Conference Map & Schedule
Doors Open, Opening Remarks and Student Orientation
On arrival make your way to the Final Stage for orientation before your group is released and able to attend any of the workshops and activations across the level up hall and the six different additional rooms.
Character Design: Create Your Game’s Heroes!
In this workshop, students will learn techniques to design and create gaming characters! We will cover how to use simple shapes to show a character's personality, how to choose the right colors to hint at their role (hero or villain), and how to come up with their basic moves and powers. By the end of the hour, you will have designed your own original game characters!
2D Art: Pokemon
Game Design Hosted by Code in Schools
These sessions are Game Jam Prep for the 2-day Game Jam ran by the Code in Schools.
How to Get Started with Unity (Unity 101) Workshop
A primer for the basics of the Unity Engine.
How to Get Started with Unity (Unity 101) Workshop
A primer for the basics of the Unity Engine.
2D Art: Dragon Ball Z
Storyboarding for Games: Plan the Action!
Creating a storyboard for your video game is a vital part of game design. In this workshop, you'll learn how to depict your characters, plot points, tone, actions, gameplay functionality, and any other aspects of the game. We will focus on two key skills: Framing (choosing what the player sees), Camera Placement (using high or low angles to create drama), and Pacing (controlling the speed and flow of the action between panels). You will finish the workshop with a short storyboard for your game!
2D Art: Sonic
Character Design: Create Your Game’s Heroes!
In this workshop, students will learn techniques to design and create gaming characters! We will cover how to use simple shapes to show a character's personality, how to choose the right colors to hint at their role (hero or villain), and how to come up with their basic moves and powers. By the end of the hour, you will have designed your own original game characters!
Lunch Break
Time to grab some food and activations across the Level Up Hall.
3D Modeling Workshop
Attendees will have a crash course in 3D Modeling for different video games.
Game Design Hosted by Code in Schools
These sessions are Game Jam Prep for the 2-day Game Jam ran by the Code in Schools.
Welcome Mixer
Professional Attendees get a chance for an early happy hour to meet the speakers and other guests attending the conference.
Doors Open
Doors open to start the first day of the professional conference!
Opening Remarks and Keynote
Opening remarks will be made from the showrunners, followed by a keynote from Will Gee.
#BLUD Post-Mortem
An in-depth analysis and retrospective by the lead designer of #BLUD discussing what went right and wrong during the development process.
Women In Games
Come join us for a power conversation about the experiences and career pathways for women in the video game industry.
Meet the moderator: Adeola Ajani. Meet the panel Members - Jen MacLean, Michelle Menard, Heather Cerlan
Transitioning from Game Leader to Business Leader: a veteran’s playbook
Kenneth E. Lawrence’s “Transitioning from Game Leader to Business Leader” bridges the worlds of gaming, military service, and organizational leadership. Drawing from decades of experience, he shows how raid strategy, cooldown management, and wipe recovery mirror the realities of leading teams, managing risk, and sustaining growth. Through clear parallels and practical frameworks like OODA loops and AARs, Lawrence offers a playbook for scaling teams and communicating with clarity under pressure. This session is for anyone who’s ever led a raid, run a mission, or managed a project—and is ready to level up their leadership in the real world.
M&T Bank Presents - Sackbird Studios: From 100 Years in AAA Games to Self-Funding an Indie Studio
If you’re dreaming of launching your own game or scaling the one you’ve already started, this conversation will unpack the ups and downs of turning a passion project into a growing successful studio!
Meet the moderator: Jim Peterson Jr. Meet the panel Members - Doug Carroll, Rob Ballantyne, David Worley
Game Jam Hosted by Code in Schools
The start of the 2-day Game Jam ran by Code in Schools.
11:00 am - 5:00 pm @ Boss LevelVIP Activations
Private VIP room to encourage conversations between our high-level guests in both the game development industry and regional leaders.
Elevate Your Career with Unity
This talk covers Unity's Elevate program and its Universal Job Profiles and Employer Advisory Board. Bradston will share his story of getting into the Game Development industry and how important it is to leverage the resources and community you have available to you.
Creature Design
Kevin Stumme will discuss creature design from an artist's perspective. The process of creature design and making creature art in 3D, covering the key goals of the design process, the thought put into each design, and steps for achieving a cohesive finished piece.
Funding Indie Games
This round table will cover different funding models and approaches for indie games.
Co-op and Non-profit Game Studios
Explore and discuss alternative studio structures in game development, including cooperative, nonprofit, and community-based models. Learn how these approaches differ from traditional studios in organization, funding, and creative decision-making, and how they can foster collaboration, equity, and sustainability in the games industry.
The Video Game Writer’s Guide to Surviving an Industry That Hates You: A User’s Manual
For over a quarter of a century, Richard Dansky has worked as a game writer, and during that time he has come to two conclusions. One, that the industry hates writers, and two, that there are things you can do about it. Join him for a deep dive into his new book, The Video Game Writer’s Guide to Surviving an Industry That Hates You, and walk out better armed to protect your work and your career.
Lunch Break
Time to grab some food and attend any activations across the Level Up Hall and the six different additional rooms.
Games for Training and Education: Historical Perspective, Practical Aspects, and Future Predictions
Panelists: Henry Kelly, Elizabeth Newbury, Catherine Croft. Panelists will discuss why they believed games are relevant for training, what evidence they gathered and what practical things they learned in the past 25 years, and finally, how they would proceed in today’s world if they were starting a game for learning or training.
Portfolio Review-Art
Get your art portfolios reviewed by professional artists in the games industry.
From AAA to Indie
The co-founder of NEARstudios will discuss the team's experience moving from AAA development to indie.
Game Design Workshop
Focused toward juniors and students, this workshop takes attendees through two sample design challenges: the first as a solo dev covering the basic steps of how to make a playable analog game, and then second breaking up into groups of 2-4 to work on a project for a bit longer.
Game Music for Ara: History Untold
A discussion of dynamic music implementation from the Audio Director of Civilization and Ara.
Meet the presenters - Michael Curran, Phillip Klassen
The Power of Prototyping with Visual Scripting in Unity
Introduction to Unity's Visual Scripting Tool and how it can be used in prototyping and game development.
From Blockbusters to Basement Builds: Lessons in AAA and Indie Development
This talk demonstrates the similarities between AAA and indie game production, including creative agility, the ability to wear multiple hats, and resourcefulness when budgets are tight.
Venture Capital Funding Panel
A panel bringing together Venture Capitalists in gaming and tech to discuss what they look for when deciding to provide funding and how game developers can leverage these insights to get capital for their projects.
Meet the panel Members - Chad Stender
Pitch Competition
An opportunity for 5 dev studios to pitch their company to series of industry and expert judges powered by Gener8tor.
Meet the presenters - Lucien Parsons, Ezra Szanton, Claudius Taylor
Game Your Future After Party
After a fun evening bringing everyone together for networking, gaming and bonding over the connections made.
Doors Open
Doors open to start the final day of the professional conference!
Pre-Production: The Lies We Tell
A close look at preproduction and the array of challenges faced by art directors during the early stages of game development, including management, vision, and inspiring the team, with a focus on the preproduction of XCOM and XCOM 2.
Tools Development for Indie Games Roundtable
This roundtable will discuss of the benefits, design, implementation, and pitfalls of tools development for indie games whether you're using tools internally for your studio's own games or producing them for use by others.
Application of The Cerny Method to Games About Reality: How to Involve Subject Matter Experts in your Search for the Coolest New Game Mechanics
Creating an innovative video game requires collaboration among a team with diverse skillsets and a prototyping process that is flexible in time and design goals. Creating an innovative video game about science or any aspect of the real world requires an even more diverse team and a few more design goals. Learning is the funnest activity. We all love learning by playing with and breaking things. We learn the most by breaking well designed systems. We love discovering the answer to a problem by gathering clues at our own pace, by discovering how parts of the system work and by pasting them together. Communication is vital for creating game mechanics that are innovative, engaging as true to the learning goals. Dr. Stegman will discuss what she has learned about fostering productive communication among the diverse pre-production team, providing examples of personal failures, successes, funny stories and examples of other team’s successes.
Game Jam Hosted by Code in Schools
The continuation of the 2-day Game Jam run by Code in Schools.
VIP Activations
Private VIP room to encourage conversations between our high-level guests in both the game development industry and regional leaders.
Unreal Blueprints Tech Demo
This talk provides the groundwork that should allow C++ Unreal Engine developers to construct new Blueprint nodes that can be much more powerful and user friendly than a simple C++ function that has been tagged Blueprint Callable.
Freelancing For Indies Roundtable
This roundtable will discuss the current state of freelancing for indie developers, tips, and gotchas to watch out for.
VBA For Designers
A technical talk for game designers, this will cover topics such as how to write simple calculators for QA, testing out balance math and running 10000s of automated trials, to full on simulators that model the game code in VBA in Excel.
Running a 46-Person Game Jam Team
Rick Williams will discuss the challenges and triumphs of organizing and running a 46-person team in a game jam.
Lunch Break
Time to grab food and attend different activations across the Level Up Hall and the six different additional rooms.
Secrets of Steam, Marketing, and Game Development in 30 minutes or less
Find out the mysteries about Steam... Peer into the "black box" that is video game marketing... and discover what fundamentals are key to making successful game design! All this condensed into a 30 minute presentation with examples from real world games that are on steam or coming out soon. This is "Open Source Publishing".
Indie Networking
Make your way to the Indie Showcase section of the Level Up Hall to network and try out the newest indie games developed by indie studios on the east coast.
Player Motivations: How to target your audience
As game budgets increase, a game that doesn't resonate with its intended target audience can have devastating consequences for publishers and developers. This talk will look at motivators for playing games and how they map to specific game types. This will lead to how developers can create "taste maps" to target their audience and help determine what game features are the most important.
Game Jam Showcase
The finale for the Game Jam with a showcase of the amazing work that was developed over the course of 2 days.
Planning Without Over-Planning
This talk will go over fundamentals of effective planning and adapting the process for different situations. The talk also aims to go over practical techniques people can use in game development and also in day to day life. The goal is to show the importance of good planning processes, how to avoid the traps of over-planning, and how to keep plans evolving without getting in the way.
Market Your Team, Not Your Idea
Funding has always been a challenge, but teams are faced with even more challenges now in our new post-covid and post-VC-content meltdown. How do you get noticed? What are publishers looking for? Do VCs even make sense anymore to pursue? Crowdfunding? Angels? What does sustainable game development look like now?
Fireside Chat
Join us for a fireside chat talking about the state of technology and what place does the video game industry have in it.
Nonsense! It's Called Gabble!
Nonsense speech, aka ‘Gabble’ in video games, may come across initially as simple or easy to create, however, there is a wide variety of this speech that exists with different function, purpose, and complexity. Creating effective and unique gabble reflecting game style and design intention can be a daunting task.
Closing Remarks
Closing remarks to be done by the show runners and a look into the future of the Game Your Future Conference for 2026 and beyond.