PRODUCED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
Zoltan Ferenczi
Founder & XR/Game Developer
Make a Break Berlin UG
Zoltan Ferenczi is an XR developer, immersive game designer and founder of Make a Break in Berlin. For more than a decade, he has created technology-driven escape-room and interactive experiences enjoyed by over 150,000 players. He is the creator and lead developer of Dunkelstein, a crowdfunded AR tabletop murder mystery built in Unreal Engine that blends a physical villa, cinematic characters and mobile augmented reality. Alongside independent game development, Zoltan works as an XR developer at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on the CUBES Circle digital-twin research project. His work focuses on turning ambitious spatial-computing ideas into accessible, social experiences.
Building a Living Tabletop: Mobile AR, Physical Game Design and AI Characters in Dunkelstein
Keynote
How do you make a physical board, a handheld device and a digital world feel like one coherent game? Dunkelstein is a cinematic murder mystery that uses mobile AR to bring a 1914 villa, its rooms and its characters to life on the table. This keynote shares lessons from building the game in Unreal Engine: tracking both a flat playfield and a physical wooden villa; designing readable interactions for people moving around a shared table; balancing visual fidelity against mobile performance and thermal limits; and keeping physical, digital and narrative states in sync. It also explores the latest step—an LLM-driven character who can listen, answer in role and react to the investigation without revealing spoilers. Attendees will leave with practical principles for hybrid XR games and an honest look at the prototypes, failures and trade-offs behind turning an ambitious AR concept into a real product.