Once More unto the Breach
Day 2 began as day 1 had, at 10:00 AM. Another day of dropping in on interesting programs and playing indie games. Oh, and there would probably be some beer involved at some point.
A Note to the Reader
If you’re reading this and you have no idea what Digital Dragons is, it’s because you’ve walked into the middle of a movie, or started streaming with Episode Two if that’s what you prefer. This article is about what I saw and did on day two of the conference – you can learn all about Digital Dragons in Digital Dragons Diary – Day One which you can find here.
Programs of Interest
So many interesting programs, so little time. Here are a couple of the ones that I attended that were particularly interesting.
What you Missed in Alan Wake 2 if you weren’t Listening
Henry Scott, a Technical Audio Designer at Remedy Entertainment, hosted Audio Details you Missed in Alan Wake 2, which was probably the best program title in the conference because you knew exactly what you were going to get from it without having to read the description. It was the kind of talk you’d appreciate a little more if you played the game, but it was fascinating from a technical standpoint on its own.
Alan Wake 2 players will remember how the game uses light-sensitive graffiti as directional guidance or to indicate a nearby secret. When you discovered one of these works of graffiti, the game would play an accompanying sound of an exhaled breath with some added reverb. If you also played the game’s DLC and were playing attention, you may have noticed that the audio for the graffiti was enhanced even though this was an unannounced feature upgrade. This time multiple exhales were recorded and mixed with a reverb spray can sound to make discovering a new graffiti sound a little different every time. Furthermore, separate actors were used for each of the game’s main characters, Alan and Saga, so you would hear a different set of sounds depending on who you were currently playing as.
One thing that Scott pointed out that I found surprising was regarding the random combat barks made by enemies in the game. If you were listening closely, you may have realized that they were created using actual quotes from Alan Wake’s writings, but even so you probably had no idea that 14,000 lines of dialog were record for those combat barks. That’s almost as many as lines of spoken dialog in the game! (20,000, in case you’re curious).
The sounds of your weapons in Alan Wake 2 are completely driven by the combination of upgrades you’ve applied to them. The game has unique sounds associate with each upgrade, for example larger clips will land with a larger thud when ejected, and will play the combination of sounds appropriate for your customized weapon.
Scott then went into further details on how the sounds for some of the game’s more iconic enemies were created. The sound of the Dark Presence (basically a big scary malevolent cloud if you haven’t played the game) is actually a combination of scream sounds selected at random but with a few rules applied. Every few seconds the game selects one of the screams to play at random. If the selected scream is taken from the “large scream” category, it will be followed by an explosive sound. The interval between the screams is determined by how close the Dark Presence is to the player – the pace quickens as it gets closer to Alan, giving the player an audio cue to the encroaching danger. In The Lake House DLC, a paint enemy is introduced that can enter walls and walk through paintings. Again, audio was used to give players a clue to their presence and location without revealing exactly where they were. To accomplish this, fixed points were created in the walls and monsters made to move along those points. A sound would be played at one of those points only after a monster left it, but the monsters will not move to a new point if the player is looking at it.
Scott also discussed a lot of what drives audio decisions in games and there’s surprisingly a lot to it. So next time you’re playing a game, pay close attention to the sound because there will be an audio designer somewhere who will be happy that you did.
Is AI Coming for NPCs’ Jobs?
You’ve probably wondered when games will regularly feature AI-controlled NPCs that will allow them to have natural conversations with players rather than parroting their way through a collection of prerecorded lines. If you attended Are LLMs the Future of NPCs? as I did, you’d know that the game industry is not quite there, yet. The presenters, Hubert Kubit and Michaɬ Mail, stated that the ultimate goal, of course, is NPCs that feel like living characters because they can carry on player-driven conversations with unlimited topics and no predefined branches. The reality is that there are a surprising number of hurdles in the way of getting there. Some of these have to do with controlling the amount of knowledge the AI character has – their whole world has to be within the game and they can’t know about anything that exists outside of it. And how do you limit their knowledge of their game world based on what the player has accomplished so far and where in the story they are? You certainly don’t want them dropping spoilers or acting jovially after a dragon has torched the village’s fields and killed half its population. Then there is the problem of memory. People will remember talking to you yesterday and what you talked about, so you have to somehow collect memories for the AI NPC that it will draw upon in future conversations.
Beyond these technical hurdles, a game designer has other considerations to weigh. Do they want to create a game in which they have no control over what their characters will say? How do you direct a scene when you don’t know how it will play out? What if players find a way to jailbreak your AI character, or what if it begins to suffer hallucinations and misdirects the player? How can you be certain that players will have the experience that you intend them to have?
As you can see, there are a lot of technical issues and design considerations to consider and overcome before we start regularly seeing AI NPCs in games. If you’re curious, you can interact with an experimental AI NPC created by the speakers here.
Back in the Zone
The Indie Zone was open on the conference’s second day, and every bit as crowded as it was on the first. I once again spent my time outside the conference program halls walking the Zone and squeezing in as many game demos as I could. I’ll preview the games in detail soon, but a few of my favorites were:
- Arms of God: Fight your way through Hell in this auto-shooter that will have you tinkering with a mind-boggling array of weapon and attachment combinations.
- Be My Horde: An auto-battler in which you play as a necromancer raising an army of zombies to conquer the world.
- Jotunnslayer: Hordes of Hel: A Norse mythology inspired roguelike horde game in which you can call upon the power of the gods.
- War Mechanic: An alternate history game in which the US went to war with the Soviet Union after World War II. Play as a mechanic rebuilding an army base and turning scrap into mechanized war machines.
There was additional excitement in the Indie Zone on the second day because of the Digital Dragons Arena, which gave indie devs the chance to pitch their game to an audience of conference attendees, and the Community Vote. Every conference attendee was able to vote for their favorite indie game at Digital Dragons 2025 using the conference app, with the top vote getter taking home the trophy and that dev rig 11 bit studios pledged to give the winner at the Awards Gala the night before. Rabid Rat took the prize for the best pitch for their game Bumpkin and Sprout. The Community Vote award went to Atomius, a group of high school kids who did an excellent job of working the crowd at the Zone and also of making a pretty good game in Soul Pact, a co-op adventure in which one player is a wizard and the other the wizard’s soul.
These are the Beers that you are Looking for
One of the non-gaming highlights of day two is the Happy Hour Mingle. Polish microbrew sporting a cool custom label for the conference is wheeled-out to the foyer and conference attendees can share their favorite moments and games with each other in the airy ICE Krakow Congress Centre or in the park that lies outside its entrance. It’s a great way to wrap up a great experience.
See you Next Year
With the end of the conference, we’ve reached the end of my diary. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this look at one of Europe’s top game conferences and are now aware of some of the reasons that Poland has such a great gaming industry, and will have so well into the future. If you haven’t tried out some of the games highlighted here and in the Digital Dragons Awards gala, be sure that you do. I’m looking forward to playing the games this year that will take home the trophies at Digital Dragons 2026! Do widzenia!
