July 10, 2021

MENA GAME TECH DAY 2021

Watch the published event sessions playlist and particpate in the post event survey for a chance to win a PlayStation 5 and many more prizes.*

MENA Game Tech Day 2021 Playlist

Post Event Survey

welcome

Welcome to MENA Game Tech Day

AWS Game Tech Day MENA is an online event designed to bring the MENA game development ecosystem together to share ideas, exchange talks, and discuss how cloud technologies are helping game studios and industries of all sizes. If you are in the process of conceiving your game as an idea, or are interested in understanding player trends, or want to integrate a particular technology into your game, or a company looking to integrate game development into its products, AWS GameTech Day will help you acquire the knowledge and tools needed to test and validate your thinking and approach, and then take your game to the next level.

speakers

The Speakers

Alex Casalboni

Developer Advocate at AWS

Passionate about web development, data analysis, serverless, and everything Cloud.

David Heidt

Solutions Architect at AWS

Game Tech Solutions Architect.

Joseph Azzam

Technical Evangelist at Epic Games

As part of the Evangelist team at Epic games, Joseph travels mostly in the Middle East to talk and teach Unreal Engine. Joseph founded LebGameDev, a non-profit initiative that focuses on growing the gamedev scene in Lebanon. He specialized in a wide range of topics including VR, cultural heritage preservation, photogrammetry, tech art, and Blueprint, which he used to Develop Byblos VR. He is currently teaching game development Saint-Joseph University of Beirut.

Gunnar Grosch

Developer Advocate at AWS

Senior AWS Developer Advocate, Retired AWS Serverless Hero and organizer of Serverless Days Nordics.

Olivier Chappe

Solutions Architect at AWS

Game Tech Solutions Architect.

Yousef BuHazza

Founder Unreal Bahrain

Community builder and game developer.

Denis Dyack

CEO of Apocalypse Studios

Denis Dyack is an AWS Community Hero and Canadian video game developer, designer, writer, director and producer.

Marion Finnigan

Sr. BDM @ AWS Game Tech

Senior Business Development Manager at AWS Game Tech | Enthusiast | Geek | Extrovert | Social Butterfly.

Michael DeNeffe

Director, Cloud Graphics

AMD

Eric Husny

Founder of Rawa.tv & the AGC

Founder of various companies aimed at developing the Arab community and growing the gaming industry in the region.

Mostafa El-kourechy

MD-Labs Co-Founder & Managing Partner

Jeel App Solution Consultant with 13+ years of experience in digital solutions design and delivery

Musab Abdullah

Executive Director, Investment Development EDB Bahrain

Nourhan ElSherief

Senior Game Developer

Have had experience working with several studios on several mobile games, till joining Instinct Games in 2016 and been working as an Unreal developer ever since

Houssem Ben Amor

Co-Founder of Tunisian Games Developers

Business Development Manager at Nuked Cockroach, Tresorier of GlobalGameJam.Inc, Co-Founder of Tunisian Games Developers

Shehroz Saleem

Chief Technology Officer at Voicemate

Passionate about Machine Learning and AI using AWS, Game Developer Hobbyist

schedule

Event Agenda

July 10, 2021

11:30AM (GMT+3)

Gunnar Grosch

Developer Advocate, AWS

Keynote

AWS Community MENA GameTech Day 2021 Keynote

12:00 PM (GMT+3)

Musab Abdullah

Executive Director, Investment Development EDB Bahrain

The Middle East’s Gaming Market: An Untapped Opportunity

AWS Community MENA GameTech Day 2021 Partners

12:30 PM (GMT+3)

Michael DeNeffe

Director, Cloud Graphics

AMD and AWS – Powering Game Development

Discover how the cloud and the infrastructure that surrounds it is helping game development studios improve production pipeline efficiencies, enable design creativity, by removing traditional IT barriers, and empower studios to become more agile through seemingly unlimited resources and dedicated services from Amazon Web services. Learn why AMD-based virtual desktops and workstations are your 1# choice for moving designers and game developers to the cloud

01:00 PM (GMT+3)

Marion Finnigan

Sr. BDM @ AWS Game Tech

Know your Players, grow your Game: A Guide to LiveOps in the Cloud

LiveOps is the secret weapon to player engagement and long-term success of your game. In this talk we will show you how cloud can help you to better prepare, how to leverage automation for sensible workload management, how to use Big Data and Analytics to move from a re-active to a pro-active approach, and how to gain insights on player events and behaviour before you have to learn it from a social media platform

1:30 PM (GMT+3)

Joseph Azzam

Technical Evangelist,
Epic Games

Unreal Engine and the Epic Ecosystem

Attendees will get to know about the latest additions to the engine, where we see the industry heading, and how we are improving the engine to accommodate the latest trends. Additionally, they will be made aware of the job opportunities for unreal developers, and the different ways we support our developers.

2:00 PM (GMT+3)

Nourhan ElSherief

Senior Game Developer

Joseph Azzam

Technical Evangelist,
Epic Games

Yousef BuHazza

Community Leader,
Unreal Bahrain

Houssem Ben Amor

Co-Founder of Tunisian Games Developers

Panel: State of the Game Dev industry the MENA region.

Community Leaders from Lebanon, Tunis, Eygpt and Bahrain will be presenting the latest progress in the gamedev scene in their country, as well as go over the future initiatives to look forward to.

2:30 PM (GMT+3)

David Heidt

Solutions Architect, AWS

Go global in minutes: How you can accelerate your gameservers and backends with AWS Edge Services.

We will dive deep into the different network, caching and compute strategies you can leverage using AWS Edge Services to ensure the best performance, scale and cost efficiency for your games. We will cover a range of different scenarios, including single and multi-region architectures across mobile, console/desktop and real-time multi-player gaming environments, to explore best practices and answer “which service to use, and when?” questions.

3:00 PM (GMT+3)

Yousef BuHazza

Community Leader,
Unreal Bahrain

The Impact of GameTech Across Sectors

Different industries are starting to adopt the video games technology and practices to improve their products and experiences by incorporating the use of gamification elements, game design, software, and hardware. Leveraging GameTech can lead to designing better products, better engagement and experiences, shrinking development time, better training and education, and many other benefits. Join us for this talk by Yousef BuHazza to get a glimpse on the history of the electronic gaming industry and how it is influencing other sectors for the better.

3:30 PM (GMT+3)

Olivier Chappe

Solutions Architect, AWS

The anatomy of a Presence API: how to modernize application with AWS Serverless services

We will introduce application modernization with serverless services on AWS, and why it might be interesting in the context of the game industry. We will then dive into an example of a presence API and how it could be quickly developed and deployed with those services.

4:00 PM (GMT+3)

Gunnar Grosch

Developer Advocate, AWS

Building a real-time leaderboard with serverless on AWS

The games industry has been moving rapidly toward multiplayer and competitive games, and an important part to drive retention and stimulate competitive engagement is the game leaderboard. But building a leaderboard that provides both real-time and historical rankings and at the same time is able to perform well when your game takes off can be a challenge. In this session, we'll look at how to build a customizable real-time leaderboard that scales with your game and allows you to compare and rank players from your games across all platforms.

4:30 PM (GMT+3)

Denis Dyack

AWS Community Hero

Get Into The Video Game Industry

Denis Dyack is the Founder and CEO of Apocalypse Studios. He has been making video games for decades and has an extensive list of fantastic games to his credit. His studio evangelizes using a cloud-first approach in game development and partners with AWS Game Tech to move the medium of the games industry forward. In this talk Denis walks through the process of defining "what is a good game" and techniques for getting into the industry. He also debuts some new art from his latest game!!

5:00 PM (GMT+3)

Eric Husny

Founder of Rawa.tv & the ACG

The impact of content and game communities on game development and success.

We will be discussing the effect communities can have on a game’s development, reception and success, as well as the increasing involvement of the community in the gaming ecosystem. We’ll go over specific cases of significant community impact, as well as some lessons we can learn from those cases and how to apply them in the region.