Alumni Lecture Series - Interesting Talks on Videogame Development, Research, and Artificial Intelligence by IDG Graduates

We’re excited to announce the 2020-2021 schedule of talks; The Alumni Lecture Series - Interesting Talks by IDG Graduates.

The Institute of Digital Games was founded in 2013 meaning that our first graduates finished their MSc in 2015 and their PhDs in 2016. Since then, they’ve gone on to do a range of interesting things from founding their own companies, working for AAA studios, design their own games, worked for mid-sized or indie developers, the variety is near-infinite. You can see an overview of the places where our alumni have gone on to work here.

Global Game Lectures from Academia and Industry

We have always held monthly guest lectures that have been open to the general public, where visiting academics such as Prof. Julian Togelius of NYU or industry speakers such as Coline Panier formerly of Ubisoft. Sometimes, it is an opportunity to present our own work to the Maltese videogames and academic community, such as was done by Dr Daniel Vella or Prof. Yannakakis.

This year with the possibility to do the lectures both remotely and physically, we decided to tap into the vast knowledge available with our alumni and organise a full year of alumni lectures.

We kicked off in October 2021 with Dr Christoffer Holmgård, CEO of Modl.ai

So you've got a game idea - What's next?

Fleur and Chelsea Sciortino start the lectures in 2022. They are the creator duo who just successfully launched their first TTRPG on Kickstarter. In this talk, The two will outline the process of taking a game concept and bringing it to market. They will cover aspects like idea generation, testing and iteration, production, sourcing art, marketing and fulfilment.

8 February 2022 - 15:00 - IDG Lab

The plan is to do this lecture in person, so please register here to attend this talk. Places are limited due to Covid-19 restrictions.

A Year of Game Lectures to Complement the MSc in Digital Games - Open to the Public and Free

The next talks are schedule but titles are still to be confirmed.

In March David Chricop will provide our alumni talk on the intersection of boardgame and videogame design. David Chircop (aka A Man from Attard) has extensive industry experience working for CD Projekt Red IPs such as Gwent, The Witcher, and Cyberpunk 2077. He is also an award-winning boardgame designer and CEO of Mighty Boards a Malta-based company developing some of the best boardgames in the world.

In April William Cachia will talk about game development specifically. He is a Senior Developer at Dorado Games. A mid-sized studio in Malta developing a browser-based real-time strategy game called Conflict of Nations.

In May Dr Daniel Karavolos will provide insight into AI and games. He is currently Machine Learning Developer at Beyond Sports where he uses AI for their sports applications.

In June Stelios Avramidis will be joining us to dispense valuable industry lessons. He is currently as Product Manager for Nodes outside of the game industry but has worked as Principal Designer on Age of Empires 4 with Relic as well as projects for Sega, Sony and Creative Assembly.

Free Lectures on Game Design

Excited about these upcoming guest lectures? We have some free full lectures available for you to check out before then such as:

Prof. Gualeni’s lecture on Deceptive Game Design

Dr. Costantino Oliva’s lecture on Musical Improvisation in Games

We’re very excited to be able to organise such an interesting series with only our alumni! Make sure to sign up to our newsletter or socials to keep in touch and updated on the upcoming events!