Unite Europe 2016 Presentation

Unite Europe 2016

When the local Hamburg Unity meetup asked for volunteers to give talks, I saw a opportunity to discuss one of my favorite topics: Procedural Content Generation. The talk was well recieved at the time, but I felt that it had been lacking, and started looking for opportunities to try again. As luck would have it, my company was one of the sponsors of Unity’s Unite Europe 2016 conference, at a level that included a speaking slot. I was approached by our PR department, and asked if I would be willing to give the talk again. I was thrilled to have a second shot with a much larger audience.

Contents May Vary

Since the speaking slot was only a half hour, I thought it would be best to provide a very rough overview of topics, and give audience members a wide variety of vocabulary words and concepts which they could then use to learn more about the subject. I covered both conceptual topics and practical, Unity-specific features that made PCG techniques more accessible. I also provided a short demonstration in the editor of a project that procedurally generated race cars and tracks. In keeping with the theme of “PCG lets you work faster”, the entire demo was build in just a few day.

Reception

I was totally overwhelmed by just how many people were in attendance. Even though the sponsored sessions were in the smallest lecture hall, every seat was full, people were sitting in the aisle and jamming the doorway. I had been worried that it might be too simple for such a technically skilled audience, but was pleased to hear afterwards that people found it helpful. The talk was posted online later by Unity, and is available here. To preserve my vanity, I haven’t looked at the comments since it was first made available.