Develop Conference keynotes announced

Dave Jones, Mark Healey and Jonathan Smith are among the many games industry luminaries set to keynote this year’s Develop Conference.

Taking place at the Brighton Metropole hotel from July 14th to 16th, the conference this year sees changes to reflect the rapidly diversifying field of game development.

In addition to the general keynote provided by Dave Jones, as reported here, the first day of the conference – now dubbed ‘Evolve’ – will see keynotes from Acclaim creative director Dave Perry, who’ll talk about ‘Resetting the Game’, and former Xbox Live Arcade portfolio manager-turned-consultant David Edery will present a talk called ‘The Long Tail of Games: How digital distribution changes everything. Maybe.’

The Art track will see a keynote from Kareem Ettourney and Mark Healey, co-founders of Media Molecule, on how they created the ‘collage of visuals that mixes the ancient and the contemporary’ in the critically-celebrated LittleBigPlanet.

Microsoft Games Studios’ director of audio, Guy Whitmore, will headline the conference’s Audio track, where he’ll talk about ‘The Runtime Studio in your Console’; while the business track will be keynoted by Mythic’s Jeff Hickman, who’ll speak about the challenges developers face as they leave the boxed-product world and into the online space.

Jonathan Smith, development director at Traveller’s Tales, will provide the Design track’s keynote, with his talk ‘Building LEGO Worlds – online, offline and everything in between’, in which he’ll draw upon user-testing research and market analysis to show the evolution of the LEGO games through licensed brands and MMO development.

Nokia’s Mark Ollila will provide the keynote for the Mobile track, in which he’ll delve into the development of Nokia’s ‘Dance Fabulous’. Finally, Ubisoft associate producer Lisa Charman and Hansoft’s Patric Palm will headline the Production track with a talk focused on how Agile project management applies to ‘multi-site, multi-cultural and multi-lingual projects’.

”The concept of individual track keynotes was successfully introduced at last year’s event in recognition of the increasing sophistication of the varying disciplines within games development,” said Andy Lane managing director of Tandem Events.

“This year, there will also be a keynote presentation dedicated to mobile games development – a look at personalised content from Nokia and two keynote addresses for the brand new Evolve conference – a guide to the future of casual gaming and how to succeed with digital distribution.”