raków Technology Park, the organizing party behind Digital Dragons 2017 conference, taking place in Kraków, Poland on May 22-13, announces three further names of the invited speakers. Remedy Entertainment’s Senior Graphics Programmer Tatu Aalto, Sony’s Santa Monica Studio vet Brian Upton, and the man who envisioned the original Mafia game, Daniel Vavra, will give their talks at this biggest B2P games industry event in Central Europe.
Tatu Alto is the person in charge of the Remedy Entertainment’s in-house Northlight graphics engine powering such games as Quantum Break. In this talk, aptly titled “How to build pretty pixels”, Aalto will go over the rendering stages in the studio’s productions on a high level. The presentation will give an idea of what is required for drawing a frame in a game and how to do this in Northlight. He will offer his insight after spending a significant amount of resources to upgrade the engine and rendering pipeline for the next-generation – all to enable realistic worlds that feel alive and support Remedy’s story-telling aspirations.
For 14 years Brian Upton worked as a Senior Game Designer at Sony’s Santa Monica Studio, where he collaborated with external teams on titles such as Fat Princess, Warhawk, Sorcery, Everybody Has Gone to the Rapture, Bound and Here They Lie. Prior to joining Sony, he was the creative director at Red Storm Entertainment where he pioneered the tactical shooter genre as the lead designer of Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon. His freelance company Game On The Rails advises worldwide clients on pitching, prototyping, design, narrative, and production. He specializes in creative problem-solving, helping teams ship their games under tight time or budget pressure. He’ll be giving a speech on building limited-interactivity narrative experiences that will satisfy the core gamer.
How to carelessly write an epic story? How to arrange for motion capture of four hours of cut scenes with more than 50 actors? How to direct the recording of nearly 60 hours of voiceovers? And the kicker: how to manage all that in only a few months? There are few people in the world who can give an educated answer to all these questions. One of them is Daniel Vávra, who achieved all that in his 2002 hit – Mafia, a game remembered to deliver one of the most cinematic experiences and believable settings in the history of gaming.
