With the lineup for this August's GDC Europe growing ever larger, show organizers have debuted new talks on Techland and Deep Silver's Dead Island, bootstrapping tips from social startup PerBlue, and the essentials of in-house playtesting.
These talks all fall within GDC Europe's Main Conference, which takes place Monday through Wednesday, August 13-15, 2012 at the Congress-Centrum Ost at the Koelnmesse in Cologne, Germany.
The full details on these new sessions are as follows:
- The first of these new sessions is a Production track lecture from Deep Silver's Guido Eickmeyer, titled, "Dead Island: How To Create A Mega Seller On A Moderate Budget." During this talk, Eickmeyer will share brand new user and market data from the successful Techland-developed open world zombie game.
Along the way, he will discuss the importance of Metacritic, and how a strong trailer, multiplayer co-op, and a small-scale open world helped the game defy industry conventions and find unexpected success.
- Elsewhere, highly rated GDC 2012 speaker Justin Beck will share some essential tips for getting a startup off the ground in the Business, Marketing & Management track session, "Bootstrapping 101: How College Kids Built a Thriving Game Company in Under Three Years."
During this session, Beck will share lessons learned from the social startup PerBlue (Parallel Kingdom), detailing "why we turned down seed funding and how we compensated team members when we had no money."
- Finally, Graham McAllister, founder of the playtesting studio Player Research (who has worked with studios including EA, Sony, Disney, Sega, and Splash Damage), will present the Production track lecture, "Implementing an in-house playtesting process."
Here, McAllister will offer practical advice to help studios establish a robust testing procedure to improve the quality of their products. The techniques discussed in this session "are designed to remove biased opinion and give evidence for making key design decisions."
These talks join numerous other previously-announces sessions including a postmortem of Mafia II, a look at BioWare's approach to DLC, lectures from the creators of Dear Esther and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and more. For a full list of all GDC Europe sessions announced thus far, visit the "Announced Sessions" page on the event's website.
Those interested in attending these or any other sessions at GDC Europe can secure their pass for the Gamescom co-located August event now, as online registration is now open.
For more information on GDC Europe, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.