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Making games is remarkably hard, and every seasoned developer must learn how to handle setbacks and outright failures with aplomb.
With that in mind, Game Developers Conference 2015 officials seek to highlight a set of notable sessions aimed at helping you be productive in the face of failure.
Heads up, game developers: GDC 2015 is just over a week away, so it's time to gather your business cards, get your pre-GDC haircut and plan out out your conference schedule.
While you're at it, show organizers want you to know that the perennially popular GDC Microtalks returns with ten brief, rapid-fire talks about the philosophy, history and futures of the design, art and culture of games and play, all packed into a single hour.
The concept is simple: during the "GDC Microtalks 2015: One Hour, Ten Speakers, Games and Play, and Us" each speaker gets 20 slides, each of which will be displayed for exactly 16 seconds before automatically advancing, giving the speaker exactly five minutes and 20 seconds to make their point.
Andrew Maximov is a senior artist at Naughty Dog.
Art direction is not just something art directors do. Art direction is in every brush stroke we lay down and in every vertex we move. It is the idea that you're trying to communicate and the emotion you put into it. It is the dialog that you're having with your audience, while the tools are just means for delivery.
If you care about art, we would be privileged to see you join us in San Francisco on March 2 for an entire day of deep and thought-provoking art discussion from the absolute best in the business, during GDC's Art Direction Bootcamp. If you're going to Game Developers Conference -- don't miss it!
In the meantime, I've gathered some of the most experienced and talented senior artists in the game industry to answer a few questions from Twitter, Polycount, and from one another:
Let's begin!
We're less than two weeks out from the 2015 Game Developers Conference, and that means now is a great time for All Access pass holders, GDC Play exhibitors and Expo exhibitors to set up onsite meetings with each other using GDC's Business Matchmaking website.
This online tool allows GDC 2015 All Access Pass attendees to identify, contact, and request and receive meetings with GDC exhibitors of all kinds.
Meeting possibilities also include those in the GDC Play Pavilion, a separate area of the San Francisco show that showcases emerging and independent developers with a series of kiosks and meetings rooms. In addition, GDC Play exhibitors are able to contact notable distributors, publishers and funders in a special 'VIP' pool.
Designing beautiful, visually stimulating games is no easy feat, and as a developer there's no better way (other than years of experience) to sharpen your aesthetic design skills than swapping stories and techniques with your peers.
With that in mind, Game Developers Conference 2015 officials are excited to highlight another great set of sessions on the process of art design that you'll want to keep on your radar.
First, don't miss Hello Games art director Grant Duncan leading a "Do Artists Dream Of Electric Sheep?" talk at the conference about how a tiny indie team went about crafting the visual aesthetic of No Man's Sky (pictured), from early concept to finalised art. Duncan will cover inspirations, pre-production and the complicated, rewarding (and sometimes messy) union between programmers and artists, replete with plenty of pictures illustrating the process.
This year the Game Developers Conference takes place March 2-6 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, which means we're less than two weeks away from the year's premiere conference for game industry professionals.
We're getting close to the wire, but you still have time to register for a GDC 2015 pass.
While you're putting together your session schedule in the Schedule Builder, don't forget to set some time aside to stop by the Expo Floors. Highlights include:
Game Developers Conference 2015 organizers are excited to highlight some promising day-long sponsored developer days for the conference that cover everything from new UnityVR technology to the ever-expanding Amazon ecosystem.
These developer day sessions take place during the first day of GDC: Monday, March 2nd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.
Amazon returns to share industry best practices and help game makers learn to utilize Amazon technology to port, optimize and scale their games.
Amazon technology leaders will be on-hand throughout the day to answer developer questions and lead talks on topics from writing games for Fire TV (pictured), how to build better cloud gaming experiences, and applying in-app monetization best practices based on Amazon's IAP data, to incorporating tips and tricks for using Amazon Web Services to build scalable online games.
Storytelling has long been an essential part of how wisdom is passed from generation to generation, and now video games are part of that process.
Indigenous societies often use traditional storytelling to share and celebrate core cultural values as well, and developers can help share those stories through games like E-Line Media's Never Alone.
However, to authentically and accurately represent such stories and values, the development process must be handled in direct partnership with the indigenous people themselves.
At GDC 2015, E-Line Media's Sean Vesce and Never Alone writer Ishmael Hope will explore how game makers can create relevant, successful commercial games based on under-represented cultures that also have meaning and social impact in their talk "Adventures in Storytelling: Telling the World's Stories Through Games."
The 2015 Game Developers Conference is coming up fast, so now's the perfect time to sort out your schedule for the March conference.
To help streamline that process, conference officials encourage you to take advantage of the free, freshly revamped GDC 2015 Session Scheduler to plan out which talks you'd like to attend and ensure you don't miss anything the show has to offer.
If you've never used the Session Scheduler before, it's a fairly straightforward process to get started: simply select "Create Account" from the Session Scheduler page and provide a valid email address, then start adding talks to your personal GDC 2015 schedule.
Note: Due to system upgrades, if you already have a Session Scheduler account you must reset your password via the Session Scheduler website before you can access the service.
We're just weeks away from the 2015 Game Developers Conference, and today show officials seek to remind you about the career growth and networking opportunities attendees can take advantage of through the GDC Career Center and the Game Career Seminar, which offers lectures, panels, and presentations to help new and aspiring developers kickstart their careers in the game business.
The Career Center returns to GDC 2015 to complement the expansive, vibrant Expo Floor with exclusive career development sessions programmed by GDC organizers and top vendors.
Stop by the Center, located on the lower level of Moscone Convention Center's North Hall, to get practical career-building advice and meet folks working at some of the largest and most prestigious publishers and studios in our industry.
Developers interested in charting a course through the new frontier of virtual reality game design would be wise to look for advice from trailblazers at the 2015 Game Developers Conference, where a variety of sessions will be offered on all aspects of VR development.
Among them will be John Carmack, CTO of Oculus VR and co-founder of id Software, speaking about "The Dawn of Mobile VR" on Wednesday, March 4th for at least an hour and a half (and probably longer) at GDC 2015.
Attendees will have the chance to hear Carmack discuss the technical details of making mobile VR a reality; techniques and strategies for maximizing the quality of your VR games, applications, and experiences; and thoughts about the future of VR, including what it means for the mobile ecosystem.
The 2015 Game Developers Conference is coming up next month, March 2-6 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, which means we're just weeks away from the year's premiere conference for game industry professionals.
While you're putting together your GDC 2015 session schedule in the Schedule Builder, don't forget to set some time aside to check out the variety of lounges, exhibits, and other events that will be happening across the Moscone Center throughout the week.
If you want to have some fun with a 3D scanner, don't miss the 3DPlusMe booth in the lower level of Moscone's North Hall. 3DPlus Me delivers a mobile personalized merchandise platform for 3D printing that can help anyone put their own face on your products -- whether physical toys or digital in-game models.
Building a proper "open world" game is no easy feat.
Attend GDC 2015 and you'll hear firsthand how creating Dragon Age: Inquisition drove BioWare to re-think their approach to design; the challenge was to populate BioWare's largest 'open world' with only a handful of designers.
To achieve the desired content scope and density, the team split and experimented with two opposing techniques: the first group aimed to create discrete narrative content, while the second planned to implement standalone systems.
In a talk entitled "Worlds Collide: Combining Story and Design in Dragon Age: Inquisition", a pair of BioWare leads will explain how the first team found their content scaled poorly, and the latter discovered their content had a disconnected impact.
The 2015 Game Developers Conference is coming up fast, and we're excited to announce that indie video game showcase collective Wild Rumpus will return to GDC to double down on the success of last year's 'Mild Rumpus' game lounge.
You may remember that last year the keen minds behind Wild Rumpus created a special low-key lounge space on the second floor of Moscone West.
The sofa-filled Mild Rumpus offered GDC 2014 passholders an opportunity to kick back, relax, and check out games like Cardboard Computer's Kentucky Route Zero and Blendo Games' Quadrilateral Cowboy.
This year the Mild Rumpus returns with an expanded game lineup and a new woodland aesthetic. The Wild Rumpus encourages GDC attendees to stroll through the trees and into the welcoming heart of the Mild Rumpus woodland grotto.
The field of mobile game design is still relatively young and bursting with potential; today, conference officials a few notable talks on the subject that you must see at GDC 2015 in March.
These talks are part of the GDC Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit, one of eight that will take place Monday, March 2nd and Tuesday, March 3rd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA during the first two days of the conference.
Here's an interesting challenge: Can you make an old game new again? Halfbrick's chief product officer Ramine Darabiha tackles the topic during his talk, "Games As A Service: Rebooting a 4 Year Old Game to the Top Charts."
