XP26 programming
2026 sessions
8:30 am
9:15 am
9:30 am
11:00 am
12:00 pm
1:00 pm
1:30 pm
2:00 pm
3:00 pm
4:00 pm
Registration (All Day)
Indie Pitch Competition presented by Ubisoft
Building an OP Cashflow Strategy for your Studio to Thrive
Building the Creator Pipeline: How Smart Partnerships Are Scaling Influencer Marketing
Always Playable: The Production Mindset That Survives Reality
Art Direction Is Marketing (You’re Just Calling It the Wrong Thing)
The Innovation Paradox
Closing Deals in 2026
Building a Community for Lifetime Game Projects
How We Rebuilt Our Studio Around AI (And Why You Should Too)
From West to East: How to Make F2P Games Thrive in New Markets
The New Timeline for Indie Success
Game Audio: The Future of Game Audio & Music
What Does Indie Success on Steam Look Like? A Data-Driven Review
Best Practices for Multi-Platform Development
Where Traditional Animation Meets Gaming
What We Got Wrong (And Right) About Game Marketing
Legal Hacks for the Non-Lawyer: Lessons from the Game Lawyer Trenches
8:30 am
9:15 am
10:30 am
11:30 am
12:30 pm
1:00 pm
1:30 pm
2:30 pm
Registration (All Day)
Designing Backwards: Creating Cauldrons for ‘Horizon Forbidden West’
IP Teardown: Under the Hood of the Game Worlds We Love
Capacity Planning That Works Across Studios and Titles
Worldbuilding a Generated City
Designing Effective Communication During Game Development
Renaissance of Business in Health Care and the Video Game Sector
Start Up 101 – 20 Years Later
Great Game, Wrong Foundation: A Studio Audit for Indie Founders
When Your Voice Shakes: Building Safety in the Studio Trenches
D2C in 2026: How New Platform Policies Unlock Even Greater Opportunity for Web Stores
How To Achieve High Quality, Performant Lighting in URP and Unity 6
The State of Game Funding: Trends, Tactics, and Opportunities
Responding to Unprecedented Climate
Funding the Future of Canadian Game Development
Advancing AI Game Development with AMD Schola and GPUOpen
2026 round tables
XP Curated Expert Roundtables are available to Conference and VIP pass holders. Limited capacity ensures focused discussion.
Advance registration through MeetToMatch is required and seats will fill quickly.
8:30 am
9:15 am
9:30 am
11:00 am
1:30 pm
Registration (All Day)
Indie Pitch Competition presented by Ubisoft
Ask Games Lawyers Anything: This Normally Costs Money
Unpacking the OP Financial Strategy: Deep Dive & Open Q&A
8:30 am
9:15 am
11:00 am
1:30 pm
Registration (All Day)
Designing Backwards: Creating Cauldrons for ‘Horizon Forbidden West’
Game Audio Round Table
The AI Adoption Gap: Bridging Strategy and Reality in Games Leadership
30 Puzzle Design Lessons From The World’s Greatest Puzzle Communities
Puzzles are a crucial gameplay element across many genres, whether players are solving a riddle, reflecting a laser, or just trying to find the boss's
ACTRA Toronto – Elevating Projects with Union Performers
This session will explore the integral role ACTRA performers play in bringing video game characters to life. ACTRA Toronto members include voice actors, motion capture
Advancing AI Game Development with AMD Schola and GPUOpen
Explore how AI is transforming game development pipelines — accelerating your workflows and enabling smarter, more immersive gameplay. This session covers the latest developer tools
Advancing UX Strategy & Ethics in the Game Industry
Game user experience (UX) is mostly approached very narrowly in the game industry, around a game's UI. However, UX is better seen as a mindset
Always Playable: The Production Mindset That Survives Reality
Most game projects fail quietly while “on track.” This talk reframes production around a single, unforgiving truth: a playable build tells you more than any
Art Direction Is Marketing (You’re Just Calling It the Wrong Thing)
Art direction is not visual polish—it’s conversion designCosmetics = identity = monetization = retentionDiversity isn’t moral fluff—it’s market expansion + player attachment Cosmetics work from
Ask Games Lawyers Anything: This Normally Costs Money
This roundtable session allows you to ask any burning legal questions* you may have from a group of games industry lawyers. DLA Piper’s games lawyers
Best Practices for Multi-Platform Development
Applying just a few best practices for code and design to a game during development, regardless of project budget, can make a huge difference in
Bots Don’t Sleep: AI QA for Games That Launch Smoother
What if your best playtester never missed a bug—and never needed sleep? From indie teams to AAA studios, developers are using AI bots to rethink
Building a Community for Lifetime Game Projects
How do you build and maintain a community for games in indefinite development? Alexandra Orlando of Kitfox Games will give a peek behind the curtain
Building an OP Cashflow Strategy for your Studio to Thrive
Let’s discuss strategies that enable studios of any size to supercharge established financial tools to improve your returns. Early-stage indies can convert sweat equity into
Building Our UA System From Media Buying to Scalable Growth Engine
Most UA teams are still optimizing campaigns while believing they’re optimizing for growth. This talk challenges that assumption and introduces a different model: user acquisition
Building the Creator Pipeline: How Smart Partnerships Are Scaling Influencer Marketing
The creator economy is evolving fast — and the studios and publishers winning at influencer marketing aren’t doing it alone. This panel brings together industry
Can Games Help Revive an Indigenous Language?
Métis developer Josh Nilson shares how his team used Roblox to create a culturally meaningful game that teaches Northern Michif, a language with fewer than
Canada’s Video Game Industry – From Strength to Staying Power
Economic impact, global competitiveness, and the policy foundation for growth.
Capacity Planning That Works Across Studios and Titles
Capacity forecasting across multiple studios and titles is one of the hardest operational problems in modern game development, and one of the least consistently solved.
Closing Deals in 2026
Learn how to pitch at the right stage, what deal terms to expect in 2026, and how to target the right partners. This session unpacks
Crafting Emotions in Games: The 5 Pillars That Make Players Feel
What makes a game into an emotional experience? This talk explores how to make players feel – from unforgettable characters and immersive worlds to authentic
Creating a Community with Your Influencer Program
One of the biggest questions when building your community is how to get those first groups of people — who are not friends and family
Creative First, Business Always
Interactive Ontario's Indie Superboost panel will explore the ongoing balancing act between creative ambition and business realities that every indie developer faces.
D2C in 2026: How New Platform Policies Unlock Even Greater Opportunity for Web Stores
2025 was a year of unprecedented growth for D2C, with rulings like Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google unlocking new growth vectors for web
Designing Backwards: Creating Cauldrons for ‘Horizon Forbidden West’
When getting stuck on designing Cauldrons (Horizon’s dungeons) on ‘Horizon Forbidden West’, Dennis Micka’s entire approach to level design changed when he started designing the
Designing Effective Communication During Game Development
Whether it is two people or fifty, knowing how to communicate clearly, resolve conflicts, and align goals can make or break a game’s development. Come
Enabling Out-of-the-Box Performance Insights in Unity Games with the Sentry SDK
Let’s face it – at some point, your game is going to crash. Or maybe it’ll freeze mid-scene transition or stutter when loading assets. And
featured sessions
- Building a Community for Lifetime Game Projects
- The Retention Layer: The Hard Truth About Community and Social
- From West to East: How to Make F2P Games Thrive in New Markets
- The Innovation Paradox
- Best Practices for Multi-Platform Development
- Always Playable: The Production Mindset That Survives Reality
- Worldbuilding and Procedural Generation
- Responding to Unprecedented Climate