Develop:Brighton 2024 Talks: iGGi featured with iGGi PG Researcher Dominik Jeurissen and his talk on "LLM Agents For QA - Potential & Limitations". Please see our related article for further detail.

iGGi @ Develop Expo: For the 3rd year running, the iGGi stand was present again on the Expo floor of the 2024 Develop:Brighton conference! The Expo always takes place on Days 2+3 of the conference and is a popular networking platform for the game dev community. Attendees could drop by the iGGi stand to speak to one or more of the 25 iGGi PG Researchers and staff who came to Develop this year.

As in previous years, iGGi was promoting the intersection between games industry and research and fostering collaboration links through knowledge exchanges that are mutually beneficial to both sides.

Displays at the iGGi Stand: PG Researcher displays this year included Michael John Saiger's Teach Quest (a serious game designed for teacher recruitment), Alan Pedrassoli Chitayat's Win Condition (an ML-powered tool for professional esport broadcasters), Sarah Master's Moth Magic (a "tiny retro pixel art game" with green development goals), Dominik Jeurissen's NetPlay (the first LLM-powered zero-shot agent for the challenging roguelike NetHack), Alan Wallat's War of the Toads (a card game used by James Goodman in his research), and Nirit Binyamini Ben Meir's and Erin Robinson's Moss Project (an immersive art installation focused on creative plant-human interaction; see image below).

Several senior iGGi PG Researchers and Alumni hosted their own session/event (or with their company) at/around Develop, e.g., Gorm Lai, Charline Foch, Tom Cole, Jozef Kulik - a warm thank you to all of them for keeping us in the loop about their work and particularly for supporting junior iGGis.

iGGi Con 2024 + Expo: We also advertised our upcoming iGGi Conference 2024 (and Expo) which showcases our recent research as well as offering a valuable opportunity for dialogue between academia and industry.

If you want take part in the iGGi Expo as an exhibitor, or to learn more about existing pathways of knowledge exchange between iGGi and games companies or other research organisations, you can check out our Industry Info + KE page, but we are also always open for new ideas and formats. Please do get in touch if you require any further information.

iGGi Partners during Develop: A massive big THANKS from all of iGGi to the various iGGi Partners who either ran satellite events, came over to our stand, invited us to events, and/or showed their support in other ways. This includes Player Research (who hosted iGGi at their office and who also organised a fabulously informative Game Accessibility Gathering with/at Unity Technologies), Splash Damage, Safe In Our World, Women In Games, Game Republic, BiG, Square Enix, Keywords Studios, Meaning Machine, #RaiseTheGame/Ukie, and AI and Games/Tommy Thompson, all of which contributed greatly to the "Develop networking magic" by connecting us to relevant contacts and by spreading the word about iGGi.

We are especially happy that Game Republic won the Develop Star Award for "Supporting Star" and Meaning Machine secured the People's Choice Award in the Indie Showcase with their game Dead Meat!! Both well deserved! Big CONGRATS from iGGi.

Lastly, a sincere THANK YOU to the Develop organisers who make it happen every year and are doing such an amazing job at it. We can't wait to see everyone back together in 2025!!