Latest News

GDC 2012 organizers have announced that online registration for the upcoming San Francisco show is now open, with discounted Early Bird pricing available until February 2.

With less than a week left before GDC China, show organizers have revealed three new sessions in the Online Games track, featuring speakers from BioWare Austin on merging casual and hardcore, WildStar developer Carbine on MMO production, and Bigpoint on its 3D web game Drakensang Online (pictured).

Taking place November 12-14 at the Shanghai Exhibition Center in Shanghai, the event will once again serve as the premier game industry event in China, bringing together influential developers from around the world to share ideas, network, and inspire each other to further the game industry in the region.

This year, the show's Main Conference will feature three primary tracks, covering Online Game Development & Business, Global Game Development, and Social Games, and two Summits on Indie Games and Mobile Games, respectively.

Here are the latest talks to be revealed for the show:

- BioWare Austin's Damion Schubert will host "Double-Coding: Making Online Games for Both the Casual and the Hardcore," which will examine how developers can straddle the line between two very different player demographics. Schubert will discuss the values held by both types of users, and will go over some strategies to convert casual players into online devotees.

- The second new talk in the Online Games track is "Massively Multiplayer Game Production: From Tiny Teams to Giant Projects," featuring Turbine founder Jeremy Gaffney, now of WildStar developer Carbine Studios. Drawing from his extensive experience producing large-scale MMOs, Gaffney will detail the essential qualities of a good producer, and will offer numerous production tips related to online game development.

- Rounding out this week's new sessions is Bigpoint chief games officer Philip Reisberger in "Trends and Challenges Facing the Next-gen 3D Web Games Like Drakensang Online." Reisberger will pick apart the studio's browser-based action RPG to offer insight on how to craft a robust 3D game on the web.

The GDC Vault service is proud to announce that videos and slides for last month's GDC Online are now available, with free videos that include Playdom's Raph Koster on social media convergence, BioWare San Francisco on Dragon Age Legends, and Riot Games on poor design decisions.

Along with these free videos, slides for all of GDC Online's sessions are now available for free, providing a glimpse into the range of notable topics discussed at the recent show.

The full catalog of video for GDC Online is also now available to GDC Vault members, which now includes All-Access Pass holders from last month's show in Austin, Texas.

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

- Over in the show's Customer Experience track, Playdom's Raph Koster hosted "It's All Games Now! How Games and Social Media are Converging," a talk that notes the ways in which games and social media are becoming more alike, and examines what this means for game developers. Koster frames his talk with a fantastical allegory for game development, illustrating how the games industry exists in its own "magic circle."

- Next, the GDC Vault offers a Business track talk hosted by BioWare San Francisco's Ethan Levy. His talk, "Dragon Age: Legends' Road to 100K Likes," looks back on the development and promotion of Dragon Age's recent Facebook spinoff, pointing to the challenges that come with building momentum for an online social game. Along the way, Levy offers tips to help developers plan and promote their games for long-term success on social networks.

- The final talk to be made available for free is "Designers are Human Too - Causes of Poor Design Decisions," from Tom Cadwell of Riot Games. Here, Cadwell teaches developers to let go of design ideas if they won't work in the game. Drawing from a number of League of Legends anecdotes, he explains what happens when teams spend too much time on ideas that just don't work.

Organizers
are reminding that there are less than 24 hours until the Student
Competition deadline for the 2012 Independent Games Festival, being held
at the Game Developers Conference 2012 in San Francisco next March 5-9.

The Independent Games Festival is
the longest-running and highest-profile independent video game festival,
summit, and showcase, and the deadline for the IGF 2012 Student
Competition is Monday, October 31st at 11:59pm PT.

The IGF has already revealed
record numbers of entrants for the Main Competition, with nearly 570
games competing, a more than forty five percent jump over 2011's total
entries.

Student Competition finalists will be announced in January 2012, and
will be available in playable form at the IGF Pavilion on the GDC show
floor from March 7-9, 2012.

Notable former student game finalists include Narbacular Drop, the precursor to the acclaimed Portal, as well as Cloud from the embryonic Thatgamecompany team, recent cult hit Octodad, and more.

Newly submitted student titles will compete for $7,000 in prizes,
which includes prizes for eight Student Showcase Winners and one prize
for Best Student Game. 2012 Independent Games Festival prizes for both
Main and Student Competitions total more than $50,000.

As noted above, submissions to the Student Competition are still open to all student game developers,
with many entrants waiting until the last minute to polish versions of
their game for more than 150 IGF judges. A full list of student entrants
will be released on the IGF website in the days following the
submission deadline, as also happened with the Main Competition.

GDC 2012 organizers have issued a reminder that the Summit call for submissions will close Monday, October 31, leaving just a few days to submit proposals for the San Francisco show submarket-specific events.

The Summits will kick-off Game Developers Conference 2012 during the first two days of the conference -- which runs March 5th-9th, 2012 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco -- and will cover pertinent topics in key sub-markets of the games industry, particularly focusing on broadening the scope of the medium to encompass new audiences, new platforms, and of course new gameplay ideas.

This year, the Summit lineup will cover topics such as AI, Education, Localization, Independent Games, Smartphone & Tablet Games, and Social & Online Games, all of which return from GDC 2011.

New to the show in 2012 are two new summits: Games For Change @ GDC and the Game IT Summit. As previously announced, Games For Change @ GDC is an event hosted in partnership with the Games for Change non-profit organization, which facilitates the creation and distribution of games that exist for humanitarian or educational purposes.

This new GDC event, which complements the annual Games for Change Festival in New York, will allow funders, educators, governmental agencies, and other organizations to interact with indie and commercial game developers to help leverage interactive entertainment for social good.

This week, the GDC Vault service has debuted specially picked free videos from previous Game Developers Conferences, including talks on the problems with game ratings, reflections on Chair's Shadow Complex, and design lessons from Far Cry 2.

These talks come from various GDC events from the past few years, and cover some particularly notable games and issues, providing just a glimpse of what the Game Developers Conference has to offer.

The following are the newest free video lectures to be made available on the GDC Vault:

- In the GDC Europe 2011 talk, "Game Content Rating Systems Must Change," Quantic Dream's Guillaume de Fondaumiere (Heavy Rain) contrasts video game ratings to those of film and other media, arguing that video game ratings are far more strict than they should be.

These restrictions, de Fondaumiere says, are hurting the industry, and this session explains why game developers need to do a better job of protecting their creations.

- During GDC 2010, Chair Entertainment's Donald Mustard reflected on the studio's hit XBLA title in a session titled, "Designing Shadow Complex." Here, Mustard points out the key pitfalls the team encountered during the game's development, and how the team learned to embrace the limitations of the platform to streamline Shadow Complex's design.

- This week's final talk comes from GDC 2009, and features Ubisoft's Jonathan Morin as he outlines the ways in which the critically acclaimed Far Cry 2 strove to support player expression in its game design. The session, dubbed, "Player's Expression: The Level Design Structure Behind Far Cry 2 and Beyond?," explores the game's open design and explains how lessons learned from this project could apply to other games.

Following Double Fine's recent announcement of the Kinect-exclusive Happy Action Theater, lead technical artist and upcoming GDC China speaker Drew Skillman discussed the studio's experience working with Microsoft's depth-sensing hardware, noting that it required the studio to re-think its approach to game design.

In particular, Skillman notes that it takes a lot of experimentation with Kinect to get things working as intended, and Double Fine had to take some unusual measures to reliably test its latest title.

At next month's GDC China, Skillman will delve further into the implications of working with Kinect in a session titled, "Rapid Prototyping Techniques for Kinect Game Development," which will focus on the studio's process for creating its motion-controlled games.

In anticipation of the talk, Skillman discusses the challenges of working with the Kinect's depth-sensing technology, offering tips on how to best make use of the hardware's strengths, and to design games around its weaknesses.

Considering Double Fine's history of making games with traditional gamepad controls, what has it been like for the studio to work with the Kinect hardware? Are there any particular challenges you or the team have encountered?

The biggest challenge has been adapting to the different types of input you get from the Kinect. A gamepad controller is quite literally a handful of very precise inputs, but the Kinect is a continuous stream of video and depth data. Even after processing that data into player joints and segmentation IDs, you will still never be able to pinpoint the exact frame when a character is supposed to jump, for example.

That difference has informed our designs at the deepest levels. We want to leverage this new technology for the amazing new interactions it allows, and not just try and use it as a calorie burning substitute for a gamepad.

What tips would you offer developers looking to start working with Kinect or other motion control hardware?

One great way to start is to check out all the phenomenal Kinect hacks that are flooding the web right now. If you do a Google search for "Kinect Hack," you will see a massive number of inspirational and creative applications, many of which are already in game form, or translate to games naturally. One reason for this rampant experimentation is that programming languages like Processing and Open Frameworks make the hardware accessible to everyone with a computer. This open source approach gives it traction in disciplines like science, education, interactive design, student games, etc. Kinect is definitely a melting pot of ideas right now.

Also, consider investing in life size, cardboard cutouts of your favorite characters. A member of our team made a genius purchase early in the project, and as a result cardboard cutouts of Dumbledore, Darth Vader, and Elvis have been invaluable testers throughout development. The Kinect detects them as very patient players. Another late arrival to our "test team" was actually a Yoga ball, which the Kinect recognizes as well.