With the 2016 Game Developers Conference on the horizon, event organizers are excited to debut another pair of intriguing sessions that should shed light on the art of developing games.
Both of these talks appear on the Programming track of talks at GDC 2016, with one focusing on the practical challenges of creating gorgeous environmental art for mobile games while the other digs into the fun challenges of porting modern games to MS-DOS (and the joys of programming in general.)
Retro City Rampage creator Brian Provinciano ported the game MS-DOS earlier this year, and as part of the GDC 2016 Programming track of talks he'll show you exactly how he pulled it off. In his talk, "From PS4 to 1.44MB Floppy: Porting Retro City Rampage to MS-DOS," Provinciano will cover the core porting challenges (reducing memory usage, fitting the game on a single floppy disk) and contrast them against the challenges he faced in porting the game to platform slike the Nintendo DS and Sony's PSP handheld.
Check out his talk to learn the value of taking time off, not to unplug, but to rediscover what drew you to programming in the first place.
Also, NaturalMotion artist Scott Harber will deliver a notable talk on "The Environment Pipeline of CSR Racing 2" that spans both Programming and the Visual Arts tracks of talks.
A longtime video game technical artist, Harber's talk will run down the realities of delivering scalable, high-quality environment art across a range of mobile devices with varying capabilities using NaturalMotion's own game as a case study.
Expect to learn simple but effective HLSL tricks for emulating high-end rendering features on mobile and gain a new perspective on how to design your games so they scale well across a wide range of mobile devices.
Of course, these are just two of the many exciting sessions that will be announced for GDC 2016 in the coming months. Stay tuned for more, and don't miss the opportunity to save money by registering for the conference early -- the deadline to register for passes at a discounted rate is Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016.
GDC 2016 itself will take place March 14-18th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information on GDC 2016, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
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