GDC News and Information Blog

Organizers of the 2013 Independent Games Festival are pleased to announce the latest additions to its discipline-specific jury panels that will determine the finalists and winner of its various awards.

The jury announcements for this year are beginning with some of the industry professionals, independent game notables and former IGF award winners that will make up its Excellence in Visual Art and Excellence in Audio Awards.

The latest jury rundown following prior announcements of its Nuovo and debut Narrative Award jurists, as well as this year's Design and Technical Excellence juries.

The Excellence in Visual Art Award

The Visual Art award is a category which seeks to highlight the innovation and quality in visuals for indie games.

Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Visual Art award have been entrants which featured impressive displays of the craft of games, including The Behemoth's vibrant cartoon-ish beat-em-up Castle Crashers, Polytron's 2D/3D "trixel"-based puzzle platformer Fez, Amanita Design's hand-painted adventure game Machinarium, Playdead's equal parts soft and stark monochromatic puzzler Limbo, and thechineseroom's ambient first-person exploration game Dear Esther.

Continue reading "IGF 2013 highlights Visual Art, Audio Award jurors" »

Posted by Staff at 4:57 PM | Permalink

GDC organizers have revealed sessions for the first ever QA Summit at the March 2013 conference that include Riot Games on rapid test iteration, BioWare on QA and development team integration, and a panel on test automation with VMC Game Labs, Sony Computer Entertainment America, and The Walt Disney Company.

These talks all fall within the QA Summit, which will take place alongside seven other summits on Monday and Tuesday, March 25-26, 2013 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California.

The debut summit based around Quality Assurance in games will discuss "new and/or current tools, processes and organization methods being used in in QA today and to show how QA is an integral part of development", and is advised by notables including Double Fine's Daniel Pangelina, EA's Mario Vasquez, and VMC Game Labs' Ben Wibberley.

Taking an in-depth look at these sessions, BioWare's Tulay Tetiker McNally and Arone Le Bray will explore the working relationship of their QA and development teams in 'BioWare QA - Partners in Development (Embed Model).'

In particular, the BioWare team will show how this QA model applies to the narrative creation process in Mass Effect 3 and how QA spot issues early on. "This made it easier to avoid costly changes in content at later stages of development, and ultimately provided the end user with a better experience."

Riot Games' Benjamin Seifert will pour out a torrent of QA information in It's Raining New Content: Successful Rapid Test Iterations.'

Riot's League of Legends faces an ongoing QA challenge, since it continuously delivers new content and features to its player base. Seifert will show that while traditional QA models may fail to adapt, Riot tackles this problem with "a three pronged approach: utilizing our specialized skills and knowledge, having diverse and frequent feedback loops, and automation."

Continue reading "GDC 2013 debuts QA Summit, including talks from BioWare, Riot" »

Posted by Staff at 4:33 PM | Permalink

The Game Developers Conference has opened nominations for the 13th annual Game Developers Choice Awards through January 4, 2013. Produced by GDC parent company the UBM Tech Game Network, the Choice Awards are the most prestigious honors in the world of video game development.

The Game Developers Choice Awards recognize the artistry and technical genius of leading industry professionals across multiple game development disciplines. The 13th Annual Awards ceremony will take place the evening of March 27, during GDC 2013 in San Francisco, CA.

Awards in 10 categories are open for nominations for games that launched to retail or debuted online during the 2012 calendar year.

Nominations are also open for three special awards: the Pioneer Award (previous winners), which celebrates those individuals who developed a breakthrough technology, game concept, or gameplay design at a crucial juncture video game history - paving the way for the myriads who followed them.

Also up for nominations is the Ambassador Award (previous winners), which honors an individual who helped the game industry advance to a better place, either through facilitating a better game community from within, or by reaching outside the industry to be an advocate for video games, and the Lifetime Achievement Award (previous winners). All three special awards are open to anyone not previously recognized.

In addition, the Choice Awards will be adding the new Audience Award category for the first time. Fans will have the opportunity to vote on their favorite video game that was released in the previous calendar year. Voting for the audience award will open on February 4, 2013 and will be completely open to the public to cast votes.

Continue reading "13th annual Game Developers Choice Awards open for nominations" »

Posted by Staff at 9:47 AM | Permalink

Organizers of Game Developers Conference 2013 are adding talks involving industry-leading IP for its March 2013 conference - including the design of the Promethean enemy for the Xbox 360 exclusive Halo 4, Kixeye on its rise to social game prominence, and IO Interactive's novel approach to animation used in Square Enix's multiplatform Hitman: Absolution.

Specifically, in 'The Design of New Enemies for Halo 4', 343 Industries' lead game designer Scott Warner will dissect the development of the new Promethean enemies. The studio had just taken over the legendary shooter franchise, and 343 knew every detail of its Prometheans would receive heavy scrutiny from Halo's dedicated fans.

Warner will present insights into "design philosophies, creative inspirations, gameplay prototyping, logic around iterative decision making for final characters, and key challenges faced along the way" of creating these alien antagonists.

Kixeye CEO Will Harbin, developer of Facebook titles War Commander and Backyard Monsters, will argue 'Death to Downloads' and will, instead, champion browser-based games for immersive experiences. Harbin's talk will include lessons on achieving long-term player retention and engagement. Kixeye's evolution, successes, and failures will exemplify these lessons, while Harbin reveals the secrets of highly monetizing free-to-play browser games.

Continue reading "GDC 2013 reveals Halo 4, Kixeye, Hitman: Absolution talks" »

Posted by Staff at 10:55 AM | Permalink

Organizers of the 2013 Independent Games Festival are pleased to announce the latest additions to its discipline-specific jury panels that will determine the finalists and winner of its various awards.

The jury announcements for this year are beginning with some of the industry professionals, independent game notables and former IGF award winners that will make up its Excellence in Design and Technical Achievement Awards, as well as high-profile additions to its Nuovo and Narrative awards, the first members of which were recently announced.

Former Journey producer and designer and current Funomena co-founder Robin Hunicke will be joining both the Nuovo and Narrative juries. Also joining the Narrative jury is Telltale writer and designer Sean Vanaman, notable for his work co-writing the recent award-winning Walking Dead adventure series. And the Nuovo Award jury will also see the inclusion of designer, curator and Kokoromi art collective co-founder Heather Kelley and Lea Schoenfelder, creator of former IGF finalist Ulitsa Dimitrova.

While the juries continue to be assembled in advance of the kick-off of our next phase of the finalist selection process, we're happy to announce the following confirmed jurists.

The Excellence in Design Award

The Excellence in Design award is a category which seeks to highlight the innovation and quality of the underlying blueprint of each entered game -- component parts like its mechanic design, level design, and difficulty balancing.

Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Excellence in Design Award have included 2D Boy's cartoon construction puzzler World of Goo, Pocketwatch Games' abstracted multiplayer heist game Monaco, QCF's rogue-like puzzler Desktop Dungeons and procedurally-generated platformer Spelunky.

The confirmed jury to date consists of the following:

Continue reading "IGF 2013 highlights initial Design, Technical Award jurors" »

Posted by Staff at 5:17 PM | Permalink

Organizers of next March's Game Developers Conference 2013 are highlighting the first summit talks behind some of the industry's biggest games in the free-to-play, smartphone and tablet, and indie arenas.

Firstly, Epic's upcoming Infinity Blade: Dungeons will serve as an example of how to design touch-based controls for both hardcore and casual markets. Exploring the free to play market in China, Tencent will discuss its best business and design practices for handling the multiple Game Developers Choice Online Awards winner League of Legends. And Indie Fund co-owner Aaron Isaksen will examine in-app purchases for indies 'without shame' in the Independent Games Summit.

For the Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit, Nick Cooper will share Epic Games' design process in 'The Iterative Touch: Crafting the Controls for Infinity Blade: Dungeons'. Epic aimed for touch-based input that appealed to casual and hardcore gamers for its action-RPG/dungeon crawler. Here, Cooper will discuss the design and implementation of Infinity Blade: Dungeons' touchscreen input, along with the iterative process by which it was developed.

For the Free to Play Design & Business Summit, Tencent's Jim Feng will discuss bringing Riot Games' League of Legends to China in his 'Operating Western Games in China' talk. Feng will highlight best practices for the operation and development of games for the massive Chinese market and will illuminate processes of working with Chinese game operators.

Continue reading "GDC 2013 reveals League Of Legends, Infinity Blade: Dungeons Summit talks" »

Posted by Staff at 9:46 AM | Permalink

The organizers of the Independent Games Festival, the leading showcase for independent video games worldwide, have announced a new agreement with Valve for IGF 2013.

All IGF Main Competition finalists for this year's event will receive the opportunity to accept a distribution agreement for Steam, a leading platform for distribution in today's burgeoning independent gaming market.

This means every single Main Competition finalist in each of the jury-voted categories - the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence In Design, Excellence In Art, Excellence In Narrative, Technical Excellence, Excellence in Audio, and even the Nuovo Award - can work directly with Steam to bring their titles to PC, Mac and Linux.

This agreement comes as the 2013 Independent Games Festival rolls out its new, cutting-edge judging website back-end - including a dedicated mobile judge app, social-style discussion tools for games, and the ability for judges and contestants to easily connect to resolve technical problems.

With over 200 distinguished judges discussing and recommending titles for named, discipline-specific juries in each of the seven main categories, IGF 2013 will announce its finalists in January 2013, and award winners at Game Developers Conference 2013 in San Francisco this March.

Finalists and winners of the Independent Games Festival since its 1999 debut have included landmark indie games such as Braid, World of Goo, Super Meat Boy, Portal predecessor Narbacular Drop, Minecraft, and a host of other seminal titles. Valve joins other supporters of the 2013 IGF including media sponsors Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine, as well as Platinum Sponsor Microsoft Studios and Platinum Student Showcase Sponsor DigiPen.

Posted by Staff at 9:14 AM | Permalink

Organizers of the 2013 Independent Games Festival are pleased to announce the first discipline-specific jury panels that will determine the finalists and winner of its various awards.

The jury announcements for this year are beginning with some of the industry professionals, independent game notables and former IGF award winners that make up its Nuovo award, as well as its first ever Excellence in Narrative Award.

While the juries are still being assembled in advance of the kick-off of our next phase of the finalist selection process, we're happy to announce the following confirmed jurists.

The Excellence in Narrative Award

The following jurists are among those chosen to lead the IGF's debut Excellence in Narrative award, which is intended to recognize innovation, quality, and impressiveness of storytelling in a game, including, but not limited to, scenario, plot construction, story, and dialogue.

The Excellence in Narrative jury will include the following:

Continue reading "IGF 2013 debuts initial Nuovo, Narrative Award jurors" »

Posted by Staff at 4:08 PM | Permalink

The organizers behind March's Game Developers Conference 2013 have highlighted the next batch of Main Conference lectures, which feature industry leaders from Epic, Frictional Games, and Microsoft. They collectively offer cutting-edge discussions in the areas of visual arts, design, production, and audio.

Gears of War creator Epic Games will analyze how it overcame the challenges of outsourcing art for its leading IPs. Amnesia: The Dark Descent developer Frictional Games will examine a new way of designing games, based around creating a sense of presence that stimulates players' imaginations.

Finally, Microsoft's Advanced Technology Group will dissect several audio innovations - while laying out ways to make audio more a part of the game itself rather than being merely ancillary to it.

The full details on these new lectures are as follows:

- In Building Epic Worlds through the Strengths of Artsourcing, Epic Games producer Chris Mielke will share the secrets to outsourcing the art talent behind the Gears of War, Infinity Blade, and Fortnite universes. Mielke will highlight some of the obstacles Epic overcame in production, while explaining how outsourcer integration can go smoothly across console, PC, and mobile platforms.

- Frictional Games' creative director Thomas Grip will explore The Self, Presence and Story-Telling in his game design lecture. As an alternative to traditional game mechanics, Grip will argue that a game should create a sense of presence and allow players' imagination do the work, much how the company's own Penumbra and Amnesia: The Dark Descent (pictured) evoked strong and often terrifying emotions.

Continue reading "GDC 2013 reveals talks from Amnesia's Grip, Epic's Mielke" »

Posted by Staff at 2:10 PM | Permalink

Game Developers Conference organizers have once again donated 25 All-Access Conference passes for students to attend GDC 2013 via the IGDA scholarship program.

The International Game Developers Association Scholarships Program is accepting applications for its GDC 2013 scholarships until January 11, 2013. The program is open to all students and recent graduates in fields related to game development.

The IGDA scholarships for GDC 2013 will include full access to the conference, mentorship from members of industry, and chances to talk to senior figures and to visit some of the Bay Area's development studios while in California for the show.

The IGDA is a not-for-profit membership organization serving individuals who create video games, and is dedicated to improving developers' careers and lives through community, professional development, and advocacy. GDC has been donating passes for students since the IGDA Scholarship program began in 2001.

Those interested in IGDA's Scholarship Program should visit the official website to learn how to apply - applicants need to be IGDA members in good standing.

GDC 2013 itself will take place March 25th-29th, 2013 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, with discounted early registration currently available to everyone.

Posted by Staff at 3:25 PM | Permalink