BSG at NZGDC: Sharing Lessons, Sponsorship, Cosmorons | Blind Squirrel Entertainment, Inc.

BSG at NZGDC 2025: Three Speakers, Sponsorship, and Cosmorons at Kiwi Games Zone!

Blind Squirrel Games is excited to be speaking at and sponsoring this year’s New Zealand Game Developers Conference (NZGDC). Our team will share practical insights on pitching, engineering, and art pipelines.

Plus, we’ll be showcasing Cosmorons at the Kiwi Games Zone, giving attendees a chance to play and experience our work first-hand. You can check out the Kiwi Games Zone here: NZGDC Kiwi Games Zone! Cosmorons will be shown at Booth 22.

Game Art Pipeline Shift from Maya to Blender

Speaker: Lluc Romani, Assisted Art Director

Date/Time: Friday, 26 September, 15:20–15:50 (UTC+12)

Location: Tāwhirimātea G (Level 2)

As we develop our upcoming co-op shooter Cosmorons, our art team has made the leap from Maya to Blender for full-scale production. Lluc will share how we navigated the migration process, trained the team, and built an end-to-end pipeline for Unreal Engine using Blender. This talk highlights the challenges, benefits, and lessons learned from adopting Blender as a professional-grade production tool for a large project.

Lessons from the Pitch: Evolving Our Approach to AA and AAA Game Proposals

Speaker: Brad Thomson, Producer

Date/Time: Saturday, 27 September, 09:30–10:00 (UTC+12)

Location: Rongomātāne C (Level 1)

Over the past several years, Blind Squirrel Games has pitched multiple original projects to AA and AAA publishers. Each attempt taught us something new about what resonates—and what falls flat. In this talk, Brad walks through the evolution of our pitch decks and strategies, offering an open, practical look at the realities of pitching at scale. It’s an inside perspective on adapting to publisher feedback, identifying what sticks, and refining the process to make proposals more impactful.

Building a Procedural Real-Time Destruction System

Speaker: Antonio Lattanzio, Lead Engineer

Date/Time: Saturday, 27 September, 15:50–16:40 (UTC+12)

Location: Whataitai (Level 2)

What happens when you push Unreal Engine’s Chaos physics system beyond its limits? Antonio will dive into building a hybrid destruction system that combines Chaos with custom real-time solutions—enabling terrain deformation, procedural debris, and dynamic cracking of static meshes without pre-baked assets. Expect live examples, hands-on comparisons, and deep technical insight into making destruction gameplay responsive, flexible, and performant.