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GDC Online has unveiled notable new sessions for the upcoming October show, now featuring The Settlers Online, Mind Candy on the importance of daily content updates, and how to best raise venture capital.

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.

This year's Main Conference will include tracks on Business & Marketing, Customer Experience, Design, Production, and Programming, as well as a sponsored track on Monetization.

As seen in the event's Schedule Builder, the following lectures are highlights from this year's Main Conference:

- In the show's Production track, Ubisoft Blue Byte's head of production, Christopher Schmitz, and head of live operation, Benedikt Grindel, will look back at the development of The Settlers Online in a session titled, "Settlers Online: Moving a Traditional European Boxed Game to a Worldwide Free to Play MMO Experience." Here, the pair will examine the challenges and lessons learned from taking producing and managing this popular European online game.

- Over in the Customer Experience track, community editor Megan Bell of Mind Candy will outline the benefits of delivering daily content updates to users in "Do the Math: True Value of Fresh Daily Content." Drawing examples from Mind Candy's own hit title Moshi Monsters, Bell will offer data that shows how regular updates benefit an online game.

- Elsewhere, in the Business and Marketing track, a panel of company executives will host a panel dubbed, "Raising Capital for Your New Venture," offering tips and insight on how to attract investments for a new company or project. Speakers at the panel include Fred Schmidt (Portalarium), Chris Chung (Motiga), Tim Chang (Norwest Venture Partners) and Cindy Armstrong (Electric Bat Interactive), all of whom will offer their own thoughts on what it takes to start your own venture.

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

Seasoned industry professionals Jeff Hanna from Volition (Saints Row: The Third) and Steve Reid from Red Storm Entertainment (Ghost Recon: Future Soldier) discussed the most significant accomplishments, challenges, and trends facing game artists as part of their drive to encourage submission ideas for the GDC 2012 Main Conference.

As GDC advisory board members, these industry veterans oversee the show's Visual Arts 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 Visual Arts-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.

As tech continues to advance, what sort of new opportunities will arise for artists? And what complications?

Jeff Hanna: For every year that passes, artists have more and more opportunities to fully express their creative vision. As processor speeds increase, RAM expands, and graphics SDKs expose new features, a game artist's toolbox grows extraordinarily large. My hope is that none of these new technologies ever unduly complicate an artist's life. As long as tools programmers, graphics programmers, and technical artists strive to create artist-centric tools to encapsulate these new avenues of expression, artists can concentrate on what they do best: creating great art.

Steve Reid: Technology helps make technically savvy artists better, but it also risks alienating the traditional artists. Technology can help talented people become great craftsman, while not actually transforming them into great artists. As we have games now of all styles and genres, I still believe that technology can help, but it is more often a band-aid than a cure. I think the greatest project impact still comes from good artistic direction, planning, and prototyping, while the greatest personal impact comes from a traditional education with a thorough understanding of foundational skills and visual narrative.

In terms of visuals, what needs to be done to help developers get out of the uncanny valley?

Jeff Hanna: To get out of the uncanny valley, the first thing you need to determine is which way you want to go. Striving for fully photorealistic 100 percent human-appearing characters in many cases will not be the right art direction choice. In fact, backing out of the valley will often yield better results than pressing forward. I feel that we already posses the capability to make engaging characters that can seamlessly exist within a given art style. As with all game art direction, the design of the characters will be a balancing act between what is possible and the overall visual look of the game.

GDC Online has unveiled several new sessions for the upcoming October show, this week featuring a web-focused talk from Angry Birds developer Rovio, a look at the life on an MMO producer, and a panel on top practices for community management.

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.

This year's Main Conference will include tracks on Business & Marketing, Customer Experience, Design, Production, and Programming, as well as a sponsored track on Monetization.

As seen in the event's Schedule Builder, the following lectures are highlights from this year's Main Conference:

- In the show's Production track, Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka and Serdar Soganci and Google's Seth Ladd will host "More Birds, More Pigs: Bringing Angry Birds to the Web," which will offer an in-depth look at the motivations, technologies, and challenges of bringing the popular Angry Birds to a browser. The speakers will also provide a more general overview of how to most efficiently translate a mobile title to the web.

- Elsewhere in the Production track, Jeremy Gaffney, founder of Lord of the Rings Online's Turbine Inc. and current executive producer at WildStar developer Carbine Studios, will host "My Producer Really Sucks: Inside the Twisted Minds of MMO Producers." In this session, Gaffney will point out the production challenges involved in big-budget MMO development, offering tips on how to deal with a large team and manage a studio through an online game's launch.

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

Seasoned industry professionals such as Media Molecule's Kenneth Young, HUGEsound.com's Chance Thomas, Microsoft's Scott Selfon, Brian Schmidt Studios' titular Brian Schmidt, and Video Games Live/Game Audio Network Guild founder Tommy Tallarico all discussed the most significant accomplishments, challenges, and trends facing audio production as part of their drive to encourage submission ideas for the GDC 2012 Main Conference.

As GDC advisory board members, these industry veterans oversee the show's Audio 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 audio-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.

What do audio professionals have to keep in mind when working on titles for the web or mobile devices? How do these platforms influence the use of audio?

Kenneth Young: Download size and available storage space certainly have a big impact on the approach -- for example, you don't have the liberty of throwing an abundance of streaming music, ambiences or voice assets at the project. On the positive side, such limitations force the developer to really consider whether wallpapering their game with music or thousands of lines of clunky, information-heavy and exposition-heavy dialogue is a good idea. Here's my obligatory Angry Birds example -- it only uses music when it is needed, in the menu and as a payoff upon level completion.

Chance Thomas: You need to remember the range of device capabilities. The mobile marketplace has a wide array of devices and capabilities, and today's audio pro needs to understand this range. For instance, a game developed for the hypothetical iPhone 5 will be sold at the same app store that old G3 users are still buying from.

Therefore, today's games still have to sound good on the minimum spec platform. For example, a cool interactive music design that works great on the iPad 2 using let's say, three stereo streams, is useless on earlier phones with only a single music stream available. It's important that audio designs still do the game justice on the minimum spec platform.

Brian Schmidt: The style of game you'll do for a mobile is most often very different from a console or PC title, as Kenny alludes to. You don't need the big choir-orchestra so much as tasty simple bits to complement the game.

In addition to download size, for web-based games, sometimes the developer is extremely concerned with "time to play" -- that is, from the time the user clicks on the game icon, they want to start playing the game within seconds. A game that requires lengthy downloads won't hold the user's attention, and they'll click and go do something else rather than wait even 60 seconds for a download or install.

A phone or web game will have a far smaller team and you will probably be the only audio person, so if you're a composer, get used to doing sound effects -- and not hacky, crappy ones! SFX is probably more important than music in many of these games. The SFX for these gmaes are much more likely to be abstract -- or non-diegetic -- than on consoles, so get good at knowing how to inform the player with sound without annoying them.

[In the latest installment of "Tales from the GDC Vault", digital historian Jason Scott debuts free video of major keynotes introducing the Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, and Xbox (via Bill Gates) to the world at Game Developers Conference.]

I'd argue that there are few bigger moments in the game industry, and perhaps in almost any industry, than the introduction of a new console. It's certainly one of the most expensive undertakings these companies will endure, requiring years of design and fabrication and meticulous planning.

If you did it all right, and luck falls in with you, and the right software houses get behind you, then success will come fast and free -- you'll have to construct additional buildings just to hold all the money.

But if you misstep, fail to have the right "kind" of titles or the killer launch games waiting alongside your console, then financial ruin and misery await you -- wounded, your company may not recover for years.

In this most stressful of times that a CEO may encounter, comes the tradition of the keynote speech, the time when you will step on stage, welcome everyone, talk of freedom and power and ability and dreams, and then point to the console mockup or system that you are going to drop on the world by (hopefully) the millions.

Any missed cues, or onstage crash, and the rags will be buzzing about it the next day. One solid, amazing demo, and you'll be the toast of the forums and the hallways of GDC. Like I said... it's as intense as it could possibly get.

With that in mind, I've digitized from BetaSP tape, specially for GDC Vault, not one but three keynote speeches given at GDC over a decade ago, introducing (or re-introducing) a new hardware console to the world. We now know who came ahead, who fell behind, and what tricks and triumphs these machines had in store, but it's very enlightening to look back with this knowledge at the offerings and statements in these presentations.

Organizers are proud to highlight the winners of the IGF China-sponsored Shanghai and Beijing Game Jams, both of which invited attendees to test their game design skills in a two-day marathon of collaboration and creative experimentation.

Held last month, these two China-based events invited professionals, indie developers, and even hobbyists to form teams and create a working game prototype from scratch, using only their own tools and tech.

To add a twist to the traditional game jam formula, each event also had its own theme around which entrants had to build their games -- the Shanghai Game Jam's topic was "Resurrection," while the Beijing event's topic was "Utopia."

In addition, the events encouraged entrants to meet other developers and work with new team members, and GDC China - part of UBM TechWeb, as is this website - awarded Tutorials & Summits Passes to the outstanding teams.

The following are the winning entries from both the Shanghai and Beijing Game Jams:

Shanghai Game Jam Winners
Topic: "Resurrection"

1st prize: The End is Nigh

As a frustrated soul left behind in the Rapture, players must try to prevent their neighbors from ascending into heaven, either by dragging them down or simply shooting them with a gun.

2nd Prize: Bud

In this title, players control seeds that sprout and grow, bringing new life into a landscape torn apart by war, industry, and death.

GDC Online has announced that PopCap co-founder John Vechey will give a keynote at the upcoming October show in Austin, Texas, where he will discuss how the Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies developer is adapting its popular single-player games to social platforms.

The keynote, titled, "Playing Well With Others - How PopCap Creates Compelling Social Game Experiences," will provide GDC Online attendees with an inside look at how mobile and social games have influenced the design philosophy of the extremely successful casual game studio.

Vechey launched PopCap in 2000 with co-founders Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka, and has been instrumental in driving nearly every aspect of the company's operations. As interim CEO of PopCap until 2003, Vechey oversaw all aspects of the company's Web presence while directing e-commerce, privacy/security and online games services.

Vechey's major contributions at PopCap include securing some of the company's largest partnerships with major Web portals and game publishers, helping to launch the immensely popular title Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, which went from zero to 25 million users in its first twelve months, and establishing PopCap as a major player in the social games business.

Currently the VP of Internal Business Development, Vechey manages PopCap's strategic investments and acquisitions, and helps shape and guide the global business and product strategy.