Finishing off the first day of this year's Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2018 is the ConnectsX PC track. The afternoon of September 11th will see some of the smartest and interesting people from the PC games market.
Here is a look at what you can expect from these sessions at the Finland conference.
14:00
Designing Games For A Broader Audience
Karoliina Korppoo, Veikkaus
The ex-lead designer of City Skylines is going to be sharing her insight into designing for wide audiences. In contrast to her work at Colossal Order, Korppoo says Veikkaus design is done in collaboration. The audience for Veikkaus games is very unique. The target audience for the catalogue is basically all adults in Finland, so the products need to be very diverse. Gambling audiences are a bit different from mobile gaming audiences, but it seems that casual mobile games and gambling games on mobile are starting to compete for the same audiences in some areas.
14:40
Developing Engaging And Interactive Storytelling
Jukka Laakso Rival Games
Janos Honkonen, Rival Games
How to combine a strong, branching narrative with more traditional gameplay mechanics, without getting too complex but yet feeling interactive enough for the gamer? With Thief of Thieves: Season One, Rival Games combined Hitman-like gameplay, but involving no killing, with Telltale-like narrative arc and presented the whole thing in a comic book art
15:00
Skabma – Challenges Of Bringing Sami Mythology Into Videogame Format
Marjaana Auranen, Red Stage
Sahin Cengiz, Red Stage
The Finnish studio tell us about introducing mythology into games development with its current project Skábma - Polar Night
15:20
Look Mum, No Wheels! Riding The Marketing Long Tail
Tracey McGarrigan
You've made a good game, executed your launch campaign, finished your PR reports, and have paused for a moment to reflect on a job well done - NOW WHAT? No sitting back in the saddle! Journey with PC video game marketing expert (and long-distance cyclist) Tracey who will share her tried and tested top tips on how to keep riding and extend your sales curve once the launch wheels have come off - looking at how to continually reach new customers and grow fan bases, increase discoverability by spotting and maximising new opportunities, and ultimately plot where your post-launch destination really is.
15:40
Feels Good Man, Some Sort Of Dead Cells Post-Mortem
Sebastien Benard, Motion Twin
Dead Cells is arguably one of the most exciting titles to come out of the indie games space in the last few years. Now the boss over at French developer Motion Twin Sebastien Benard is going to be telling us how they did it
16:00
Community-Based Game Development
Kimmo Kari, Fake Fish
How Fake Fish started to develop PC games based on the work of a web-based collaborative writing project. That lead to a success of 10m-plus downloads, that created us our own fanbase and got also the attention of the worlds biggest YouTubers. We have been continued this path with our next project, a sci-fi submarine game.
16:20
Battle Royale With Cheese
Mikael Haveri, Housemarque
Last year, head of publishing Mikael Haveri took to the Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki stage to tell us about how "the arcade game to kill all arcade games" Nex Machina came about and what exactly went wrong with the fast-paced shooter. Now he is going to be telling us about the Helsinki-based company's follow-up project, battle royale title Stormdivers.
16:40
What's Next In Line For PC Games?
Milena Koljensic, Epic Games
Raimo Gratseff, Redlynx
Sebastien Benard, Motion Twin
Kimmo Kari, Fake Fish
Tracey McGarrigan, Ansible Comms
David Roulin, Pinata Punch
Top minds from the PC space ask what is set to happen in this sector
