GDC Europe organizers have revealed major new speakers for its August 2010 event in Cologne, including a Heavy Rain postmortem from David Cage, plus detailed talks from the creators of Crysis 2, APB and Split/Second.
The latest announcements follow details of a keynote from Bigpoint and initial lectures from notables from Playdom, Sony, and Playfish. These begin to flesh out the schedule for the major three-day European game development event, taking place for the second year on August 16th-18th in Cologne, Germany.
The notable new speakers for the conference, which is created by the UBM Techweb Game Network, include the following major new talks from leading video game creators:
- In 'Heavy Rain: How Far Are You Prepared to Go to Develop an Original Project?', David Cage "will be driving the audience through a detailed postmortem on the hurdles Quantic Dream had to overcome to produce a game such as Heavy Rain", looking at making the "babylonian production while trying to keep creative control."
- InstantAction's Lou Castle is debuting a notable Business Track lecture called 'Baggies, DVDs and Bitstreams: How to Reinvent Yourself in a Dynamic Market', and the Westwood co-founder (Command & Conquer) will showcase thought-provoking opinions, "offering several specific methods of retaining and refocusing your personal outlook and, therefore, your professional career in games."
- 'The Art and Visual Styling of Crysis 2' is the title of a lecture by Crytek senior art director Frank Kitson, discussing the process of defining and shaping the visual styling the much-awaited action title. It will "offer practical techniques of defining color space and getting to the core of building a compelling visual image, as well as how to define key visual requirements and build a unique visual language that is consistent across an entire game."
- Black Rock's Matthew Rubin presents a lecture called 'Rigged to Blow: Powerplay Pipeline for Split/Second', looking at authoring set pieces and destructible environments for the acclaimed Disney racing game. Each stage of the data-driven pipeline will be discussed, including early prototyping, fracture modeling, rigging and animation, collision attachment, timeline and game event authoring, layering of audio and visual effects, real-time previewing and in-game play testing.
- Realtime Worlds' Joshua Howard will present 'APB's Beta Postmortem (And How We Changed Realtime Worlds Along the Way)', honestly discussing -- with regard to the PC MMO beta from the co-creator of Grand Thef Auto -- "what... worked and didn't work, what we learned along the way, and how the drive to go live served as a forcing function for a variety of changes that needed to be made."
The second GDC Europe event takes place Monday through Wednesday August 16-18, 2010 at the Cologne Congress Center East in Cologne, Germany, alongside the major GamesCom public/trade event. All non-student GDC Europe passholders will receive a four-day pass to attend GamesCom, which includes hardware and game exhibits from all of the industry's biggest names, from Sony and Nintendo through EA, Ubisoft and beyond.
For more information on specifics for GDC Europe -- for which registration is now open -- interested parties can visit the official Game Developers Conference Europe website.
