GDC Europe 2009 has announced initial speakers for its August event in Cologne, Germany, with Flower's Kellee Santiago joining Swords And Soldiers' Joost van Dongen and Zootfly's Bostjan Troha at the international event.

The event will be held in conjunction with the massive European GamesCom industry event for consumers, publishers, and trade professionals, and will take place August 17-19 at the Cologne Congress East Center in Germany.

While just a small percentage of the lectures and roundtables have been announced, a first set of speakers is now available on the GDC Europe website. These span the gamut of content from technical through design and business talks, and some of the highlights thus far include:

- 'Flower - Design Postmortem' by ThatGameCompany's Kellee Santiago, in which the company co-founder discusses the hit PlayStation Network title, and "will walk through the team's design process and playable prototypes that led to the final product."

- 'Surviving Project Cancellation in the Economic Downturn' by Zootfly's Bostjan Troha, which sees the Eastern European company, perhaps best known for its Ghostbusters game prototype, discussing "hard-learned lessons from a near-fatal cancellation of a three-platform $5-million project" by a failing publisher, with "recommendations and strategies" on recovering.

- 'Advanced Racing Game AI in PURE', by Black Rock's Eduardo Jimenez, discussing the critically acclaimed, Disney-published ATV title and "what we did to try to have the player challenged and surrounded at all times, while avoiding the unfair sensation that rubber band methods leave the player with."

- 'Compressing Loads of Content Into Only 20MB: A Case Study Of Swords & Soldiers for WiiWare' by Ronimo's Joost van Dongen, in which the Dutch developer, compromised of original De Blob co-creators, discusses "techniques and approaches for making large amounts of textures, animations, sounds, music, XML and text fit into a small file size."

Overall, GDC Europe will host more than 80 sessions addressing the needs and opportunities for developers and business professionals throughout Europe. More information on the August 17-19 show is available at its official website.

Posted by Staff at 4:35 PM | Permalink

Game Developers Conference organizers Think Services and Reboot Communications have announced that the first ever GDC Canada saw more than 800 attendees at the event last week in Vancouver.

This represents a doubling in attendance over last year's Reboot-run Vancounver International Game Summit (VIGS), say the organizers.

The two-day event was focused on offering education, networking opportunities to the Canadian development community -- and on the heels of its success, the event is set to return to the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Center May 6-7, 2010.

GDC Canada featured over 40 lectures, panels and sessions focused on cross-disciplinary collaboration in production cycles, with the aim of offering developers opportunities to share best practices. GDC Canada also featured an expo, networking receptions and the Game Career Seminar, in addition to Future Play 2009.

"With perspectives from Don Mattrick of Microsoft and the BioWare doctors, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, GDC Canada was an opportunity for Canadian developers to assess where the industry has been and where it is going," said Izora de Lillard, event director.

"This event's focus on collaborative learning and career programs were met with tremendous support from the Canadian developer community and really demonstrated its passion, commitment and resilience that will continue to move the industry forward."

Interested parties can find complete information on GDC Canada as well as other Game Developers Conferences -- including GDC Europe, GDC Austin, GDC China, and GDC 2010 at the event series' official news weblog.

Posted by Staff at 12:09 PM | Permalink

Organizers of this September's GDC Austin have announced a call for submissions for the first-ever Independent Games Summit there, also revealing the Advisory Board and topics to be discussed at the two-day Summit.

Initial information about the September 15th-16th Summit is available on the GDC Austin website, with organizers noting that the Indie Games Summit will include "discussions surrounding business models and methods, promotion and marketing, deep game design techniques and inspirational case studies."

The Advisory Board for the Summit, which will be announcing its first speakers in the next few weeks, include local Austin-area independent developers Adam Saltsman (Paper Moon, Cave Story WiiWare contributor) and Brandon Boyer (editor of indie-friendly BoingBoing-affiliated game site Offworld.com).

In addition, the three main Advisory Board members of GDC San Francisco's yearly Independent Games Summit, Flashbang Studios' Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink (Minotaur China Shop) and IGF Chairman Simon Carless, are also helping to oversee the event.

The San Francisco version of the IGS -- held alongside the Independent Games Festival -- has hosted some of the most notable names in indie gaming over the previous years, from World Of Goo's Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler through Flower's Jenova Chen, Braid's Jonathan Blow, and many more.

As the GDC Austin Indie Games Summit call for submissions page explains, organizers are looking for the following topics, spanning both smaller one and two-person indies and somewhat larger independent console and PC game developers:

- Indie Business: "How to make money, manage teams, and run a company without going insane."
- Promotion & Marketing: "How to get noticed when the "Marketing Department" = you."
- Design and Philosophy: "Deep dive into design techniques, for example: constraints, rapid prototyping, tools."
- Case Studies and Postmortems: "Inspirational talks that demonstrate what worked, what didn’t, what surprised you and made you wiser."

The submission deadline for presentation abstracts for the 2009 Indie Games Summit at Austin GDC is June 3rd at midnight PST, and more information is available on the official GDC Austin IGS website.

Posted by Staff at 12:27 PM | Permalink

May 12th-13th saw the just concluded, successful first annual Game Developers Conference Canada, held at the new Vancouver Convention Center by Think Services in conjunction with Reboot Communications.

There was a general focus on higher-budget games for the first GDC Canada -- reflecting the output of many Vancouver-area developers like EA Canada, Relic Entertainment, Next Level Games, and Radical Entertainment, all of whom had representatives at the show.

2009 GDC Canada's relatively small size gave it an intimate feel, although the keynotes by Don Mattrick of Microsoft and Drs. Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka of BioWare saw fully-packed rooms.

Think Services-owned editorial site Gamasutra had extensive session coverage from the two days of GDC Canada, including both keynote addresses - here's the highlights:

Microsoft's Mattrick Talks Distinctive Days, Pioneer Spirit
"In the first of GDC Canada's two keynotes, former Electronic Arts and current Microsoft executive Don Mattrick spoke with Victor Lucas about his history in the games industry, from Distinctive Software to Xbox. There was particular relevance to the assembled crowd -- after all, Mattrick can arguably credited with having sown the seeds for the now-thriving Vancouver-area game development scene."

BioWare Bosses Talk The Future Of Storytelling
"BioWare co-founders and medical doctors Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk never have any shortage of things to say about interactive narrative, and that held true in the second GDC Canada keynote. The good doctors conveyed their studio's mentality towards game storytelling, from different player character perspectives to internal versus external narrative, to character archetypes."

Next Level's Tronsgard On The Anti-Crunch Manifesto
"With all the recent discussion about the necessity of crunch in video game development, this triumphant talk by Next Level Games CEO Douglas Tronsgard provides much-needed reassurance: it is possible to develop high-quality video games without crunching. Tronsgard explains that his studio was explicitly founded to achieve that goal, and its "intentional culture" of rooting out the causes of crunch has allowed the studio to maintain its standards with few slip-ups."

Rogers On Determining Studio Value To Publishers
"The games industry is notoriously secretive about its own financial affairs, which makes Dan Lee Rogers' comprehensive analysis of high-profile video game studio acquisitions like Rare, BioWare, and Shiny particularly fascinating. Rogers, a longtime acquisition negotiator on behalf of studios, drills down into what publishers actually want out of their developer purchases, and what they did get (or didn't) out of some of the priciest ones."

EA Montreal's Schneider Gets Disruptive On Army Of Two
"EA Montreal producer Reid Schneider's current project is Army of Two: The 40th Day, but in this postmortem he focused on that game's predecessor -- and through the experience of developing that game, the team 'built a studio, learned a ton, and created a franchise.' Learn why "they" shouldn't be telling you how to make your game, why execution can trump disruption, and why you should listen to Gore Verbinski."

What Game Developers Should Know About Windows 7
"In one of the conference's more 'brass tacks' talks, Microsoft senior software design engineer Chuck Walbourn laid out many of the changes coming to the anticipated Windows 7, with a particular focus on games. In particular, he touched on 7's successive relationship to Vista, concluding with, 'If you have any issues with Vista, fix them now. They're not going to go away. If you're a developer, you should be using Windows Vista 64-bit or Windows 7.'"

Researcher Chandler Talks Creating Emotion, Belief
"Did you know scary games can kill you? Here, researcher Clive Chandler explains how games with prolonged frights can cause a harmful buildup of the stress hormone cortisol. On a less medical note, Chandler also broadly discusses emotion in games, including the importance of building player trust and providing an appropriately varied emotional roller coaster."

More information on this year's just-concluded GDC Canada event is available at the official Game Developers Canada website.

Posted by Staff at 9:08 AM | Permalink

GDC Austin organizers have announced an expanded Advisory Board for the 'connected gaming'-centric September event, adding Nexon, SOE and EA/Mythic notables to the filled-out board.

The event, to be held September 15th-18th, 2009 at the Austin Convention Center in Texas, has added advisory board members including Nexon's Min Kim (MapleStory), EA/Mythic's Eugene Evans (Warhammer Online), Sony Online Entertainment's John Blakely (DC Universe Online), and Hangout Industries and former Disney exec Mike Goslin (Pirates Of The Caribbean Online), as well as Schell Games' Sheri Graner Ray.

They join existing board members such as BioWare Austin's Rich Vogel and Gordon Walton (Star Wars: The Old Republic), Metaplace's Raph Koster and Zenimax Online Studios' Matt Firor.

“The online gaming space continues to change and expand. GDC Austin addresses the latest trends and challenges in connected gaming,” commented event director Izora de Lillard in relation to the appointments and the main portion of GDC Austin, which will take place Wed-Fri, September 16th-18th.

In addition, GDC Austin will feature both existing and new 2-day Summits. Firstly, the Game Audio and Game Writer Summits will continue their long-running association with Austin.

It's also been revealed for the first time that two new Summits - an iteration of the breakout successful Independent Games Summit and the newly introduced iPhone Game Summit, will also debut on September 15-16, 2009.

Online registration for GDC Austin opens in early June, and for more information on GDC Austin and the advisory board, interested parties can visit the official GDC Austin website.

Posted by Staff at 8:47 AM | Permalink

Game Developers Conference organizers have made free streaming video of two major GDC 2009 events, the Game Design Challenge and the inaugural Indie Game Maker Rant, available as part of the newly launched myGDC Vault service.

The myGDC Vault website allows GDC 2009 All-Access Pass holders to view hundreds of specially video-recorded sessions from this year's Game Developers Conference, with synchronized slides and easy one-click viewing.

In addition, organizers will be making select GDC lectures available for free to the general public, and the first set of GDC 2009 lectures are now available. These include the following talks:

- Game Design Challenge: My First Time
The popular Design Challenge series has spanned everything from an “inter-species game” to 2006's 'Nobel Peace Prize' challenge, won by Will Wright.

This year's Challenge saw Infocom veteran Steve Meretzky, Habbo lead designer Sulka Haro and last-minute substitutes Heather Kelley (Thief: Deadly Shadows) and Erin Robinson (Spooks) entertainingly twinning 'sex and autobiography' in their entertaining, warring game concepts for the theme 'My First Time'.

- Indies: Beyond Single-Player
In an Independent Games Summit lecture, Jason Rohrer, creator of the critically acclaimed indie titles Passage and Gravitation, shares his thoughts on games as a new expressive form. Rohrer's thesis? To push games forward artistically, we may need to return to the medium's pre-digital roots: multiple players seated around a game and using it as an interface for communion.

Only multiple players allow game mechanics to blossom into their full, emergent potential, he suggests in this lecture -- something he's been exploring in the IGF Nuovo Award-winning Between, commissioned as part of an Esquire article.

- The Indie Game Maker Rant
One of the most explosive and entertaining lectures at the Indie Games Summit earlier in GDC's week, a multitude of indie game makers assembled by Fez creator Phil Fish rant, using slides and examples, about everything from game demos through Roger Ebert.

Some of the highlights of the Pecha Kucha-style rant session, recapped at indie site TIGSource if you'd like a key to the order and background of speakers, include Steve Swink (Minotaur China Shop) on ethical game design, thatgamecompany's Kellee Santiago (Flower) on changing the game biz, and an amazing finale from Crayon Physics's Petri Purho.

In addition to these free, non-registration based sessions, a number of GDC sponsors have made their own lectures available freely in video form in the myGDC Vault Sponsors section, if basic name and email information is filled out by users. Viewers can click on the + sign next to 'Free Sponsored Content' to reveal the list of lectures.

(Sponsors Nokia has additionally helped to make the entire GDC Mobile program, including a number of interesting editorial lectures, watchable for free under this system.)

Posted by Staff at 4:33 PM | Permalink

The second GDC China has opened up its call for submissions for panels, lectures, and tutorials, which remains open through May 22, 2009.

As previously announced, GDC China 2009 marks Think Services' return to the Chinese mainland; the event has the official sanction of Ministry of Culture of China.

The show itself will take place at the Shanghai International Convention Center from October 11 - 13, 2009. Its event director is Meggan Scavio, who serves the same role she does for the U.S.-based GDC, which took place last month in San Francisco.

Lecture formats sought include 60-minute lectures, 60-minute panel and full-day tutorials. Some of the track topics that GDC China 2009 will particularly focus on include:

- Global Game Development
- Online
- Visual Art
- Audio
- Mobile
- Independent Games

All ideas for sessions can be submitted via the official GDC China website; full guidelines on the submission process can be found at this link. English submissions need not have a Chinese component at this stage.

Posted by Staff at 10:24 AM | Permalink

For this year's recently concluded Game Developers Conference, Think Services' alt.gaming weblog, GameSetWatch, decided to try a little journalistic/interactive experiment.

They recruited Canadian author and game creator Jim Munroe, whom, as his Wikipedia page explains, is a former editor at Adbusters Magazine and a HarperCollins-published author ('Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask').

In the game field, he founded the Artsy Game Incubator project, and his poignant illustrated text adventure, 'Everybody Dies', took third place at IFComp last year and picked up a number of other media honors.

So, the editors of GameSetWatch got Jim -- in exchange for a press pass to the event -- to write his experiences at GDC and what he finds out, and use that as inspiration to write a text adventure with some kind of Game Developers Conference theme, and that's just what he did.

Here's his brief explanation before you get into playing what is, intriguingly, more of a social simulator (very befitting of GDC!) than a traditional IF work:

"I wanted to try something that was more of a "text game" rather than "text adventure game". Think of it as a round of cards rather than an immersive and colourful narrative. If you don't like the hand you're dealt, you can always reshuffle with a restart. If you find you're playing "guess-the-verb" (IF's most infamous minigame), restart and read the beginning carefully."

You can now play 'GDC: The Game' in your web browser using Java [UPDATE: If you don't have Java, try this Parchment link], or, if you'd like to download the Z-Machine file to play it on your computer, here's 'GDC: The Game''s zcode file - go check out the IFGuide's Wiki for info on an interpreter.

In addition, if you'd like to read the process whereby Jim experienced GDC, thought through the game creatively, and then made it, we've archived his GameSetWatch.com posts made during the event and afterwards, with lots of insight into what he considered, and how that birthed the game.

[Please note that Jim had carte blanche to write anything he liked into the GDC game, and the work was conducted separately of the main GDC organizers and without marketing input, so it was an experiment rather than an explicit promotion. We hope you like how it turned out!]

Posted by Staff at 3:22 PM | Permalink