Heads up, GDC attendees: The GDC 2018 Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial on Monday, March 19th, 2018 is going to be a fantastic opportunity for you to take a day-long deep dive into the nuts and bolts of rendering gorgeous graphics in games.

Brought to you as a collaboration of the industry’s leading hardware and software vendors, this day-long tutorial provides professional insight on how to create cutting-edge game graphics on the PC platform.

Special emphasis is placed on advanced graphics techniques that use modern low-level APIs to produce stunning visuals and achieve speed-of-light performance on contemporary GPUs. These will be delivered by NVIDIA’s and AMD’s demo and developer technology teams as well as some of the top game developers who ship major games into the marketplace.

In addition to illustrating the details of rendering advanced real-time visual effects, this tutorial will cover a series of vendor-neutral optimizations that developers need to keep in mind when designing their engines and shaders.

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Amid all the hustle and bustle of the 2018 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this month, make sure you don’t overlook one of the most intriguing tech topics being discussed at the show: how top devs are applying machine learning techniques to make better games.

For example, Naughty Dog technical art director Andrew Maximov is hosting a multi-day roundtable dedicated entirely to the art and business of machine learning in game dev.

Come by to engage with (or listen in on) the lively discussion about how deep learning based artificial intelligence is going to affect video game production in the years to come. A wide swathe of topics wll be covered, including the use of neural networks in game content generation, their value at runtime, and how you can integrate this technology into your creative process.

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With weeks to go until San Francisco plays host to the 2018 Game Developers Conference, we want to make sure you know about a great talk the folks at Guerrilla Games are presenting on the AI systems driving their 2017 hit Horizon Zero Dawn.

As part of the GDC 2018 AI Summit, Guerrilla’s own Julian Berteling will be delivering “Beyond ‘Killzone‘: Creating New AI Systems for ‘Horizon Zero Dawn‘“, a session that aims to show you exactly what changes the veteran triple-A studio made to switch from having to support a single human enemy in closed corridor spaces to a game with more than 25 wildly different characters in a large open world.

Specifically, Berteling hopes to explain how Guerrilla changed the navigation and animation systems that made the characters in Horizon Zero Dawn move realistically. Additionally, this session will offer useful details on how these changes impacted Guerilla’s workflow throughout the project, so you can get a better sense of how similar work might affect your own projects.

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As game development teams achieve veteran status working on project after project, questions begin to arise about formally documenting what were once improvised solutions to commonplace problems. But how should developers, especially technical artists, go about formalizing these processes?

At GDC 2018, Creative Assembly lead technical artist Jodie Azhar wants to help developers solve that problem. As part of the technical artist bootcamp, she’ll be giving a talk on what happens when tech art teams need to stabilize workflows in order to save time in the long run during development. To learn more about Azhar’s talk, we’ve reached out to her for a quick Q&A which you can read in full below!

Don’t miss out! The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next March is going to be full of interesting and informative sessions like Azhar’s. For more visit the show’s official website.

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It’s nearly here: the 2018 Game Developers Conference! As you prepare yourself accordingly, organizers want to make sure you don’t overlook a great talk about the unique production of indie hit What Remains of Edith Finch.

As part of the GDC 2018 Design track of talks, Giant Sparrow creative director Ian Dallas will present “Weaving 13 Prototypes into 1 Game: Lessons from ‘Edith Finch‘.” Edith Finch contains 13 different sub-stories, each with its own unique art style and gameplay mechanic; of course, and to make that happen Giant Sparrow had to prototype more than 13 games.

Dallas will thus talk about how he and his team approached prototyping where the goal was for each mechanic to be something players had never seen before, but also intuitive enough to grasp without tutorials. He’ll also discuss the challenge of blending these radically different mechanics into a cohesive experience along with the production process his team evolved to try and keep the whole team informed in the face of nearly constant, frustrating, exhilarating change.

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One of the big challenges in any medium, but especially VR, is the challenge of creating authentic, likable characters for an audience to interact with. It’s a task that involves artists, writers, and engineers coming together to hopefully create a fictional entity that will win the hearts and minds of people everywhere…but when you’ve got a whole new medium on your hands, how do you do that?

At GDC 2018, Polyarc engineer Brendan Walker hopes to answer that question in a session about the studio’s debut game Moss. To help attendees get introduced to one of the people who brought the charismatic mouse Quill to life, we’ve reached out to Walker for a quick Q&A about his work, which you can read below!

Don’t miss out! The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next March is going to be full of interesting and informative sessions like Walker’s. For more visit the show’s official website.

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When you get to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco later this month you’re going to have a ton of cool stuff to choose from — including an intriguing talk from the devs behind last year’s sleeper hit Friday the 13th: The Game.

It’s an interesting game because it asks players to engage in asymmetrical multiplayer matches — one player takes on the role of the iconic Jason villain, and the others play camp counselors seeking to thwart him. In his Design track talk “‘Friday the 13th‘: Design and Balance for Asymmetrical Horror” game director David Langeliers will explain how the team designed and tuned that asymmetrical balance.

He’ll dig into how the team worked to make a Jason player feel extremely overpowered, and the large team of counselors feel very under-powered, while still having the experience feel fair for both teams, and scary for the counselors while staying true to the source IP. You won’t want to skip it!

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As the 2018 Game Developers Conference draws nigh, organizers are happy to announce that the Indie MEGABOOTH Showcase is back at GDC for the fifth year in a row — and this year it’s showcasing twice as many games!

Today they share the full list of games that will be playable by all GDC passholders throughout the conference (which is taking place the week of March 19th through the 23rd) at the MEGABOOTH, which will be on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center’s West Hall.

However, since, this year’s MEGABOOTH at GDC will feature double the amount of indie dev teams from previous years, organizers have implemented a mid-show refresh: Monday and Tuesday will host a dozen games, and then a fresh set of curated games will be close out the showcase Wednesday through Friday.

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When you’re an independent game developer, you often don’t have the luxury of just sticking to your art and craft, you have to go out and build a business for yourself as well. It’s an experience a lot of developers can relate to, but at GDC 2018, you’re going to hear from speakers like Tanya X. Short, who not only makes games at her company Kitfox Games, but helped co-found Pixelles, a non-profit dedicated to helping women make games in Montreal!

To get a sense for what Short will be talking about at GDC, we reached out to her for a quick Q&A about what it’s like being an indie with an interest in procedural game design and running her own company. You can read all of her answers below!

Don’t miss out! The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next March is going to be full of interesting and informative sessions like Short’s. For more visit the show’s official website.

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Perhaps you’ve heard the news: GDC 2018 is just a few weeks away!

As you’re looking over the session schedule and figuring out what to see and do, organizers want to quickly remind you that for the third year running, a bunch of GDC speakers have put together 60-second (ish) pitch videos for their talks!

These “Flash Forward” videos are always perfect summations of what makes GDC sessions great: they’re fun, charming, and surprisingly informative. What’s more, they couldn’t be more convenient to watch! Just head over to the official GDC YouTube channel, which is now packed with pithy videos submitted by a diverse group of GDC 2018 speakers.

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