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Dead Secret dev shares mobile VR game design tips at GDC 2015

Developing virtual reality games is largely uncharted territory at this point; making mobile VR games is even less well understood, and it offers a set of unique design challenges.

Developers interested in charting a course through mobile VR game development would be wise to look for advice from trailblazers like Robot Invader, who rebuilt its moody murder mystery game Dead Secret to accommodate mobile VR devices (like Samsung's Gear VR headset) in the summer of 2014. 

At GDC 2015, Robot Invader chief taskmaster Chris Pruett will explain how they did it -- and what they learned along the way -- in a talk entitled "Designing for Mobile VR in Dead Secret."

Videogame History Museum returns to GDC with prized Atari exhibit

As the 2015 Game Developers Conference draws closer, organizers are pleased to confirm that attendees of the March conference can look forward to the return of the perennially popular Videogame History Museum exhibit.

After the success of last year's Nintendo exhibit, and to commemorate Warren Robinett's groundbreaking Adventure on the Atari 2600 -- which he'll be deconstructing in an Adventure Classic Game Postmortem during the show -- The Videogame History Museum will be building an amazing interactive exhibit within the conference hall paying tribute to the history of Atari. 

Warren Robinett talks Adventure in GDC 2015 Classic Game Postmortem

As the new year heats up around us, Game Developers Conference 2015 officials are excited to announce that another game industry luminary is coming to the show in March to deliver an informative, insightful postmortem of a seminal game.

Warren Robinett, the veteran programmer, designer and The Learning Company founder known for his groundbreaking game design work at Atari, TLC and NASA, is coming to GDC 2015 to deliver a Classic Game Postmortem on the creation of his hit 1979 game Adventure for the Atari 2600 console. 

Adventure is particularly notable for (among other things) being one of the first graphical action-adventure games ever released. Adventure also contained one of the earliest known "Easter eggs" ever hidden in a game by a designer -- in this case, a hidden screen revealing Robinett's name and authorship at a time when Atari was unwilling to publicly credit game makers for their work. Thus his efforts to create Adventure meaningfully advanced both the practice of game development and the fight for developers to be recognized for their work.

Mike Bithell explains how to polish your indie game at GDC 2015

Independent developers often spend countless hours crafting the perfect gameplay experience...but how much time do they spend finishing that perfect gameplay experience?

Indie game maker Mike Bithell (Thomas Was AloneVolume) has spent a lot of time thinking about how you can make the most of the last ten percent of your development time, and at GDC 2015 he'll share his learnings with attendees in a talk entitled "Indie Polish: Making the Most of the Last 10%."

2015 Independent Games Festival announces Main Competition finalists

The Independent Games Festival (IGF) juries have announced the Main Competition finalists for its prestigious 17th annual awards, honoring the most influential and outstanding development in independent video games. The IGF has nominated over 30 extraordinary game titles released in the past year.

Candidates for the 2015 IGF Awards were distributed to a group of esteemed evaluators from across the industry for evaluation. Expert juries specializing in distinct disciplines for each category then selected the IGF finalists following playthroughs and recommendations from the nearly 650 IGF Main Competition entrants.


This year's finalists are led by various standout titles nominated for multiple awards, including inkle's globe-trotting interactive fiction game 80 Days, Croteam's philosophical first-person puzzle game The Talos Principle and the brutally earnest wartime survival simulator This War Of Mine from 11 Bit Studios.

Written on your eyeballs: Game narrative in VR at GDC 2015

As VR game design grows ever more popular it's going to be critical for game narratives to be fully integrated with gameplay, rather than being segregated in cutscenes.  

Relying on his experience designing stories and optimizing dialogue for VR-native games, Rob Morgan is coming to GDC 2015 in March to show you how to craft compelling stories with limited resources and simplified mechanics in his Summit session "Written On Your Eyeballs: Game Narrative in VR."

More esteemed developers, artists join IGF Jury Panels

The juries behind GDC 2015's Independent Games Festival continue to take form with an exciting lineup of highly lauded developers and industry professionals to decide the finalists for the awards this March.

2015 IGF Main Competition finalists will be announced later this week, but in advance of that, following the announcement of the jurors taking part in our Excellence in Design and Excellence in Audio panels, below you can find the confirmed jurors for our remaining juries.

These are Excellence in Visual Arts, and Excellence in Audio Awards, and our special Nuovo award, recognizing excellence in shorter-form, more esoteric games. The remaining juries being announced today are as follows:

Destiny's multithreaded rendering architecture explained at GDC 2015

Building a cutting-edge multi-platform graphics engine is tricky business. 

Contemporary developers know that modern consoles sport varied, multi-core computational architectures that differ vastly in performance and memory characteristics.

To optimally take advantage of all available resources, a game engine must be designed from the ground up for job-based multithreading. At GDC 2015, Bungie's own Natalya Tatarchuk will delve into the renderer developed for Destiny in a talk titled (simply enough) "Destiny's Multithreaded Rendering Architecture." 

Get hard data on how players make moral choices at GDC 2015

Much is made of designing games to afford players meaningful choices, but how do people actually respond to those choices? If you sink a huge amount of money, time and talent into fleshing out a dark side to your next game's narrative, how many players will see it?
Game critic, interactive fiction writer and Microsoft technical evangelist Amanda Lange surveyed over 1,000 people to better understand how they interact with a game system that allows the player to choose a "good" or "evil" path through a game story. An important question was also added: do players play twice? You may be surprised at the results, and what they reveal about the use of moral choices in game design and how they could evolve.

USC's Lemarchand investigates 'infinite play' game design at GDC

As 2014 comes to a close and the industry winds down its reflections on the year that was, Game Developers Conference officials are pleased to announce a forward-thinking talk for GDC 2015 about what games can be and do in the years to come.

Richard Lemarchand, former Naughty Dog lead game designer and associate professor in the USC Games program, will deliver a talk at the March conference that investigates the game design potential of "open play" - play that does not necessarily result in an outcome of victory or defeat.

GDC Spotlight Interviews: Microsoft and Havok

| December 2014

In This Issue:

  • Microsoft - Mark Seminatore, principal development manager, Xbox Advanced Technology Group at Microsoft, talks about DirectX 12, buying Mojang, and how the best coders can win prizes in the QuickStart Challenges at GDC.

Q&A: Emotional game design with D4 developer SWERY

When Microsoft quietly released Access Games' episodic Xbox One adventure game D4 at the tail end of September, it sparked strong emotional reactions from fans of director Hidetaka "SWERY" Suehiro's previous work -- the cult classic Deadly Premonition.
"The really hardcore DP fans, for whom DP is their life, have gotten kind of mad at me because [D4] is so different from DP," says Suehiro.
Dealing with emotional fans isn't exactly a new challenge for the idiosyncratic developer, but designing D4 to evoke a broader spectrum of emotions from its player -- for better or worse -- proved tricky enough to prompt Suehiro into pitching a GDC 2015 talk about D4 and the topic of emotional game design.

Get expert advice on hosting your own eSports event at GDC 2015

Game Developers Conference officials added eSports to the GDC 2015 Summit lineup for a simple reason: eSports events are on the rise, and they're bigger than ever.
Just this year, noted eSports organization ESL One Frankfurt put 12,500 Dota 2 fans into a World Cup football stadium in Frankfurt, and ESL's James Lampkin will explain how you can put together your own independent event of similar size at GDC 2015.

GDC Play and the 'Best in Play' awards are back for GDC 2015

Organizers of the 2015 Game Developers Conference have confirmed the return of the GDC Play emerging/independent developer showcase to the show this year, with the 'Best in Play' awards also returning to the event.

GDC Play, which is still available for potential exhibitors, is a separate area of the San Francisco show that showcases emerging and independent developers with a series of tables and meeting rooms. It will take place from Wednesday, March 4 to Friday, March 6 at Moscone Center during GDC 2015.

Indie Megabooth Showcase returns to GDC 2015

GDC officials are excited to announce that the Indie MEGABOOTH Showcase exhibit will make a triumphant return to GDC this year, with a curated array of innovative indie games that will be playable by all GDC passholders (from Expo to All-Access) at various points during the week of the 2015 Game Developers Conference, March 2-6.
"We had a really positive reception from the participating teams and the development community last year so we're thrilled to be working with UBM again to bring a new set of games and teams to GDC!" said the Indie MEGABOOTH's Kelly Wallick.

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