Full Program

Enjoy a light snack and some coffee or tea at the Glass Egg Central Bar, brought to you by Presenting Sponsor, Glass Egg Digital Media

Victor Lucas

CEO/Founder

EP Media Ltd.

Join us alongside Victor Lucas at the Technicolor Mainstage, to kick off the 7th Annual External Development Summit (XDS)

Joe Nickolls

Vice President & General Manager

Electronic Arts

Victor Lucas

CEO/Founder

EP Media Ltd.

Joe Nickolls is VP and GM of Maxis, a division of Electronic Arts. Joe oversees the development of industry-leading titles such as The Sims, one of the world’s top simulation games and top ten selling franchises in gaming history. Sit back and settle in as our host Victor Lucas discusses Joe’s career beginning as a Promotions Manager for the likes of Elton John, his 19 years spent making games for Radical, Microsoft, Capcom and EA, and his take on the evolution of creating content en masse for the world’s biggest and best AAA games.

Dedicated time to connect with other XDS 2019 attendees!

Curtis Cherrington

Senior Manager,
Worldwide External Development

Electronic Arts

Negotiation definition: 1. obtain or bring about by discussion. 2. necessary evil for external development. If you’ve ever had to negotiate a contract, rates, or changes to an existing engagement, but felt that you were lacking the experience or skills to ensure a win/win scenario, then let your worries end here. In this presentation, Curtis Cherrington, Worldwide External Development Manager for Electronic Arts, will share the techniques and strategies from both vendor and publisher perspectives that have enabled him to successfully negotiate more than $200 million worth of successful contracts and engagements.

Carla Rylance

External Development Manager

The Coalition - XBOX Game Studios

It’s the end of the milestone and it’s time to tackle the arduous data analysis. Such a chore, right? Not necessarily! It may not be the task that’s the chore, but way you’re approaching it. This session will cover the importance of coherent organization of your administration and how a spring-clean of your documentation can not only increase your efficiency, but also spark joy in its completion and upkeep. We’ll also cover how compacting your External Development administration footprint increases capacity, data accuracy, transparency, as well as generating intrigue from your internal and external teams. By the end of this session you’ll take away practices to help you evolve from dreading “KPI Friday” to the exclaiming “KPI Fri-YAY”

Daniel Gomez Cortés

Managing Director

NXA Studios

Brendan James George

Lead Artist, Character

NetherRealms Studio

We discovered that hard-to-come-by results are achieved when we focus primarily on the other guy’s big concerns. Our intention is to encourage attendees to effectively reimagine the way that they approach ongoing issues with communication, iteration, poor quality deliverables, financial solvency, loss of talent and…you get the idea. We will share the communication-centered practices that we have utilized over the last 3+ years to help bring brilliant solutions, by FIRST solving our partners’ main concerns, before our own. We will also explore the probability that most of these problems are only symptomatic – and therefore can be addressed by implementing some seemingly counterintuitive solutions. And there might be a plot twist or two along the way!

Casey Wu

Senior Producer

343 Industries - Xbox Game Studios

David Hiscock

Principal Software Engineer

SkyBox Labs Inc.

Most modern Triple-A game development relies on effective co-development relationships to successfully ship a high quality product. Learn how 343 Industries and SkyBox Labs partnered together to ship Halo 5, Halo 5 Forge on PC and Halo 5’s Xbox One X update as well as build the team to tackle the next game – Halo Infinite. Casey Wu and David Hiscock will be walking through how both studios evolved their culture, development philosophies, process, and technologies to become better partners over their five year history together.

Enjoy a refreshment at the Glass Egg Central Bar, brought to you by Presenting Sponsor, Glass Egg Digital Media

Dedicated time to connect with other XDS 2019 attendees!

One of our Presenting Sponsors, Keywords Studios, brings you our coveted Welcome Reception! Come by the Parq Patio for our “Glow” inspired event complete with a loop artist, delicious eats, and magnificent views of Vancouver. Year over year, it has become the clear Welcome Reception presented by Keywords Studios is definitely not to be missed!

Enjoy a light snack and some coffee or tea at the Glass Egg Central Bar, brought to you by Presenting Sponsor, Glass Egg Digital Media

Dedicated time to connect with other XDS 2019 attendees!

Sam Carlisle

Senior Director, Partner Relations

X Box Game Studios

Gilles Langourieux

CEO

Virtuos

Andrew Brown

CMO

Keywords Studios PLC

Laurent Lugbull

Category Manager - Outsourcing & External Development

Ubisoft

Andrew Ponomar

CEO

Enter Capital

Ron Ashtiani

Consultant

Ron Ashtiani

How are mergers and acquisitions changing the market? What does the future look like, and what can we learn from other tech sectors with matured consolidation? On a personal level, what’s the impact and experience of acquisition on the acquired studios? How has the perspective from the hiring publishers evolved? We’ve assembled a diverse panel of senior experts to cover all sides of the equation. From active M&A companies, to the acquired studios and the hiring developers; this panel promises to provide a unique insight into one of the driving trends in External Development today.

Jeff Kuipers

Visual Effects Director

Alchemy VFX

Discover how Electronics Arts has used external development for real-time visual effects on AAA mobile titles such as Command & Conquer: Rivals, and Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Join Jeff Kuipers (Visual Effects Director) as he breaks down the complexities of developing real-time VFX for the increasingly demanding platform of mobile games. He will share his insights from working remotely as VFX Director and Lead VFX Artist on several key EA titles, and share critical best practices for effective external VFX development.

Grayson Chalmers

Outsource Manager

Epic Games

With the quality bar, production volume, and speed needed for outsourcing stylized assets, it can be a challenge to make sure that everything stays on time, on budget, and on quality.  In this talk, we’ll cover how I’ve used Shotgun on past projects to track external assets throughout the creation process, hold asset dailies, broadcast feedback, track status, and how to integrate external partners into the Shotgun workflow.  We’ll be going over the parts of the process that worked and what aspects could have been improved.

Annelie Svensson

Distributed Development Manager

Ghost Games

Nicolas Repetto

Producer

elite3d

To successfully create the massive, complex world of Need for Speed using external teams, Ghost Games knew that the key was to form a collaborative and integrated partnership. But how is that done in practice and what are the tools needed? In this presentation by Annelie Svensson, Distributed Development Manager at Ghost games, and Nicolas Repetto, Producer at elite3d, they share how they built the pillars that made the engagement successful as well as their thoughts on the one big question – what makes a relationship work?

Patricio Spallatti

Creative Director

Globant

Raman Bassi

Producer

Electronic Arts

EA Sports UFC franchise has climbed the ranks to become a top-contending title within the distinguished history of EA Sports. For the UFC team, battling UI/UX can be as difficult as a reverse triangle choke. In this presentation we step into the Octagon to demonstrate how EA teams with external developer Globant to ground and pound the creative and technical challenges of UI/UX. Let’s get it on!

Frederic Tremblay

VP Strategic Accounts

BKOM Studios

Steve Woodzell

Senior UI Artist

Avalanche Studios

Alexis Russell

Producer

Avalanche Studios

In pivoting from the release of Just Cause 4 to its suite of DLCs in 2019, developer Avalanche Studios needed a partner to shoulder the burden of UI/UX creation as its team transitioned to post-launch development. Learn how BKOM Studios stepped into an ongoing production cycle and partnered with Avalanche to navigate the challenges of off-site collaboration, complex workflows and development for a proprietary engine.

Enjoy a refreshment at the Glass Egg Central Bar, brought to you by Presenting Sponsor, Glass Egg Digital Media

Join us for what may well be one of the most fun and adventurous XDS parties yet. We take you to Colony On Granville, a new hot location where you can play games, earn badges, and win the camp championship! The venue is multi-level, so there will be quieter spaces to have a conversation. Or if you prefer, dance until the early morning as you fuel up with craft beers and tasty food.

Enjoy a light snack and some coffee or tea at the Glass Egg Central Bar, brought to you by Presenting Sponsor, Glass Egg Digital Media

Dedicated time to connect with other XDS 2019 attendees!

(By Sign-up Only) XDS 2019 introduces Table-Topics, an interactive learning format in which small groups of participants gather around to deep-dive on important topics hosted by seasoned professionals. Invitations are sent to attendees on August 27, and participants are selected on a first come, first served basis. More info on the Table-Topics here.

Christian Buhl

Technical Product Manager

Riot Games

Hoa Bui

Senior Technical Artist

Riot Games

League of Legends has historically taken an ad hoc approach to working with external content developers, with individual teams engaging with individual vendors to develop individual pieces of art for our skins content. Over the past year, we’ve developed and executed on a holistic strategy towards external content development. We’ll discuss the approaches we’ve taken and results we’ve achieved with regard to vendor selection and management, the art feedback and content production process, and challenges around tools and distribution.

Jacquie Shriver Sladeck

Head of Studio

Side LA (Pole to Win America, Inc.)

In this talk, Jacquie Shriver Sladeck, Head of Studio at Side LA, discusses the points along the dialogue production pipeline where money and time are most efficiently invested. By defining and examining the pipeline, then analyzing real-world examples from large and small projects, Jacquie will demonstrate how investing in specific portions of the pipeline can improve the quality of the outcome with a fixed budget. She touches on the costly scheduling, casting, script writing and recording habits some teams face and offers tangible solutions for these unavoidable production situations. She also discusses investing time to avoid investing money – specifically for smaller budgets. To demonstrate these points, Jacquie will provide anonymous case studies and analysis of actual projects, including budget, scope and timeline.

Tyler West

Creative Director

West Studio

This presentation focuses on achieving quality with an external partner during the visual development process. Most of us know great concept art when we see it, but individually strong concept art doesn’t always translate to a clear and consistent visual identity that will resonate with players, nor do they always support the gameplay or inform the production pipeline. Over the last decade working on some of the most beloved franchises in the industry, Tyler West and his team at West Studio have developed a number of key insights and processes that other teams can easily implement when creating new interactive worlds – regardless of size or subject matter. In this presentation, Tyler will share approaches and best practices relating to being efficient in the early blue-sky stage, teamwork and how to properly build a visual development foundation that can eventually grow into a beloved and instantly recognizable franchise.

Dale Crowley

Creative Director

Somatone Interactive

The modern office is more and more becoming the home office. More and more work is being done on the Cloud. This presents new challenges to IT professionals and creatives, not to mention the increasing amount of proprietary and valuable IP that crosses the internet each day. Doing creative work on encrypted drives significantly hampers performance, and IP holders demand tight end to end security. This talk will present state of the art solutions to this problem, and will discuss in detail the following: SLAs, Data Breach Response Plans, Cloud based Asset Management, Governance of Asset Flow, and Local Encryption Techniques. The take away will be a clear end to end data security protocol when working with external developers.

Tina Merry

Senior Director

Tina Merry Consulting

Creativity and innovation are key pillars to success in game development as we strive to create exceptional entertainment experiences. Diversity in our teams, in global markets and within the organization are also an industry reality. However, without the skills represented by Cultural Intelligence (CQ), teams are at risk to achieve less optimal results related to operating costs, productivity and most importantly, innovation. Conversely, research indicates teams with high CQ can expect to significantly outperform any similarly skilled homogeneous team. This presentation will outline the CQ framework, explaining how cultural intelligence can be measured and developed in teams and individuals.

Enjoy a refreshment at the Glass Egg Central Bar, brought to you by Presenting Sponsor, Glass Egg Digital Media

Victor Lucas

CEO/Founder

EP Media Ltd.

Join us for the XDS Wrap Party + Awards! Enjoy live music, beverages, canapés and reminisce on the past three days at XDS. This is the perfect opportunity to say farewell, and find out who will go home with one of the XDS 2019 Gary awards!