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GDC Europe has revealed a new batch of lectures for the upcoming August show, featuring industry legend Mark Cerny on the future of the industry, Age of Empires and Titan Quest veteran Brian Sullivan on level design, and Battlestar Galactica Online developer Bigpoint on handling large IP.

Taking place Monday through Wednesday, August 15-17, 2011 at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost, alongside the major gamescom trade show, GDC Europe will again provide the essential pan-European perspective of game development and business trends.

Some of the new highlights from the Main Conference, which features tracks on Business & Marketing, Game Design, Production, Programming and Visual Arts, include the following:

- Industry veteran Mark Cerny, whose career spans titles such as Marble Madness, Crash Bandicoot, and Resistance, will host a high-profile talk in the show's Design track titled, "The Long View," which will examine the last forty years of video game history, as well as provide a look into the future.

Cerny notes that "2009 and 2010 have now shown some erosion in console video game sales," and his talk will discuss what this trend could mean for the industry, and why developers might have to adapt to considerable changes in their creative process.

- In a retrospective Design track lecture, "Level Design: Lessons Learned from Age of Empires and Titan Quest," Northeastern University instructor Brian Sullivan will provide attendees with a look back at lessons learned from two popular isometric PC titles he was a part of.

Sullivan, who worked with Ensemble on the Age of Empires series and founded Titan Quest developer Iron Lore Entertainment, will go over the level design processes for these games, offering developers "insight into how to design their levels with respect to gameplay, play style, topic, story, quests, pacing, performance, tech, art, budget, schedule, and fun."

[Continuing his 'Tales from the Vault' series, official GDC historian Jason Scott debuts complete free video of two seminal Nintendo keynotes at GDC -- Shigeru Miyamoto in 1999 and Satoru Iwata in 2005.]

The videotapes are starting to pile up in the "done" box and the process of turning the resulting video files into more lightweight video streaming files is now well underway, and I'll be adding these talks at a good clip for the coming months.

Since Nintendo gave the main keynote for the 2011 GDC [GDC Vault free video], I thought it might be fun to bring out two other Nintendo keynotes given across the last ten years plus: a Shigeru Miyamoto presentation from GDC 1999, and Nintendo's 2005 GDC keynote that introduced the Nintendo DS in depth to the world.

So we're debuting these talks for the first time online, free via GDC Vault. Firstly, Miyamoto's appearance and keynote at the 1999 Game Developers Conference [GDC Vault free video] is a big deal -- a real big deal.

Even if you didn't know who he was, the introductions and palpable excitement from the presenters shows that having the legendary Mario game designer was a huge win for the conference.

To his great credit, Miyamoto provides a presentation about his ideas on game design, the history of Nintendo's entry into the console game market, and a call to innovation, and it's filled with ideas both specific and universal. In other words, he makes it worth the trip.

His speech, coming via a BetaSP archive we've digitized, starts in English. But then he announces he'll continue in Japanese, which he does, with a translator providing the rhythmic back-and-forth between the two languages.

And the core message, as I hear it, is that he thinks story and gameplay, with a good dash of artistry, is what brings the games from being mere shoot-em-ups and twitchfests to being something more, something that will stay with people a long time.

Perhaps that might seem obvious, but his consistent vision from the days of Donkey Kong up through to what he hints at (the Wii) gives these games a sense of weight and thoughtfulness, and his wish in the speech is for many others to do the same.

As an unbroken, long-form presentation of evidence that Miyamoto deserves his high regard and hall of fame designer status, this speech is perfect. It lives up to all the promises of any great speech, and is well worth enjoying, even a decade plus later.

GDC Europe 2011 has revealed a selection of new lectures from the show's Summits, including thatgamecompany on reaching out to new audiences, Glu Mobile on freemium viability, and Digital Chocolate on making social games with hardcore gameplay.

This year, the gamescom co-located mid-August show in Cologne, Germany will host Summits on Social Games, Independent Games, Smartphone & Tablet Games, and Community Management.

Some near-final new highlights from these Summits, which have largely rounded out their line-ups, include the following:

- In the keynote for Monday's Independent Games Summit, president and co-founder of thatgamecompany Kellee Santiago will discuss how to reach out to new demographics in "Developing New Audiences: When the Past Can't Predict Your Future."

Drawing from her experience working on flOw, Flower, and Journey, Santiago will explain "how to make effective decisions based on little data to create commercially successful titles that, in the beginning (and maybe right up until you ship), no one will think you can sell."

- In the Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit, Mike Breslin, VP of global marketing at mobile publisher Glu Mobile (Gun Bros.), will host a talk titled "From Free-to-Play to Freemium: Emerging Category in Mobile Gaming."

GDC Europe 2011 organizers have revealed new sessions for next month's show in Cologne, featuring talks from Braid
creator Jonathan Blow on truth in game design, free-to-play game leader
Gameforge on virtual goods success, Quantic Dream's co-CEO on flawed
game rating systems, and more.

Taking place Monday through Wednesday, August 15-17, 2011 at the
Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost, alongside the major gamescom trade show, GDC Europe will again provide the essential pan-European perspective of game development and business trends.

Some of the new highlights from the Main Conference, which features tracks on Business & Marketing, Game Design, Production, Programming and Visual Arts, include the following:

- Renowned game designer and Braid/The Witness creator Jonathan Blow will host a talk in the show's Design track titled, "Truth in Game Design,"
which Blow says will "illustrate that games, being algorithmic systems
implemented on computers, are biased toward revealing truth, so long as
we do not quash the truth in order to force our own high-level wishes
into the design."

Blow's cerebral talk will also seek to explain how "we use games as
instruments, like telescopes or electron microscopes, to observe aspects
of the universe that we would not normally have access to."

GDC Online organizers have revealed the initial lineup for the show's Game Narrative Summit, which features speakers from Eidos on Deus Ex: Human Revolution's branching narrative, Microsoft on creating transmedia giants, MIT on crafting education-based ARGs, and more.

Taking place Monday through Thursday, October 10-13, 2011 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, GDC Online continues as the leading worldwide event to solely discuss the development and business trends surrounding connected games -- including casual titles, MMOs, virtual worlds, and social networking games.

Now in its sixth year, the Game Narrative Summit - formerly the Game Writers Conference - once again returns to GDC Online to showcase leading speakers on the many facets of interactive storytelling, with sessions ranging from roundtable discussions to postmortems and more.

The initial sessions and lectures featured in the two-day Game Narrative Summit currently include the following:

- In "Building the Story-driven Experience of Deus Ex: Human Revolution," Eidos Montreal's lead writer and narrative game designer Mary De Marle will present an in-depth look at the story-building process behind the upcoming Deus Ex title. De Marle will outline how the creative team crafted the game's numerous story branches and player choices, while still maintaining a coherent and satisfying experience.

- Elsewhere, Geoffrey Long, producer of narrative design at Microsoft, will note what it takes to build an IP into a powerhouse franchise in "From Story to Universe: 10 Best Practices for Transmedia Franchise Design." Long will look at franchises outside of games, including Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Star Wars, to explain why these IPs became some of the most popular in the world, and how game developers can build their IP to do the same.

Organizers have officially opened submissions for the 2012 Independent Games Festival, being held at the Game Developers Conference 2012 in San Francisco next March 5-9.

The Independent Games Festival is
the longest-running and highest-profile independent video game festival,
summit, and showcase, and is now accepting entries to its 14th annual
edition, with deadlines in the Main and Student Showcase categories by
October 17 and October 31 respectively, and finalists to be announced in
January 2012.

All games selected as finalists will be available in playable form at
the IGF Pavilion on the GDC show floor from March 7-9, 2012, and will
compete for nearly $60,000 in prizes, a significant increase from last
year.

This includes the high-profile $5,000 Nuovo Award, honoring abstract,
short-form, and unconventional video game development, and previously
won by designers including Jason Rohrer (Between) and Messhof (Nidhogg).

In addition, awards for Excellence in Visual Art, Audio, and Design,
Technical Excellence, Best Mobile Game, the Best Student Game, and the
Audience Award each now receive a $3,000 prize, and the signature Seumas
McNally Grand Prize for the independent game of the year (won by
Mojang's Minecraft in 2011) has been increased by 50 percent to a record $30,000.

Winners will be announced on stage at the high-profile Independent
Games Festival Awards on Wednesday, March 7, 2012, at the Moscone Center
in San Francisco. The Independent Games Festival Awards are held
immediately before the wider Game Developers Choice Awards.

GDC Europe 2011 continues to debut talks for the August event opposite gamescom in Cologne, including Obsidian's J.E. Sawyer on RPG mechanics, GameStop on expanding into the digital market, and Sony on the PlayStation Vita.

Taking place Monday through Wednesday, August 15-17, 2011 at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost, alongside the major gamescom trade show, GDC Europe will again provide the essential pan-European perspective of game development and business trends.

Some of the new highlights from the Main Conference, which features tracks on Business & Marketing, Game Design, Production, Programming and Visual Arts, include the following:

- In the Business & Marketing track, Steve Nix, divisional vice president and general manager of digital distribution for video game retail giant GameStop, will host a talk dubbed, "GameStop's Digital Strategy: Bringing Immersive Gaming to a Digital Audience."

As the traditionally retail-heavy GameStop reaches into the digital space by acquiring Stardock's Impulse download service along with streaming technology company Spawn Labs, Nix will examine the growth and evolution of the digital space and how his company plans to work with publishers and developers to shift beyond the traditional console market.