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The field of visual design for games has never been more exciting, and thus Game Developers Conference 2015 officials are eager to highlight another great set of sessions about the practice of crafting art for games that you'll want to keep on your radar.

You can find full details on these and other excellent art talks at GDC 2015 via the Visual Arts track session list.

Artificial intelligence design in games remains one of the perennially popular Game Developers Conference topics, and today we're highlighting a few notable talks on the subject that you must see at GDC 2015 in March.

These talks are part of the GDC AI 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.

Developers, how would you go about bringing a big-budget game franchise like Hitman to the mobile market as a standalone product in a way that best takes advantages of the platform's strengths?

It's a tricky question, but you'll likely find at least one good answer in the GDC 2015 talk "Design by Constraints: Hitman GO Design Postmortem." Check it to see Square Enix Montreal's Daniel Lutz, the game director behind Hitman GO, deliver a design postmortem on the game and its unorthodox design concept: an extremely minimalistic turn-based strategy game with diorama-style set pieces.

Developing virtual reality games is largely uncharted territory at this point; making mobile VR games is even less well understood, and it offers a set of unique design challenges.

Developers interested in charting a course through mobile VR game development would be wise to look for advice from trailblazers like Robot Invader, who rebuilt its moody murder mystery game Dead Secret to accommodate mobile VR devices (like Samsung's Gear VR headset) in the summer of 2014. 

At GDC 2015, Robot Invader chief taskmaster Chris Pruett will explain how they did it -- and what they learned along the way -- in a talk entitled "Designing for Mobile VR in Dead Secret."

As the new year heats up around us, Game Developers Conference 2015 officials are excited to announce that another game industry luminary is coming to the show in March to deliver an informative, insightful postmortem of a seminal game.

Warren Robinett, the veteran programmer, designer and The Learning Company founder known for his groundbreaking game design work at Atari, TLC and NASA, is coming to GDC 2015 to deliver a Classic Game Postmortem on the creation of his hit 1979 game Adventure for the Atari 2600 console. 

Adventure is particularly notable for (among other things) being one of the first graphical action-adventure games ever released. Adventure also contained one of the earliest known "Easter eggs" ever hidden in a game by a designer -- in this case, a hidden screen revealing Robinett's name and authorship at a time when Atari was unwilling to publicly credit game makers for their work. Thus his efforts to create Adventure meaningfully advanced both the practice of game development and the fight for developers to be recognized for their work.

The Independent Games Festival (IGF) juries have announced the Main Competition finalists for its prestigious 17th annual awards, honoring the most influential and outstanding development in independent video games. The IGF has nominated over 30 extraordinary game titles released in the past year.

Candidates for the 2015 IGF Awards were distributed to a group of esteemed evaluators from across the industry for evaluation. Expert juries specializing in distinct disciplines for each category then selected the IGF finalists following playthroughs and recommendations from the nearly 650 IGF Main Competition entrants.

The juries behind GDC 2015's Independent Games Festival continue to take form with an exciting lineup of highly lauded developers and industry professionals to decide the finalists for the awards this March.

2015 IGF Main Competition finalists will be announced later this week, but in advance of that, following the announcement of the jurors taking part in our Excellence in Design and Excellence in Audio panels, below you can find the confirmed jurors for our remaining juries.

These are Excellence in Visual Arts, and Excellence in Audio Awards, and our special Nuovo award, recognizing excellence in shorter-form, more esoteric games. The remaining juries being announced today are as follows: