Digital Dragons

🎮 Maciej Jemioł (Assistant Lecturer, Ignatianum University in Krakow) will be a speaker at Digital Dragons Conference 2025. 🎫 Buy your ticket: https://lnkd.in/dsfSpvtp 👤 He is a philosophy lecturer and researcher located in Kraków, Poland, specializing in the field of philosophy of video games. Born in 1996, he began studying philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, the oldest and one of the most prestigious universities in Poland, in 2015. In 2018, he obtained his bachelor’s degree, and in 2020, he obtained his master’s degree in this field, both magna cum laude. His bachelor’s thesis focused on narration through interaction in video games, while his master’s thesis focused on ideas in recent English-language cinematography. In 2020, he moved to the Ignatianum University (also in Kraków) to work on a PhD thesis focused on the philosophical dispute within the space of video games, which is due to be defended in early 2025. Since October 2024, he has been working as an assistant lecturer at the Ignatianum University. His academic research focuses on the philosophy of culture (especially popular culture), narratological and phenomenological aspects of video games, and the dynamics between big-, mid-, and low-budget video games (mainstream vs indie). He has participated in numerous international scientific conferences on the philosophy of video games and has published a number of papers on the subject in peer-reviewed journals. 🕹️ Philosophical Ideas for Video Game Writing and Design 👾 While philosophy is often believed to be a dry, academic field with no practical implications whatsoever, the truth is that video game writers and designers utilize philosophical ideas in their work each and every day, often without even realizing it. In this presentation, backed by academic research from my PhD thesis but aimed at the reality of gamedev, I will explain not only which philosophical ideas work well in video games, but also what they can do for video game writers and designers.

🎮 Sergey Bieliayev (Lead Software Engineer, PixelAnt Games) and Sylwester Służałek (Senior Software Engineer, PixelAnt Games) will be the next speakers at Digital Dragons Conference 2025. 🎫 Buy your ticket: https://lnkd.in/dsfSpvtp 👤 Sergey Bieliayev is an engineer with 14 years of expertise in game development, porting, graphics software, and technical leadership. Currently leading PixelAnt Games' porting/3rd-party division (CollabCrew), he specializes in project evaluation and estimation, architecture design and prototyping, as well as hands-on development for challenging projects. Throughout his career, he has successfully contributed to titles such as Dying Light 2, Chernobylite, Nightingale, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Crime Boss: Rockay City, and Trove, among others, across multiple platforms, including PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation. 👤 Sylwester Służałek is a Senior Software Engineer at PixelAnt Games with 10 years of experience in gamedev. Helping clients to develop or port their games while continuously growing as a technical leader. Has contributed to titles such as Chernobylite, Nightingale, and Crime Boss: Rockay City. 🕹️ Topic: Porting Chernobylite to Nintendo Switch 👾 Porting the huge, 3D-scanned world of Chernobylite to the limited hardware capabilities of the Nintendo Switch was a challenging task. This talk will explain how we successfully preserved the original gameplay experience by implementing effective optimizations and smart workarounds. Achieving this required not only a solid technical approach but also clear planning and robust risk management. Most of the solutions presented are platform-agnostic and can be applied to any Unreal Engine project.

🎮 Meet Paulina Pyzioł, our Game Industry Acceleration Coordinator, at DevGAMM Gdańsk 2025! 🕹️ Don't miss the chance to network!

🎮 Boris Schneider-Johne (Senior Product Manager, CipSoft GmbH) will be a speaker at Digital Dragons Conference 2025. 🎫 Buy your ticket: https://lnkd.in/dsfSpvtp 👤 Boris Schneider-Johne is one of Germanys "elder statesmen" of Videogames. Having started with C64 programming in the early eighties, he was editor and editor-in-chief at two of the most successful magazines in Europe, Power Play and PC Player. In 1986 he decided that these new point-and-click adventures could be translated and single handedly created a German version of Murder on the Missisippi (Activision). This led to a new job translating most LucasFilm Games titles, including The Secret of Monkey Island, and producing localizations into French, Italian and even Hebrew. He also translated games and consulted for Electronic Arts, Interplay and Origin. In 1997 he joined Microsoft to get away from videogames. That plan failed when he was hired into the Xbox team in 2001. Over a ten year period he held jobs like PR Manager and Product Manager, was deeply involved in the European launches of Xbox Live and Kinect (from both the technical and localization side) and ran launch campaigns for titles like Forza Motorsports. He also did video shows for Xbox Live under his gaming nickname KugelBlitz. 2011 saw the move out of Xbox to the Windows Marketing team, leading a Windows 7 upgrade campaign, the Windows 8 and finally the Windows 10 consumer launch. For the "PC Life Tour", a unique concept at retail with a PR twist, he received the "Circle of Excellence Platinum Award" in 2013, the highest employee recognition at Microsoft. From July 2016 to Feburary 2022 he worked in the Microsoft GPS division as a Senior Partner Development Manager, helping software companies to use the cloud (Microsoft Azure) for Artificial Intelligence projects. In September 2024 Boris, to his own surprise, went back to work for a Computergames Studio: CipSoft in Regensburg, Bavaria. You can find Boris on IMDB and Mobygames and the german-language Wikipedia. 🕹️ Topic: How to Handle Money: 20 Years of Real Life Experience 👾 Tibia is not only one of the longest running MMORPGs - it actually still is on a steady growth path. The commercial success is intertwined with decision around the ways players pay. Learn from twenty years of experience of what people actually want to pay for, how they pay for it and especially what they do NOT do. Plus - how to avoid fraud, how to lower costs and how to usefully integrate Blockchain into an existing game.

🎮 Together, let's welcome Mikołaj Kurcin (DevOps Engineer, Flying Wild Hog), the next speaker at Digital Dragons Conference 2025. 🎫 Buy your ticket: https://lnkd.in/dsfSpvtp 👤 He is an experienced DevOps professional with 2.5 years at Flying Wild Hog, where he contributed to the development of games such as Evil West and Shadow Warrior 3. Currently, he is involved in the production of new titles at FWH. He has strong expertise in CI/CD and cloud solutions, particularly with AWS, as evidenced by his certifications: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, and Associate Cloud Engineer Certification. Additionally, he is supporting Blank Game Studios as a DevOps engineer. Prior to this, he spent 4 years working as a Unity Developer at companies such as Fuero Games and TenSquareGames, where he gained substantial experience in game development and managing development processes. 🕹️ Topic: IaC for Game Developers: Configuring, Versioning, and Automating Workflows 👾 Learn how to harness the power of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to streamline your game development workflows. This talk will cover, among other topics, building and versioning pipelines with Groovy, managing on-premise settings using Ansible, and optimizing development with Docker and Docker Compose. Discover how to automate and version everything for efficient, scalable, and collaborative game development.

🎮 Jochen Peketz (User Research Manager, Ubisoft) will be a speaker at Digital Dragons Conference 2025. 🎫 Buy your ticket: https://lnkd.in/dsfSpvtp 👤 He has been in the games industry for 25 years in different roles. He started as a level designer for the notorious German RPG Gothic. Since then, he has worked as an editor for gaming console magazines and as a level designer for different companies. For the past 15 years, he has been leading a user research team for Ubisoft Düsseldorf, which he built up from scratch, supporting about 50+ games with user research studies. His motivation is to find out how to make better games to make players happy. 🕹️ Topic: User Research and Insights for Indies and Small Businesses/Publishers 👾 Indies and small businesses struggle with running decent User Research for several reasons. Besides the financial aspect, missing knowledge and experience keep them away from gaining valuable insights about their players. Learn which methodologies can be applied to your project and how.

🎮 Promote your game at Digital Dragons Conference 2025 - secure your spot in Indie Zone! 🕹️ Indie Zone is an expo space where indie game developers will vie for the attention of publishers, investors, media and leading game developers. Each exhibitor will have a fully equipped booth, and everyone can also participate in Digital Dragons Arena (pitching session) and Indie Dragons Awards (competition for the best indie game). 🏆 Webedia Poland will award the winner of Indie Dragons Awards with a promotional campaign on GRYOnline.pl worth 25,000 PLN, and AMD - Technology & Indie Zone Partner of the conference - will award a hardware prizes. 👾 Don't miss this incredible opportunity to showcase your indie game at the prestigious ICE Kraków Congress Centre. 🎯 Apply by the end of March: https://lnkd.in/dxSBKmK5

🎮 Michał Dębek (CEO and Head of Research, Try Evidence), Joanna Buganik (Senior Partner, Try Evidence), and Marcelina Król (Game Researcher, Try Evidence) will be speakers at Digital Dragons Conference 2025. 🎫 Buy your ticket: https://lnkd.in/dsfSpvtp 👤Michał is an experienced gaming researcher, PhD in psychology, and market analyst, he has worked on the research and analysis of dozens of games for various studios and publishers, including CD PROJEKT RED, 11 bit studios, Bloober Team, Plaion, and many others. In the 2000s, he served as the marketing director at Techland before becoming an assistant professor at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Wroclaw, where he launched and led the Consumer Psychology specialization for several years. Since co-founding Try Evidence in 2019, he has been deeply fascinated by uncovering gamer behavior and preferences, exploring trends in gaming culture, and conducting strategic analyses of the gaming market. 👤 Joanna is a a game user researcher and marketing strategist with a knack for spotting hidden opportunities to capture the market and win the hearts of players. She’s collaborated with Blizzard Entertainment, CD PROJEKT, GOG.COM, QLOC, Techland, Activision, KONAMI, Disney, and Larian Studios, and she actively works with the indie communities in Poland and Portugal. She never stops learning and always says, 'I’ll check it out.' 👤Marcelina is a psychologist (MSc) with gaming research experience credited in six games. At Try Evidence, she conducts research in Game User Research and supports the team with her extensive knowledge of clinical psychology. She has a strong appreciation for how games can depict characters' deeper psychological aspects and believes gameplay can offer therapeutic benefits, helping players process their inner experiences. 🕹️ Topic: Bridging Motivational Psychology and Game Design 👾 Explore the fresh approach to gamer motivation - Psychogenic Equilibrium Theory of Gamer Motivation (PETGaMo), based on global research Gaming Sense 2024-2025. Learn how motivators like autonomy, social bonds, and catharsis shape player preferences and impact game design. Gain actionable insights and a developer's "cheat sheet" to align mechanics with gamer psychology, ensuring deeper engagement and satisfaction. Perfect for creators aiming to design games that truly resonate with players.

🎮 Celia Hodent (Game UX Strategist / PhD in Psychology) will be a speaker at Digital Dragons Conference 2025. 🎫 Buy your ticket: https://lnkd.in/dsfSpvtp 👤 Celia Hodent is recognized as a leader in the application of user experience (UX) and cognitive science in the game industry. Celia holds a PhD in psychology and has fifteen years of experience in the development of UX strategy and processes in video game studios. Through her work at Ubisoft, LucasArts, and as Director of UX at Epic Games (Fortnite), she has contributed to many projects across multiple platforms, from PC to consoles, mobile, and VR. Celia is also the founder & chair of the Game UX Summit, advisor for the GDC UX Summit, member of the Foresight Committee at CNIL (National Commission on Informatics and Liberty, an independent French administrative regulatory body). She currently works as an independent consultant, helping studios increase the likelihood of their games to be engaging and successful. Celia also provides guidance on the topics of playful learning, ethics (founder of ethicalgames.org), unconscious bias, and inclusion in tech. Celia is the author of The Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX can Impact Video Game Design (2017), The Psychology of Video Games (2020), What UX Really Is: Introducing a Mindset to Great Experiences (2021), and co-editor of Game Usability: Advice from the Experts for Advancing UX Strategy and Practice in Videogames (2022). 🕹️ Topic: UX as a Strategy in Game Development 👾 User experience has become trendy in the game industry, yet it's mostly approached very narrowly, around a game's UI. UX is much broader than a good UI, it's primarily a mindset that affects all aspects of game development. This talk is about approaching UX in its broad sense and how to set it as a strategy in a game project and at the studio, from clearly defining the experience for players all the way to setting studio's core values, such as accessibility and ethics.

🎮 Our next speaker at Digital Dragons Conference 2025 is Moazam Dzhan Fazli, Gameplay Programmer from CD PROJEKT RED! 🎫 Buy your ticket: https://lnkd.in/dsfSpvtp 👤 Dzhan Fazli is a Gameplay Programmer at CD PROJEKT RED and currently a member of The Witcher 4 gameplay team. He joined CDPR in mid-2021, contributing to the development and enhancement of gameplay systems for Cyberpunk 2077 patches 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0, as well as the Phantom Liberty expansion. His work has focused on areas such as NPC behavior, perks, the movement system, quickhacking, and more. 🕹️ Topic: Slide Dash Jump - Simple Approach to Elevating Traversal in Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 👾 Traversal is one of the core features of most video games. Yet, it is often overlooked. This presentation introduces a few key pillars that can elevate traversal mechanics—focus areas that, when well-developed, make movement fluid and enjoyable. Building on these pillars, a simple and practical approach to improving movement is presented, with Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 serving as a case study to demonstrate how this approach can enhance an existing traversal system.