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The 2011 GDC Europe concluded on Wednesday, August 17 with a successful showing and a final attendee count of more than 2,100 game professionals representing 57 countries.

A marquee keynote lineup of notable industry veterans, from wooga founder and CEO Jens Begemann, to co-creator of the legendary Ultima series and founder of social media games developer Portalarium Richard Garriott, to Epic Games president Dr. Michael Capps, among others, joined an additional 170 European and international speakers, a total of 46 exhibitors and 35 sponsors and more than 300 media representatives covering game development on PC, social networking sites, consoles and mobile platforms.

Event organizers also announced that GDC Europe will return to Cologne, Germany on August 13-15, 2012.

In its third year, GDC Europe continued the tradition of bringing high-quality content to the European game development community. The introduction of the Social Games, Independent Games, Smartphone and Tablet Games, and Community Management Summits demonstrated the increasing importance of these developing areas that are pertinent to European game development. The Social Games Summit also proved to be a forum that showcased the spirit alive across both European and Western independent developers including speakers Kellee Santiago from thatgamecompany, Frictional Games' Thomas Grip, and Spaces of Play's Marek Plichta.

Highlights of day one at GDC Europe included wooga CEO Jens Begemann giving a keynote discussing today's social games and how they are not designed to turn all core gamers into FarmVille farmers. In his talk, Begemann surprised attendees with the live, real-time launch of Magic Land, a title that contains an exciting mix of social gaming elements with aspects from the dungeon-crawling genre. The first day of GDC Europe also featured a keynote talk by Enric Alvarez, game director and co-author of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and founder of its development studio Mercury Steam, who discussed how the small Spanish studio met the challenge in taking on a beloved franchise from a Japanese developer.

The GDC Vault service has released several new free videos from the Game Developers Conference 2011, this time featuring a collection of strategy game talks covering StarCraft II's e-sport aspirations, a behind-the-scenes look at League of Legends, and a panel examining the future of the strategy genre.

These talks join recently-debuted free videos including GDC 2011's social game developers rant, sessions from successful indie startups and industry veteran Don Daglow, in addition to GDC 2011's classic postmortem series and a slew of other sessions from throughout the history of the Game Developers Conference.

The following video lectures are the newest highlights to be made available for free from GDC 2011:

- When Blizzard set out to create StarCraft II, the studio had to reinvent the rules of one of the most popular competitive games of all time. In "The Game Design of StarCraft II: Designing an E-Sport," lead designer Dustin Browder outlines the obstacles Blizzard had to overcome to make the game suitable for spectating and high-level competitive play.

- Riot Games' Tom Cadwell and Steve Snow discuss the development process behind the studio's hit MOBA title in "League of Legends Postmortem -- Beta, Launch and Beyond." Here, Cadwell and Snow "discuss the three major areas that were particularly challenging: Recruiting a team without a reputation or a product, interacting with an existing audience with large expectations, and organizing teams to be successful amidst the distractions of a live game."

- In "Strategy Games: The Next Move,"
a panel of strategy game experts discuss rising trends, overlooked
innovations, and the overall trajectory of the strategy game genre.
Speakers including writer Tom Chick, Civilization veteran Soren Johnson, Civilization 5
lead designer Jon Shafer, Robot Entertainment's Ian Fischer, and
Blizzard's Dustin Browder discuss the implications of free-to-play,
online persistence, and more to offer insight on where strategy games
are headed.

GDC Online has revealed a new batch of talks for the show's Game Narrative Summit, featuring a roundtable with Valve's top writers, a look at how BioWare balances storytelling and design, and a Telltale lecture on crafting an authorial voice.

Taking place Monday, October 10 through Thursday, October 13, 2011 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, GDC Online continues as the leading worldwide event dedicated solely to discussing the development and business trends surrounding connected games -- including casual titles, MMOs, virtual worlds, and social networking games.

Now in its sixth year, the co-located Game Narrative Summit -- formerly the Game Writers Conference -- once again returns to GDC Online to showcase leading speakers on the many facets of interactive storytelling, with sessions ranging from roundtable discussions to postmortems and more.

The latest sessions and lectures featured in the two-day Game Narrative Summit include the following:

- In "Just Go: A Roundtable Q&A with Valve's Writers," attendees will get a rare chance to sit down with writers Erik Wolpaw, Marc Laidlaw, Chet Faliszek, and Jay Pinkerton in a no-rules discussion of Portal 2, Left 4 Dead 2, the past and future of the Half-Life series, and much more.

Here, all attendees will sit in a collective roundtable with the session hosts, so seating will be limited to only 50 people -- make sure to arrive early!

- BioWare Austin's senior world designer Wynne McLaughlin, world designer Blake Rebouche, and senior writer Hall Hood will host a panel dubbed, "Building a Bridge Between Design and Writing," outlining how the Star Wars: The Old Republic developers find synergy between two very specialized realms of game creation. The hosts will explain the core conflict that often pits game writers against designers, and will provide insight on how to reconcile these differences.

With just a day left to register online for next week's GDC Europe event, organizers have chosen to highlight the various events and parties that will take place during and after the Cologne show.

These social events are hosted by some of the show's sponsors, and serve as a great opportunity to relax after the conference and get to know other industry professionals and developers.

A GDC Europe pass is required to get in to each of these parties, so make sure to register online while there's still time. Once online registration closes, passes will be available only via on-site registration, which opens Sunday, August 14 at 3:00PM.

The following are some of the biggest sponsored events open to GDC Europe attendees:

- On Monday, August 15 at 8:00PM, Crytek will host its very own Crytek GDC Night, offering a venue for show attendees to relax, chat, and network with game developers from around the world. The event will take place at Rheinterrassen, Rheinparkweg 1, 50679 Cologne and is open to all GDC Europe pass holders.

- On Tuesday, August 16 at 6:30PM, Glu Mobile will sponsor the Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit Mixer, an event that ties in with the titular GDC Europe Summit. Here, pass holders can drink, mingle, and meet other industry professionals involved or interested in mobile and tablet-based games. The event will take place on the Expo Floor at the Congress-Centrum OST Koelnmesse.

- At 9:00PM that same evening, pass holders can head over to the Diamonds Club at Hohenzollernring 90, 50672 Cologne for the GDC Indie Party. Here, badge holders can dance, have drinks, and chat with fellow developers, students, and high-level professionals from throughout the industry. Attendees will also get a taste of Europe's nightlife with a live act by Sound of Games.

For more information on any of these events, please visit the official GDC Europe events section.

GDC Europe has announced a new keynote from Mercury Steam founder Enric Alvarez, who will reflect on the development of the studio's recent action title Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

Alvarez will join other speakers such as Epic's Mike Capps, Ultima creator Richard Garriott and Wooga founder Jens Begemann as the fourth keynote speaker to be announced for GDC Europe. This year, the event will take place August 15-17, and is located in Cologne, Germany alongside gamescom, the leading European trade and consumer show.

The keynote, titled, "Postmortem: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - How To Succeed And Not Die Trying," will provide an in-depth look at how the Spanish developer Mercury Steam took the reins of one of gaming's most classic franchises.

In addition, Alvarez will also delve into the origin of the project, how Mercury Steam handled its relationship with a Japanese publisher, as well as what went right and wrong throughout the course of the project.

Prior to working on Lords of Shadow, Alvarez and the rest of Mercury Steam worked on projects such as Codemasters' Clive Barker's Jericho, and the American McGee-designed game Scrapland

Following the production of these titles, Alvarez began co-writing and directing Lords of Shadow, a game that eventually set a new milestone for project scope and size in the Spanish development community. The game also had the support of Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima, who served as the title's project advisor. Alvarez will elaborate on this relationship and more in his upcoming keynote.

To help inspire submissions for the GDC 2012 call for papers, the event's advisory board members for the Production track spoke out on the challenges facing modern producers, and outlined what they hope to see discussed at the upcoming San Francisco-based show.

Seasoned industry professionals such as Zynga's Louis Castle, WB Games' Laura Fryer (Lord Of The Rings: War In The North), Media Molecule's Siobhan Reddy (LittleBigPlanet), and Epic's Rod Fergusson (Gears Of War) all discussed the most critical elements of contemporary game production as part of their drive to inspire submission ideas for the GDC 2012 Main Conference.

These GDC advisory board members oversee the show's Production track, and ensure that each of its sessions remain relevant and hold up the high bar of quality that GDC attendees have come to expect.

The call for papers for GDC 2012 will close on September 6, with a list of production-specific topics available on the official website. In the following interview, the advisory board members discuss key issues they'd like to see addressed at next March's show.

How does a producer's job vary between large and small development teams?

Louis Castle: Small team producers literally do anything and everything that is not being done by a team member. Bigger teams offer specialization and very big teams demand specialization. This usually manifests itself in more creative control and responsibility with small teams, but also requires extraordinary individuals to achieve world-class results.

Laura Fryer: I agree with Louis. The primary role of the producer on both is to serve and support the team. For both they need to be great communicators, but in larger teams, communication is more challenging since your bandwidth per person naturally goes down as you add people. With a small team you are probably sitting close to everyone and can talk to them multiple times a day, whereas on larger teams that's not usually possible.

Siobhan Reddy: I certainly agree with Louis and Laura. At a small studio, it's very important to know your limits and when to hire in experts for areas you aren't so great at -- especially QA, HR, finance, IT. Small implies cheaper, which means you can take advantage of being a more experimental or innovative. Being large implies a higher burn rate, so your approach to experimentation would be different.

Rod Fergusson: Everyone has made great points so to try and add another aspect to this is the idea of managing staff. Most teams I've been on have been "all of the responsibility but none of the authority" types where it's a matrix and no one directly reports to you.

Even in that structure though, as the team grows your job will change, as you need to have supporting producers and associate producers reporting to you to be able to keep up with the team. I don't think you can assume that because a person can manage a project that they can be responsible for the growth of the people that report to them.

It's another skill in the toolbox, as Laura likes to say, and it means you're not just focusing on shipping. You have to think longer term for the people that report to you so that you can plan their development beyond just this ship cycle.

This month's GDC Europe has debuted a new track keynote from Crytek's Cevat Yerli, as well as talks from Ninja Theory on performance capture, plus the IGF's Brandon Boyer on how indies will drive the future.

Taking place Monday through Wednesday, August 15-17, 2011 at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost, Germany, alongside the major gamescom trade show, GDC Europe will again provide the essential pan-European perspective of game development and business trends.

The new highlights from the Main Conference, which features tracks on Business & Marketing, Game Design, Production, Programming and Visual Arts, include the following:

- Crytek president and CEO Cevat Yerli will give a track keynote in the conference's Game Design track titled, "An Old Horse Learning New Tricks - From AAA Retail to AAA Online." Here, Yerli will examine Crytek's history as a traditional, retail game developer and its experience transitioning to the online space with its upcoming shooter Warface.

Looking back at the company's previous retail offerings such as FarCry and Crysis, Yerli's keynote will also outline the biggest challenges Crytek faced when adapting to online game development, noting the "insurmountable differences" that forced the studio to learn new approaches to game production.

- Also in the Game Design track, UK-based Ninja Theory co-founder Tameem Antoniades will offer a in-depth look at cut scene production in, "Performance Capture: A Creative Primer." This talk will detail how Ninja Theory cooperated with movie studios such as Weta Digital (Lord of the Rings), actor Andy Serkis, and numerous other movie professionals to create believable, high-fidelity scenes in titles such as Enslaved and Capcom's DmC: Devil May Cry.