Since 2011, KRAFTON has been holding its developer conference each year as a venue of communication that allows its game developers to interact and share their ideas with each other. Rebranded as “KRAFTON Developers C:ONNECT Week (KDC:Week)” last year, this storied event has since evolved into a venue for networking and exchanges among various departments as well as among the people of KRAFTON, swapping wide-ranging insights on game development, relevant markets and communities, intellectual property rights, and platforms. We met with three KRAFTON members — Haksu Lim, Joseph Park, and Seunghyun Mun — to talk about their experiences and impressions as they attended the diverse range of events at the 2022 KDC:Week.
Nice to meet you all. I’d like you to introduce yourselves, talk about the programs you experienced at this year’s KDC:Week, and tell us your impressions about participating in the event.
Haksu Lim: Hi there. I work as a game dev accelerator and an art advisor at KRAFTON’s Game Dev Accelerator Department. I participated in this year’s KDC:Week event as one of the speakers on the first day. I decided to participate, hoping to make a small contribution to the various pioneering endeavors that are taking place at KRAFTON by sharing my experience and insight.
Given the amount of work I do, it wasn’t exactly easy for me to prepare my presentation. That’s why I started by gathering all the memos I made about the creative and development processes whenever I could in the past. Then I had the idea of addressing the keyword of “creativity,” which is a perpetual topic of interest for all developers, and the topic of “strengthening the visual competitiveness of products,” which is another matter of deep personal interest for developers and development leaders in the art sector.
Of course, I knew that it was far too ambitious to go into in-depth detail about these topics in a short presentation of around 30 minutes. However, I felt that it was a valuable opportunity to convey my experiences and thoughts to countless people, so I didn’t want to give up or compromise in that regard. As such, I set the goal of my presentation as examining the essence of “creativity” and “art production” and providing a catalyst that sparks an interest towards innovation, then I put together my presentation with the genuine hope that there will be a solid foundation for the continuous production of quality products in the near future with bold new endeavors to follow.
I’ve been in this industry for a fairly long time, but I still felt nervous before the presentation. So, I kept reading the script I wrote out loud as practice, which naturally gave me a strange sense of confidence. (Laughs)
Seunghyun Mun: Hello. I work as an engineer at PUBG STUDIOS. I’m a junior member and I’ve been a developer for just over a year so far. I was keeping an eye on the news regarding KDC:Week, then I applied to participate in the event after I found out that there was a program called “Dev Mentoring” since I’ve recently been concerned with the question of growing my career as an engineer. I wanted to meet with senior engineers at KRAFTON who have walked the same path, so that I could ask them questions about my concerns and share conversations together.
Before participating in the program, I organized my thoughts in advance with regard to my recent concerns as an engineer, such as the situation and environment that I’m currently facing, the problems that I’m facing, and the specific efforts I’m making to overcome such difficulties. Then, I shared my ideas with each of the mentors and discussed my experiences and thoughts to date with them.
I was so grateful that my seniors gave their precious time to help out a junior engineer like me. I really felt that, in the mentoring process, they never made light of my concerns and instead listened carefully to tell me what I needed to hear. That’s not to say that a single conversation could solve all my problems, but it was a valuable opportunity for me to gain some clues as to how to approach problems in the future.
We’re going to have three more mentorship meetings. I plan to place into practice all the things I realized and learned from the first conversation, then talk to my mentor about them again on the next meeting. I’m already looking forward to it.
Oh, and I particularly appreciated that I was asked about what kind of mentor I would prefer to be matched with, and my opinion was reflected in the process of matching the right mentor to the mentee. I think that’s why I was able to meet a mentor who could offer me essential advice regarding my concerns.
Joseph Park: Hi there. I work in the Pathfinder Team, which is dedicated to training game development producers. I participated in a session titled “Pathfinders’ Live Talk” with my coworkers in KRAFTON’s Producer Pathfinders Program as well as our CEO CH Kim. It was a wonderful session in which we were able to share the things we’ve learned while operating the program for about a year and implementing various iterations, in addition to discussing our future direction in developing the program.
I’ve worked in the game development industry for over 20 years. In that time, I’ve experienced diverse projects of various sizes, and I’ve always felt that I wanted to contribute something to the company, organization, and industry that I was a part of. Looking back at my past experiences, I realized that making a good game requires a lot of knowledge and studying in various areas outside of development. I felt that I wanted to share my experiences in that regard, while linking other areas to create even greater value as my contribution.
Other than the presentation, I also participated in the Dev Mentoring program that Seunghyun mentioned, which was a nice opportunity to look back at the dilemmas I faced in the past. As we gain experience as a developer and see, hear, and feel new things, we come to realize that the world can throw such a wide variety of situations at us, which requires us to keep an open perspective about things. In the past, however, I was often preoccupied with solving the immediate problem at hand while thinking and acting in a short-sighted way.
This is something I felt while coaching in the Pathfinder Team, but there are so many coworkers around us with outstanding abilities, regardless of how long their careers might be. However, it’s difficult to be aware of and think about areas that we don’t know much about, if we lack experience. That’s why I wanted to help my coworkers to broaden their horizons. And, in that process, I hope that I myself will continue to come up with new ideas and learn about the changing environment as well.
2022 KDC:Week had a number of participation-based events as well as various presentations. Which programs did you find interesting, other than the ones you’ve mentioned already?
Seunghyun Mun: I watched the presentations with great interest, since they’re arguably the main events of KDC:Week. Among them, I was particularly struck by the presentations on new trends in the industry in relation to the metaverse. KRAFTON regularly tells with its members about the company’s current direction and endeavors through avenues of communication such as “KRAFTON Live Talk” or the “All-Hands Meeting,” but I was happy to learn even more about our ongoing new projects through this session.
Another unforgettable experience was the C:ONNECT PARTY that took place in the evening on the last day of the 2022 KDC:Week. There haven’t been many opportunities for us to gather in one place with other KRAFTON members, and this event allowed us to enjoy our time together in a comfortable atmosphere. It was an event that was participated by members of various independent studios as well as KRAFTON, so we had the opportunity to network with other developers who work under different circumstances and environments. It’s just a shame that I lack the social skills to approach them first and start a conversation. (Laughs)
Still, it was nice to participate in a number of hands-on programs such as games and photo booths. In particular, the lucky draw event was a fun event that drew the attention of so many of our coworkers. Of course, it helped that I won a keyboard as one of the prizes! I think it’ll help me to focus on my work even more!
Joseph Park: One of the most memorable parts of the event for me was the Fireside Chat session in which we invited Thomas Vu, the executive producer for “Arcane: League of Legends,” to share his experiences. I enjoyed that he spoke so candidly about his dilemmas and lessons from his own experiences, alongside our panelists. Since KRAFTON is also making broad efforts to expand upon its intellectual property (IP), hearing about his concerns in depth was a useful opportunity. Also, I felt that it was highly effective as a method of communication to have a guest speaker communicate freely about their experiences and knowhow, instead of the conventional format of having them lead the presentation.
Have you ever taken part in another developer conference? How do you feel that KDC:Week differs from the others?
Seunghyun Mun: I’ve participated in various developer conferences in Korea, which were mostly comprised of sessions that were limited to professionals in the development sector. In contrast, KDC:Week allowed developers and members of other professions to come together and enjoy the event. Of course, some sessions purely focused on the technical aspect, but there were also those that didn’t. I’m an engineer myself, but I’m not solely interested in technical sessions, so I liked that there were diverse sessions centered around the keyword of video games.
Haksu Lim: I’ve attended the “Game Developers Conference (GDC)” in San Francisco, USA before. At the time, I attended the event in person each year to gain a healthy stimulus by interacting with various video game industry workers, but I found it difficult to find the time to attend these events myself as I began to set my schedule to the busy pace of my current work. The desire to interact with industry peers and grow as a result can’t be satisfied in any other way, which is why KRAFTON holds this highly-accessible developer conference each year to allow members to participate with ease. I think this is an excellent part of the company’s welfare system.
Unlike other conferences, KDC:Week presents a truly packed itinerary, as it invites core luminaries at global companies within our industry, provides sessions dedicated to independent developers, organizes programs for us to empathize with the experiences and thoughts of our junior coworkers who are working hard on their first foray into the industry, and holds live talk sessions to envision KRAFTON’s future by reflecting on its past and present.
I’d like to know if you have any hopes or expectations for future KDC events.
Joseph Park: First of all, I saw signs of painstaking thoughtfulness and meticulousness in the preparation process and the actual operation of the event. This kind of event is comprised of little implementations that may be small in scale but are nonetheless difficult to orchestrate and achieve, which makes the overall project such a difficult endeavor.
I believe that success is the result of accumulating countless trials and errors. But, when we look at the process of a huge failure, we often find that there were also many tiny successes along the way. That’s how we can continue to learn by examining various case studies and actual implementations. I hope that the event keeps evolving as a venue to candidly share our countless endeavors as well as experiences of tiny successes and failures with our coworkers.
I also hope that the event will organize more roundtable venues to hold sessions where panelists and participants communicate and converse freely, as well as participant-led sessions. We spend most of our day alongside our coworkers within the organization of our company, and I would like these events to lead to a closer and more mutually beneficial relationship among organizations as well as among individual members within KRAFTON.
Haksu Lim: Although my presentation had many shortcomings, I received words of support and encouragement from various sources in the preparation process. It was a truly heartwarming experience, and I’d like to thank everyone for their support once again.
Personally, I felt that the art department had fewer sessions than presentations by other groups. I myself work in the art domain, so I understand that some people are more familiar with expressing their thoughts and emotions through art as opposed to language. However, given the huge number of outstanding artists at KRAFTON, I believe that they could show a little bit of courage to give presentations that will serve as hugely beneficial experiences for their coworkers in the audience as well as the presenters themselves.
Lastly, I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to the organizers who prepared and dedicated themselves to the event in various ways, as well as our coworkers who gave us their precious time to listen to the sessions presented at the event.
