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With just under a month left early registration for Game Developers Conference 2017 ends January 18 at 11:59 PM Pacific, conference organizers are encouraging anyone interested in attending to register now at a discounted rate.

When you register you'll be securing access to a wide variety of game development talks, roundtable discussions, postmortems and workshops, as well as fantastic interactive spaces like the Alt.Ctrl.GDC exhibit of games with idiosyncratic controllers and the Train Jam game jam showcase for game prototypes developed while riding the rails.

All passholders also have access to the GDC Expo Floor, located within the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, which serves as a showcase for cutting-edge technology from some of the industry's biggest and most influential companies.

The Expo Floor also provides attendees with numerous opportunities to learn about upcoming products, interact with developers and publishers, and establish business relationships with some of the industry's top professionals. GDC even offers a special service dedicated to facilitating such relationships -- the GDC Business Matchmaking service, available to all GDC 2017 attendees.

The schedule for the 2017 Game Developers Conference is shaping up nicely -- today, for example, organizers are proud to announce a cool talk taking place at the show about how Hangar 13's Mafia III got its sublime soundtrack.

In their GDC 2017 session on "'Raising a Ruckus: Bringing the Blues to 'Mafia III'" composers Jesse Harlin and James Bonney will break down how Mafia III was scored.

Through an experimental and exploratory demo process, the game's score pointed towards the creation of an interactive, all-original blues score. However, Harlin and Bonney suggest the blues introduces several challenges: its form and structure is very simple, its instrumentation is limited in color, and often its players, while accomplished, are not musically literate. This talk will address the challenges of working with a music tradition that is not typically used for scoring video games.

Telling great stories in video games is tricky business, thanks in no small part to how a game's narrative must cohere with the mechanics of playing it.

That's why organizers of the 2017 Game Developers Conference have lined up a great talk about how to design a game so that its mechanics elevate its narrative.

In his Independent Games Summit talk on "Building Game Mechanics to Elevate Narrative in 'Oxenfree'", Sean Krankel -- cofounder of Oxenfree developer Night School Studio -- will dive into the various design decisions that went into creating an acclaimed supernatural thriller rooted in communication and exploration.

Every game's development can benefit from greater harmony of mechanics and player purpose. Come see where Night School Studio succeeded and failed at striving to answer both questions as it sought to merge storytelling and mechanics as closely as possible.

The schedule for the 2017 Game Developers Conference is robust, so today organizers would like to let you know about a cutting-edge talk about the audio tech in Gears of War 4 that you won't want to miss.

In their GDC 2017 session on "'Gears of War 4', Project Triton: Pre-Computed Environmental Wave Acoustics," Microsoft Research researcher Nikunj Raghuvanshi and Microsoft technical audio lead John Tennant will break down Project Triton, which they call the first successful effort for detailed scene-dependent wave acoustics in games.

Triton shipped in 'Gears of War 4', resulting from a collaboration between The Coalition and Microsoft Research. Triton robustly models complex wave phenomena such as diffraction, scattered reflections and reverberation on static 3D level geometry. In doing so, it captures important effects like smooth occlusion around obstacles or longer reverberation in large halls, as well as how these effects change when source and listener move through the environment.

The 2017 Game Developers Conference is going to be here before you know it, and today organizers want to quickly let you know about a helpful talk on game design education that's taking place at the show.

Marko Suvajdzic is an experienced game design educator and at GDC next year he'll be sharing some critical lessons learned about trying to teach game design in his GDC Education Summit talk on "Video Game Design Practices in a Symultaneous Synchronous/Asynchronous Oncampus/Online Classroom."

Real-time online learning is quickly becoming the Holy Grail of education. Suvajdzic will share insights and learn specific best practices to the real world problems encountered during the past 2 years in teaching video game design in an experimental research program where all classes are offered simultaneously to the three distinct groups of students: on-campus, online synchronous (real time video conference), and online asynchronous. Professor Suvajdzic reviews the multimedia classroom setup for this specific hybrid model content delivery method, offers best practices in teaching, reviews hardware/software options, and presents the data collected from the first two generations of the students.

As the 2017 Game Developers Conference schedule continues to shape up nicely, organizers would like to highlight a really great talk from Guerrilla Games that will take GDC 2017 attendees behind the scenes of the studio's upcoming game Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Paul Van Grinsven is a game programmer at Guerrilla Games, and in his GDC 2017 talk on "Player Traversal Mechanics in the Vast World of 'Horizon: Zero Dawn'" he'll show what went into making protagonist Aloy traverse the vast world of 'Horizon: Zero Dawn' with its complex and organic environments.

Various traversal mechanics will be covered from a gameplay programmer's perspective, focusing on the interaction between code and animations. The different systems and techniques involved in the implementation of these mechanics will be explained, and he will look at the underlying reasoning and design decisions.