With the advent of Kickstarter and Early Access, many developers are now making their games in the open, providing beta, alpha, and even prototype builds to any player willing to buy in early. It's a new frontier -- how do you deftly navigate it?

Learn from those who have gone before at GDC 2015 by attending the open game dev panel discussion "A Thousand Voices: Open Game Development", moderated by experienced game industry reporter Colin Campbell. 

There, veteran crowdfunded developers Soren Johnson (Offworld Trading Company), Chris Avellone (Torment: Tides of Numenera [pictured]), Adrian Goya (Kerbal Space Program) and Jamie Cheng (Invisible, Inc.) will share the lessons they've learned during open development. 

The 15th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, the premier peer-based awards celebrating game development, will be honoring Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the bestselling Final Fantasy series of games and the founder and president of Mistwalker, with the Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the world of gaming.

The Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony takes place on Wednesday, March 4 at 6:30 pm at the Moscone Convention Center during the 2015 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and will be streamed online and open to all GDC pass holders.

Game Developers Conference organizers are happy to announce that voting for the Independent Games Festival (IGF) Audience Award is now open through February 9th, 2015 at 11:59 PM PT.

This Audience Award represent an opportunity for the gaming public to weigh in and cast a vote for their favorite nominee. Anyone who would like to vote for the IGF Audience Award can visit the links below, select the name of the game they'd like to vote for from a list of nominees, and enter a valid email address -- voters will then receive an email to confirm their vote.

The 2015 Game Developers Conference is coming up fast, and today conference officials are excited to announce another great in-depth Indie Games Summit session that attendees of the March conference absolutely must not miss.

We're excited to have Alen Ladavec and Davor Hunski, CTO and CCO (respectively) of Croteam, delivering a postmortem of development on the IGF award-nominated puzzle game The Talos Principle. 

During their session, "Reactive Game Development: The Talos Principle Postmortem", the pair will offer attendees a behind-the-scenes look at the design decisions and creative reactions that guided development of this surprise hit.

What it takes to succeed as an independent game maker changes every year, and so today we're highlighting a few notable cutting-edge talks on the topic that you must see at GDC 2015 in March.

A few years ago, working with a publisher meant working with one team to do all your funding, marketing, distribution, accounting and outreach. Now, you might get funding from three different places, have two different teams working on marketing, distribute it yourself, and outsource the accounting.

What do we fund? Why? What sorts of marketing works? What's the overhead like? What sorts of deals should developers get? At GDC 2015, Adam Saltsman (Finji), Kellee Santiago (OUYA), Greg Rice (Double Fine) and Nigel Lowrie (Devolver Digital) will try to answer these questions as part of the "Indie Publishing: A Whole New World" panel.

"Test early, test often" is a popular mantra for player researchers in certain circles of development.

But what do you do with all that data you're gathering on how people play your game, especially when you're designing and testing your design decisions right up until the final days of development?

At GDC 2015, Electronic Arts lead researcher Veronica Zammitto (credited on EA games like Madden NFL 25 and NHL 14) will show you how to distinguish what to focus on and how to maximize findings from testing user experience in the last stages of production in a talk entitled "Moving the Needle: User Research at the End of the Production Cycle."

| January 2015

In This Issue:

• Intel - Christos Georgiopoulos, VP, Software & Services Group and GM, Developer Relations Div. at Intel, reveals the cool game technology it is delivering by working with the top game engine vendors, and what will be hot at Intel's eight GDC 2015 sessions.