We announce the names of the Digital Dragons conference

11 marca 2022

This part of Europe’s biggest games industry conference is still searching for lecturers – you can still submit your own talk. The organizers planned 6 thematic tracks: Game Design, Business & Marketing, Art in Games, Programming & Technology, Team Management, Mobile and F2P. Here are the lecturers!

This year, a group of curators are working to ensure the quality of speeches and attracting the best speakers in the business. They keep watch over the different thematic tracks and direct the process of building the whole program. The curators of the different blocks are:

Business and marketing – Marta Adamska (PTW)
Art in games – Kacper Niepokólczycki (CD Projekt RED) and Konrad Czernik (Flying Wild Hog)
Production and Leadership – Błażej Żywiczyński (Moon Studios GmbH)
Mobile and F2P – Mariusz Gąsiewski (Google)

We are still receiving submissions. The Advisory Board and curators have their hands full. We can finally announce the names that will visit this year’s Dragons’ scene. We especially encourage you to go meet with the representatives of gaming’s biggest sales platform, Steam, who will try to answer the most important questions of the DD audience. This year we’d also like to underscore the lecture by People Can Fly’s Roland Lesterlin – producer and director who worked on such games as Outriders, Just Cause 3 or The Chronicles of Riddick.

Błażej Grygiel, Digital Dragons Programme Coordinator

You want to share your knowledge and experience with others?

Submit your speech now!

Meet this year’s speakers

Before becoming the creative director of People Can Fly New York, Roland Lesterlin worked at the publishing wing of Atari, as game director for Avalanche Studios and creative director at Defiant Studios. As part of Atari, he worked on such titles as Ghostbusters: The Video Game, Backyard Sports, Codename Panzers – Cold War, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Star Trek Online and Champions Online. At Avalanche, he helped form the New York studio and directed Just Cause 3. With Defiant Studios,he worked on L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files for Rockstar Games and on Warframe for Digital Extremes. During more than two years at People Can Fly, he helped out on Outriders and is currently keeping watch over the studio’s new, unannounced project.

Isaque Sanches is a game designer and technical artist of universal experience. Currently he is a senior game designer at Ubisoft Redlynx. He is also the founder of notagamestudio (twitter.com/notagamestudio) and co-founder of A Ludoteca (twitter.com/aludoteca). Currently he lives in Finland, but he gained much of his experience in Switzerland and Portugal. Isaque will visit with a lecture titled “3 Math Tricks to Improve Your Game”.

André Schenini Moreira comes to us from Brazil. As managing partner at FMA.legal, he works in an advisory and legal capacity in cases involving IT, video games and e-sports. His lecture will touch upon many important questions which developers, publishers and investors should keep in mind when preparing a publishing agreement.

Our next guest will be Tor Frick, currently the creative director at Uppsala’s Neon Giant. The last project he worked on was The Ascent. Before beginning work at Neon Giant, Tor worked as a technical and art director on AAA games such as Wolfenstein: The New Order and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. Throughout the years, Tor helped on such titles as Gears of War, Doom, Far Cry, Rage and many more. His lecture will be about the artistic process behind the urban landscape of The Ascent, Neon Giant’s latest.

Martyna Neumann-Baranowska is a marketing manager and has a portfolio of over 30 published mobile games, on top of experience as a marketing mentor at the Digital Dragons Incubator. Mirosław Manelski is an experienced entrepreneur, leader of Neurodio and graduate of the Digital Dragons Incubator. He coordinated many research and development projects regarding developing cognitive abilities through video games. They will share their thoughts on the borderline between business and science. Basing on neuroscientific knowledge on human attention and memory, they will present the latest discoveries and research that can help answer a very important question: “How to design the perfect advertisements to draw in your audience and future players?”

You will find the names of all lecturers at the Digital Dragons website.

The Digital Dragons conference will take place on May 16-17 2022.

Tickets available here

Enter an Arena for innovative projects

This year, the conference will also be an arena for startup presentations. Digital Dragons Arena i san event dedicated to developers looking for investors or publishers. The teams to submit their pitches will have a chance to present before a panel of experts. On the line is the opportunity to gain a business partner. Apart from that, all participants can expect quality feedback on their projects, exchange of ideas in an international space, while the best of them – to meet a business partner or join the acceleration programme ran over the next months by the Digital Dragons Accelerator.

Pitch your game

We plan to build a marketplace on the borderline between the Digital Dragons conference and Digital Dragons Accelerator a space for two sides of one coin to meet: intriguing, preselected gaming studios additionally prepared by us and interesting, promising, open to ideas publishers and investors, including investors from other industries. We want to create a shorter way for good studios to reach publishers and investors, and vice versa: a shortcut to good studios for publishers and investors’ scouts. The DD Arena is under the patronage of the Digital Dragons Incubator and Accelerator teams. We do not treat the DD Arena as a one-off, but as the introduction of a longform cooperation as part of the incubation and acceleration programmes within the Digital Dragons ecosystem. Thus, we’d like to already invite studios actively looking for investors and publishers – and investors and publishers actively looking for gaming studios.

Łukasz Leszczyński, DD Accelerator chief

For years, the conference has been attracting industry professionals who want to follow current trends. It’s the perfect place to find investors, publishers, top developers, small and big studios together, or to check out last year’s gaming hits and indie propositions from all over the world.

Partners:

Third Kind Games is the Main Sponsor of the event: an independent studio with over 60 employees based in Leamington Spa, United Kingdom, founded on AAA experience by senior developers from Activision (FreeStyleGames) in 2016. Third Kind Games has also recently expanded into Poland, launching a new studio in early 2022. Third Kind Games has experience working with some of the largest companies in the games industry, developing critically acclaimed games and franchises for the likes of Activision, Sony, Nintendo, Codemasters, Crytek and, most recently, Mythical Games. Third Kind Games is the lead developer of Blankos Block Party by Mythical Games, a ground-breaking Play to Earn party game featuring NFT characters and accessories, providing players with proof of verified ownership and authenticity and enabling true player-to-player trading through Mythical Marketplace. Third Kind Games is also currently working on its own IP, alongside an unannounced project with a high profile industry name.

Małopolska Region is the Main Partner of the event: the regional authorities implementing a range of projects that serve innovation and economic development of Małopolska, and its attractiveness for investors. Małopolska is a perfect location for running business, particularly based on new technologies.

Kraków Technology Park (KPT) has contributed to the development of proper conditions for the development of entrepreneurship for 20 years. For 10 years it has managed the Technology Incubator for IT start-ups. The KPT inspires the start-up community by organising numerous events including workshops, hackathons, and conferences that help to verify business concepts. Besides these, it runs KPT ScaleUp acceleration programme. Companies may count on the support of seed funds, tax reliefs offered by the Polska Strefa Inwestycji (Polish Investment Zone) programme, and preferential office space rental conditions. The KPT is particularly focused on Industry 4.0 and the video games industry. It is the leader of the hub4industry consortium aiming to provide comprehensive support for companies wishing to implement Industry 4.0 solutions. The KPT also organises Digital Dragons – the leading games industry event in Europe.