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It's nearly here: the 2018 Game Developers Conference! As you prepare yourself accordingly, organizers want to make sure you don't overlook a great talk about the unique production of indie hit What Remains of Edith Finch.

As part of the GDC 2018 Design track of talks, Giant Sparrow creative director Ian Dallas will present "Weaving 13 Prototypes into 1 Game: Lessons from 'Edith Finch'." Edith Finch contains 13 different sub-stories, each with its own unique art style and gameplay mechanic; of course, and to make that happen Giant Sparrow had to prototype more than 13 games.

Dallas will thus talk about how he and his team approached prototyping where the goal was for each mechanic to be something players had never seen before, but also intuitive enough to grasp without tutorials. He'll also discuss the challenge of blending these radically different mechanics into a cohesive experience along with the production process his team evolved to try and keep the whole team informed in the face of nearly constant, frustrating, exhilarating change.

When you get to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco later this month you're going to have a ton of cool stuff to choose from -- including an intriguing talk from the devs behind last year's sleeper hit Friday the 13th: The Game.

It's an interesting game because it asks players to engage in asymmetrical multiplayer matches -- one player takes on the role of the iconic Jason villain, and the others play camp counselors seeking to thwart him. In his Design track talk "'Friday the 13th': Design and Balance for Asymmetrical Horror" game director David Langeliers will explain how the team designed and tuned that asymmetrical balance.

He'll dig into how the team worked to make a Jason player feel extremely overpowered, and the large team of counselors feel very under-powered, while still having the experience feel fair for both teams, and scary for the counselors while staying true to the source IP. You won't want to skip it!

When you're an independent game developer, you often don't have the luxury of just sticking to your art and craft, you have to go out and build a business for yourself as well. It's an experience a lot of developers can relate to, but at GDC 2018, you're going to hear from speakers like Tanya X. Short, who not only makes games at her company Kitfox Games, but helped co-found Pixelles, a non-profit dedicated to helping women make games in Montreal!

To get a sense for what Short will be talking about at GDC, we reached out to her for a quick Q&A about what it's like being an indie with an interest in procedural game design and running her own company. You can read all of her answers below!

Don't miss out! The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next March is going to be full of interesting and informative sessions like Short's. For more visit the show’s official website.

Game devs, take note: the GDC 2018 Producer Bootcamp on Tuesday, March 20th is going to be a fantastic day-long learning opportunity with a ton of expert sessions on the ins and outs of being a great producer in game dev.

It's one of many Bootcamps and Tutorials that take place during the first two days of GDC (Monday and Tuesday, March 19th and 20th this year) and offer attendees the chance to dive deep and explore focused topics like level design, game production, art direction and animation.

Of course, in the game industry a producer's role often varies from team to team and differs across studios. Good (or bad) production practices and methodologies can make or break a game's overall quality, the team's health, and even define studio culture. The Producer Bootcamp brings together experts and colleagues for a day to discuss best practices in production and team management, as well as share their career experiences.

Next month the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco will once again feature a curated selection of great stuff for virtual reality developers under the aegis of VRDC @ GDC -- including an array of great talks from top VR/AR creators!

Notably, the "'CocoVR': Engineering a Cinematic Experience, Spherical Multi-Projection" session -- part of the Entertainment AR/VR track of VRDC @ GDC talks -- will see Magnopus' Luke Schloemer and Xavier Gonzalez discussing how the team at Magnopus (a visual development and experience company) used textures created by Pixar's rendering pipeline so they could texture the static geometry with lighting equivalent to what they have in their films.

As you get ready for the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next month, don't skip a great talk from the team at Digital Extremes that breaks down everything they've learned about community management in 5 years of operating Warframe!

This is a big deal because Warframe is a cross-platform free-to-play game, and in her Business & Marketing track talk on "Whose Game Is It, Anyway? How Community Relationships Shape Games: Lessons from 5 Years on the Front Lines of 'Warframe'" live ops and community director Rebecca Ford will share insight into how the game's community has been nurtured and built up.

Attendees of this talk can expect to learn how best to work with a diverse, unpredictable community, how far to take transparency, how to use community feedback in a fast-paced dev cycle, what to do when decisions fail and succeed, and more.