera motion. We will show the advantages of mapping at the object-level compared to traditional point-based features in terms of data compression, loop-closure, relocalisation and the ability to parse a scene graph to enable realistic interactions for AR games.
Henry Falconer
Ninja Theory
Henry Falconer graduated from Imperial College in 2006 and has been working
in the video game industry ever since. After graduating, he spent two years
at small developer Codeglue in The Netherlands. Here he worked in a team of
four on an Xbox Live Arcade game called Rocket Riot, which was made in XNA.
He then moved to Cambridge to work for Ninja Theory, a significantly larger
company with just less than a hundred staff, and rose up through the ranks
to become a lead programmer managing a small team.
Building The Combat System of DmC Devil May Cry
DmC Devil May Cry is a combat-heavy action adventure game that was released
earlier this year. This talk explains Ninja Theory's approach to building
game systems, and goes into technical detail on the combat system in
particular and how it works. The talk will also give some background on what
it's like to work on a large team with dozens or even hundreds of people
collaborating on a single project.
Abhijeet Ghosh
Imperial College, London
Dr. Abhijeet Ghosh is a Lecturer in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. His main research interests are in appearance modeling, realistic rendering, and computational photography. Previously, he was a senior researcher and research assistant professor at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies where he worked on Light Stage based Facial Capture. Abhijeet received his PhD in computer science from the University of British Columbia. His doctoral dissertation, “Realistic Materials and Illumination Environments,” received an Alain Fournier Award. He currently holds a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award at Imperial College London.
Light Stage Based Acquisition of High Resolution Facial Geometry and Appearance
The talk will cover state of the art techniques for acquisition of facial geometry and appearance properties under controlled illumination using a Light Stage. The first part of the talk will present efficient acquisition of facial geometry and reflectance using polarized spherical gradient illumination. The talk will also cover practical ways of measuring layered skin reflectance including surface and subsurface scattering using a small set of measurements under controlled illumination. Finally, the talk will present some recent results of measuring skin microgeomtry at the resolution of a few microns for very high resolution (16K) rendering of skin for increased realism of facial renderings.
Richard Evans
Little Text People
Richard Evans is the co-creator of Versu, along with Emily Short. Richard and Emily co-founded Little Text People to develop real-time multiplayer interactive fiction. Little Text People was acquired by Linden Lab in January 2012. Previously, he was at EA/Maxis, as the AI lead on The Sims 3. Before that, he designed and implemented the AI for Black & White, for which he received a number of awards, including the Game Developer Choice Award for Programming Excellence, and a Guinness World Record for most intelligent being in a game. He is particularly interested in the application of formal logic to AI applications.
Versu: A Simulationist Interactive Drama
Versu is a text-based simulationist interactive drama set in the world of Jane Austen. It is available now for iPad and soon for other devices. I will describe the design process which led to the final game. I will also describe the AI architecture we use to power the simulation, and the authoring tools we use to make the episodes.
Darren Grey
Independent Developer
Darren Grey is a roguelike game developer and host of the design-focused podcast, Roguelike Radio. He has made games about grues, alcoholics and mosaic tile-layers, and has recently delved into the engorging depths of generative music. When not developing odd procedural ASCII games he also makes game-inspired poetry and is main writer for indie RPG Tales of Maj'Eyal.
The Procedural Toolbox
Procedural techniques are becoming increasingly important to game design, both as an aid to large scale development and as a core part of delivering a replayable experience. This talk will look at the procedural designer’s toolbox - the commonly used algorithms that developers rely on, and examples of their application in making games. It will include live demonstrations, delving into new ideas and showing how small snippets of code can produce dramatic results.
The presentation will itself be procedurally generated.
Dimitris Doukas and Marc D'Sousa
UNIT9
About Dimitris
Dimitris started coding interactive experiences in Greece and after receiving his Masters in Computer Engineering and international awards for his work he moved to London to further practice his passion for creating using technology.
He is a generalist that strives to understand everything around him and believes that great work comes as a result of love for creating. He is now creating video games as the Head of Game Development at UNIT9 London. His work has been recognised by the One Show, the FWA, Webby awards and others.
About Marc
Armed with a Masters in Engineering from Imperial College, Marc spent a whole 9 months working in a CAD/CAM studio before taking a headlong leap into the world of videogame development. 16 years later, Marc has gained game design and development experience spanning several countries, sizes of organization and development platforms; From Milan to London via Amsterdam - From Ubisoft to NC Soft via Sony - from Game Boy to web via PS3.
Marc is now an Executive Producer at UNIT9 - specialising in the delivery of 'digital experiences', often games, and playing a leading role in defining and driving and the high level vision. He is responsible for producing innovative and original game ideas, shaping them into tight specifications, overseeing and influencing them from concept to completion, guiding the team along the way.
Chasing Goalposts: Adapting to changing requirements in a fast-moving technical environment
In a time when interactive technologies are advancing quickly, game creators must to stay up to speed and be able to adapt to the changing environment. New devices and technologies introduce requirements and impose constraints but also open up possibilities to create original experiences and engage audiences in new ways.
We will be showing how new technologies have enabled the creation of novel experiences, by presenting some of our work at UNIT9. These include mobile e-commerce games, user-generated racing games and ones that can be played on internet TV using one's smartphone as the controller.
Thomas Matcham
coAdjoint
Tom Matcham is a Mathematics Graduate at Imperial College and Managing Director of coAdjoint Ltd. Tom started coAdjoint to develop and publish coAdjoint Action and Orbit, skill modelling and machine learning software, which he hopes will provide game developers the opportunity to explore new ideas in character development and adaptive artificial intelligence. He doesn't know what he likes to do in his spare time, as he has none.
A (Slightly) Different Approach to Game Design
The games industry is known as a source of innovation, as competition amongst the top developers drives improvements in graphics and scale. However, besides monetisation methods, the experience of playing a AAA game hasn't evolved a great deal over the last 10-15 years. Archaic techniques such as experience points and level up systems are still commonplace, and story-lines rarely deviate from a linear format. Behavioural modelling (commonly known as AI) of non-player characters has advanced in many respects, but frequently AI implementations fail to incorporate the ability to adapt behaviour at run-time.
In this presentation, we present a set of techniques that improve upon current game design methodologies. These novel techniques require little more consideration in the design stage than current methods, but can provide a dynamic user experience that would be
difficult to achieve with current design practices. We first present theoretical aspects of these techniques, and demonstrate their application in a first person shooter.