UX Summit
Monday March 9, 10:30 am – 11:30 am, Room 3002, West Hall

Alexis Denance (Game Content Director, Ubisoft Da Nang)

The porting team approach to adapting Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown on Mobile.

The team identified early on the challenges linked to a platformer and combat metroidvania for Mobile. Alexis Denancé presents how the team approached this puzzle and implemented various features & adaptations to enrich the game experience and make it enjoyable to a larger audience while delivering on the true HD experience that brought Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown to win the Innovation in Accessibility Game Award in 2024.

He details at length all the 3Cs adaptation, additional features, as well as the Free Trial format and Playtest learnings during production.

Main conference
Monday March 9, 1:50 pm – 2:50 pm, Room 304 South Hall

Nathalie Mathe  (Professor, Northeastern University)

Navigating the workplace or job interviews can be especially challenging for neurodivergent game developers. Differences in communication, stress management, or adapting to change can lead to misunderstandings or feelings of isolation in professional environments. This roundtable explores practical strategies for self-advocacy at work and during interviews. Participants are encouraged to share personal experiences or hypothetical scenarios, learning techniques and insights from one another in a supportive, peer-led discussion. This roundtable is hosted by the IGDA Neurodivergent in Games SIG.

UX Summit
Thursday March 12, 10:30 am – 3:30 pm, Room 204 South Hall

Anna Waismeyer (Senior Product Manager, Xbox)
Cari Watterton (Senior Accessibility Specialist, Scopely)

Learn by doing. Work with other attendees to design a game accessibility workshop from scratch. Workshops like these are the cornerstone of culture and process changes throughout the industry. This hands-on walkthrough, hosted by two game accessibility workshop experts, Anna Waismeyer from Xbox and Cari Watterton from Scopely, covers the content, structure, and logistics behind an impactful accessibility workshop experience.

Fringe
Thursday March 12, 11 am – 4 pm, Room 204 South Hall

Xbox

An inclusive, 21+ indoor/outdoor gathering designed to celebrate the people, cultures, and creative forces shaping the future of games. Whether you’re early in your career or a seasoned leader, the G4E Community Networking lounge is designed to encourage conversation and shared moments of play—bringing people together across studios, roles, and communities to connect, recharge, and build relationships beyond the pace of the conference floor.

Main conference
Friday March 13, 10:50 am – 11:50 am, Room 304 South Hall

Jordan DeVries (UI/UX Director, Respawn Entertainment)
Cari Watterton (Senior Accessibility Specialist, Scopely)

Accessibility’s growth as an established professional practice has continued at pace across the video games industry–from AAA studios to indie developers–but the past couple of years have brought difficult times, with teams operating under reduced headcounts and budgets. Even without these constraints, a studio’s journey towards accessibility maturity involves figuring out how to do more with less, moving beyond initial explorations and innovations to ensure it can be a repeatably efficient part of “business as usual.”

Wherever you are along that journey, our discussion will focus on ways to achieve this, from processes to programs, and champs to dev tools.

Main conference
Friday March 13, 1:10 pm – 2:10 pm, Room 2001 West Hall

Jessica Roache (Sr. Manager, Global Corporate Communications, Ubisoft)
Steve Saylor (Accessibility Consultant, Independent)

Marketing campaigns are about building hype – revealing just enough information to pique fans’ interest, while saving key details to share at high-impact brand moments. But gamers with disabilities can’t look forward to a game’s launch until they know whether or not they’ll be able to play it. This conversation between Ubisoft Senior Corporate Communications Manager, Jessica Roache, and Disabled Accessibility Consultant, Steve Saylor, will seek to encourage developers and marketing teams that there are clear benefits to highlighting a game’s accessibility early – and creating a successful, inclusive marketing campaign. For teams who haven’t yet explored accessibility, this talk will provide actionable advice on how to pitch the business case for accessibility to their leadership.

Main conference
Friday March 13, 3:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Room 3018 West Hall

Brian Schmidt (Brian Schmidt Studios LLC)

Recent studies have shown that frequent gamers play with headphones more than 50% of the time. While increasing immersion (which is what we try to do!), the prolonged use of headphones at high volumes is a significant contributor to hearing damage.

There are things we as game developers can do to help mitigate impact on players’ hearing health, and it turns out many are small tweaks to things we currently do for player accessibility. Accessibility and player sensory health are close cousins, from a developer perspective.

This talk will look at some the basics of hearing safety and go over the work the World Health Organization has done in hearing safety and health in esports and video games. We will also show how incorporating simple recommendations for game software and systems can have an impact on our players’ hearing health, and how your game may be doing something very similar already.