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Good news: Passes for the Game Developers Conference are still available, and today we're excited to announce more details about the third annual ‘Shut Up & Sit Down’ GDC board game exhibit, which will be open to all GDC 2017 passholders at various points during GDC week -- February 27th through March 3rd.

As always, this excellent exhibit is carefully curated by the clever folks who run tabletop game enthusiast hub Shut Up & Sit Down, and will offer GDC attendees a calm oasis where you can relax and play some of the best tabletop games of 2016. Video game makers can learn much from the world of tabletop games -- something GDC is embracing this year by hosting a Board Game Design Day!

This time around the Shut Up & Sit Down space at GDC 2017 -- one of many engaging interactive spaces spread across the show -- promises to be bigger and better than ever. To find out more, we had a brief conversation with Shut Up & Sit Down cofounder Paul Dean about what to expect this year.

Plus, after the interview we have the full list of games that will be available for GDC 2017 attendees to play in the Shut Up & Sit Down Games Lounge!

Organizers of the 2017 Game Developers Conference are happy to confirm that Square Enix will be at the show offering a behind-the-scenes look at the narrative design of Final Fantasy XV.

Dan Inoue is a lead writer and localization director at Square Enix, and in his talk on "Bringing Fantasy to Life in Final Fantasy XV" he'll discuss how "a fantasy based on reality" came to reside in the real world, and what rules were made and broken to maintain a cohesive, coherent narrative amid swathes of information.

So come learn how the fantasy came to life -- you'll walk away with techniques for bringing realism into a fantasy world, insight into the challenges of maintaining a cohesive narrative across companion projects and promotions, and strategies for turning the universe to your advantage, all with a unique AAA JRPG spin.

With just a month and change to go until the 2017 Game Developers Conference, organizers want to let you know about a great game design talk taking place at the show from Blizzard game director Eric Dodds.

Dodds has worked on everything from StarCraft to World of Warcraft to Hearthstone while at Blizzard, and in his GDC 2017 talk on "Let Your Players Do the Talking! (Why Player Stories Matter)" he will speak first to why player stories are important and then about three of the tools that can be used to generate more and better player stories with examples taken from Hearthstone and World of Warcraft.

This talk is interesting because Dodds believes game designers like to tell stories with their games, but their narrative is much less compelling than the stories their players are telling each other. As game designers, they should focus on providing tools that enable their players to tell their own awesome stories -- and attendees of his talk will learn how to do just that!

The schedule for the 2017 Game Developers Conference is coming together nicely, and today organizers are excited to announce that the developers of Gears of War 4 will be at the show to talk about how they did more with less.

In his talk on "Motion Warping in 'Gears of War 4': Doing More with Less," The Coalition technical animator Steven Dickinson will reveal the techniques and technology developed to increase flexibility and reduce scope on Gears of War 4. For example, he'll show you how motion warp points can be used alongside traditional animation content authoring approaches and how this approach is philosophically critical to the animation process at The Coalition.

Blending multiple animations has traditionally been a way of dealing with distance, direction and environmental variance. However, the amount of assets needed for adequate coverage in today's large AAA titles can be crushing. Multiple animation blending also reduces visual freedom as blended animations must be of similar style and timing. Some games have tackled this content explosion by dynamically warping motion to meet the spatial constraints. These are often ad hoc/specific to particular actions and not exposed to the animator. For Gears of War 4, The Coalition developed a generalized solution by introducing the concept of warp points.

As the 2017 Game Developers Conference draws nigh, organizers would like to quickly let you know about some of the great talks on artificial intelligence in games that will be taking place during the March conference.

Each of these talks is part of the GDC AI Summit, one of eight that will take place Monday, February 27th and Tuesday, February 28th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA -- the first two days of the conference.

Each Summit offers a comprehensive overview of a specific game industry discipline, and the AI Summit is no exception. This year, for example, Havok Inc. AI team lead Ben Sunshine-Hill shows you how to implement an asynchronous task processing system in his AI Summit talk on "Beyond Framerate: Taming your Timeslice through Asynchrony."

Such a system can smooth CPU spikes, leverage idle cores, and guarantee an exact processing time limit for your AI step, allowing programmers to still use complex and long-running AI computation in a real-time video game without compromising simulation quality.

2017 is here, and with it comes some exciting news: The 2017 Game Developers Conference will play host to a pair of game industry luminaries who will take the stage to deliver a posmortem look back at their work on an incredibly influential game.

Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley, a pair of game industry luminaries who have together shaped the history of video and board game development through their work on everything from Railroad Tycoon to Age of Empires, will be presenting a Classic Game Postmortem on their groundbreaking game Sid Meier’s Civilization at GDC 2017!

The pair worked closely together at MicroProse on many notable projects, but it was in Civilization that Shelley’s background in board game design and Meier’s history of sim game development blended together perfectly, leading to the creation of what is perhaps the biggest and longest-running strategy game franchise in the world.

Now, Meier and Shelley will take the stage at GDC 2017 to deliver an earnest postmortem of their work conceiving, designing and developing Civilization. The game and its sequels have influenced a generation of game makers; don’t miss your chance to hear how it all began.

Designing satisfying enemies in games is often a question of balance: too many vs. too few, too aggressive vs. too skittish, too authored vs. too systemic.

To help you better understand that balance, organizers of the 2017 Game Developers Conference have lined up a great talk from the folks at Naughty Dog about how they fine-tuned the combat AI in their blockbuster 2016 game Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.

Matthew Gallant is a game designer at Naughty Dog, and in his Design track talk on "Authored vs. Systemic: Finding a Balance for Combat AI in 'Uncharted 4'" he'll show you how to evaluate which aspects of combat AI should be authored by designers and which parts are better handled with systems-driven logic. This includes specific methods for assigning roles in combat situations, particularly when larger number of NPCs or complex level geometry are involved.