Crafting the movement of creatures can be one of the greatest joys and challenges in an animator’s career. These challenges often multiply when a creature is intended to work within the design, technical and production constraints of an international video game project. 

This talk aims to give a glance at the broad pipeline and daily processes of a gameplay animator at Larian Studios, and how cross-departmental and cross-continental collaboration can be harnessed to create memorable creature encounters.

Among the game dev projects she contributed to are Ukrainian indie games FoxTail (93 % positive review on Steam) and Trash is Fun (17th place out of 25 highest-grossing Ukrainian games on Steam in 2022), and also a mobile game WildCraft (100+ million of downloads, and a 4.5 rating on Google Play from 1+ million of reviews).

In this talk, Ruslana will share some essential tips and tricks and advanced approaches to creating audio for indie games. You’ll learn how to choose an audio specialist, organize an overall process, and ensure you get the most out of your options (and budget!).

You will learn how to determine the audio goals in your game, to come up with an audio concept and technical task and why you should deliver that to an audio professional! She will explain how to choose a reliable and right person to work with and evaluate the results they provide, and, of course, when to start thinking about all of those questions.

Metal vocalist since 1991 (Necrotic Mutation) and throat singer (Tibetan, Mongolia and Inuit throat-singing) since 1996, Sébastien Croteau masters an impressive number of extreme vocal techniques. He began teaching metal voices and throat-singing 15 years ago. Since then, he has trained hundreds of metal vocalists and voice talents around the world and he is a renowned expert in vocal distortion, extreme sounds and creature voice design.

It is thanks to these techniques Sébastien began to work for video games companies in 2005. Since then, he has specialized in vocal stunt work and sound creation of the voices of monsters and creatures. He has worked on more than forty video games (including Hellblade 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Warhammer: Realm of Ruins, Gotham Knights, Meet your Maker, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Dead by Daylight, Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Far Cry 5, Rainbow Six Siege: Outbreak, Prince of Persia – The Forgotten Sands and Assassin’s Creed 2) and has lent his voice to more than 300 characters.

For the past few years, he has been a casting director and a voice director for various projects. He also teaches vocal distortion, extreme vocals and creature voices with various institutions. 

In 2018, he created a company called The Monster Factory, a service provider and talent agency that specializes in extreme sounds, vocal stunts and creature/monster voices.

This talk will be co-hosted by Elizabeth Andrews who has more than 14 years experience as a metal vocalist in extreme voice techniques both on stage and in the studio. She is also a vocalist, lyricist & frontwoman of the Swedish melodic death metal band Frantic Amber.

Elizabeth is also one of vocal stunt performers at The Monster Factory, debuting with voicing Illtauga in Hellblade 2.

Environmental sounds are prevalent in video games. Effort, running, block, idle, attack, choke and death sounds (among others) can be heard in all video games.

Sébastien and Elizabeth’s talk is an introduction to environmental sounds (onos and grunts). You will learn about the different challenges encountered by voice talents and how to prepare them before a recording session, how to help the voice talent prepare for a recording session and to perform the different variations required in a realistic way and how to create a phonetic script. 

You will receive some tips on vocal stress and vocal health, on directing voice talent for environmental sounds, on helping the voice talent with all the different variations, on creating a phonetic script and much more !

PreviewLabs turns ideas into interactive prototypes, allowing its clients to evaluate concepts early on. This service enables them to explore more different concepts and ultimately helps them to be more successful developing new products.

In the first thirteen years of PreviewLabs, Bernard oversaw the development of prototypes for over 200 different concepts, for clients including Walt Disney Imagineering and Yale University, but also a large number of startups seeking to develop new products. In 2016, Bernard established PreviewLabs’ US office, which is now based in Guilford, Connecticut.

Bernard is also the chairman of FLEGA, the Flemish Games Association, as well as a proud member of XR Valley.