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It can be tricky to balance the demands of making a great mobile game and making a mobile game that earns enough to let you keep making mobile games.

At GDC 2018, TapBlaze president Anthony Lai will be offering fellow game makers advice on how they can do both in his talk "'Good Pizza, Great Pizza': Game Design, Iteration, and Business Lessons Learned."

Drawing on Tapblaze's experience taking its free-to-play mobile game Good Pizza, Great Pizza from 3,000 to 60,000 daily active users in the space of a year (without paid user acquisition), Lai will walk you through the process of making a good, sustainable game under significant resource constraints.

If you press your ear to the ground on a chill winter's eve, you just might hear it: the muffled sound of game makers around the world making preparations to attend GDC 2018 in San Francisco next March.

Among them is Em Halberstadt, a sound designer with Shell in the Pit Audio who's going to be at the Game Developers Conference next year to deliver a neat talk about "How Sound Tells the Story of 'Night in the Woods.'"

The story of Night in the Woods is based on the environment, and the sound works in conjunction with each scene to make players feel as though they're there. It aims to mimic the liveliness of real life, and in her talk Halberstadt will be exploring how she created appropriately atmospheric audio, including the ways in which it changes over time, and brings life to that which cannot be seen.

Winter is nearly here, and that means the 2018 Independent Games Festival is about to enter its jurying phase -- the period in which experts in specific disciplines play, evaluate and discuss the most notable games of the nearly 600 entered in the 2018 Festival Competition, which together continue to push the boundaries of video game development and design.

This year the list of experts tasked with evaluating IGF 2018's most promising entries is once again studded with game industry luminaries. Now that hundreds of evaluators have conducted the first round of IGF judging, these expert juries will convene to determine the finalists and winners of the various IGF 2018 awards at the 2018 Game Developers Conference.

To recognize their contributions to the process, today we'd like to celebrate those who have volunteered their time and talent to take part in judging the Excellence in Visual Arts Award, the Excellence in Narrative Award, and the Nuovo Award.

Before you know it, the year will be 2018 and you just might be in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference. To give you a glimpse of what's in store for you there, organizers are excited to announce a talk from Naughty Dog's Josh Scherr about the art of writing great characters in games.

His GDC 2018 Narrative Summit talk on "Character Development in Non-Linear Spaces: 'Uncharted: The Lost Legacy'" will showcase how Naughty Dog had to adapt its usual "wide-linear" narrative techniques to allow for more player choice, while still keeping the development of Chloe and Nadine's relationship consistent and natural.

Scherr was a co-writer on both Lost Legacy and Uncharted 4, and in his talk he hopes to provide an overview of Naughty Dog's story development techniques, followed by a detailed look at the writing process for this unique area, including: cutscenes and gameplay dialogue, the choices and compromises they made to make it work, and the mistakes they hope to avoid in the future.

We're delighted to announce the inaugural GDC Film Festival, one of the first ever documentary & narrative film fests focused on the art and culture of video games.

The 1st Annual GDC Film Festival will take place at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts' Screening Room - directly adjacent to the Moscone Center - from Monday, March 19th to Wednesday, March 21st during Game Developers Conference 2018.

Screenings will be open to all GDC 2018 pass holders, on a first-come, first-served basis. Across the three days, there will be a wide range of documentaries & other filmed material based around the video game medium, some of which will be debuting for the first time.

The 2018 Game Developers Conference will be here before you know it! To give you a taste of what's in store for you at the San Francisco event next March, organizers are proud to announce a talk from Hinterland Games founder Raphael van Lierop.

In his GDC 2018 talk "A Long Dark Road: Blending Player and Authored Story in a Sandbox Survival Game", which spans the Design and Production & Team Management tracks of talks, van Lierop will examine how it's possible to successfully marry a linear, authored narrative experience to an open-world sandbox.

Using anecdotes and insights gained through the ongoing development of Hinterland's flagship game The Long Dark, van Lierop will share hard-won lessons about community-informed development, the principles that define a successful sandbox gameplay experience, and the challenges of wrapping a story mode around the core of a popular survival sandbox, with a large vocal community of players who might just prefer you left it alone!

Are you coming to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next March? You should, because it promises to be a premier opportunity for game makers to share and learn from each other while attending some fantastic talks.

For example, Ubisoft will have a great Programming track talk at GDC 2018 that's all about the asset build system used to build Far Cry 5. 

The talk, appropriately titled "The Asset Build System of Far Cry 5", will feature Ubisoft Montreal engine architect Remi Quenin speaking frankly about how Ubisoft fleshes out its big open-world games full of assets without bringing the whole project crashing down.