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SWTOR dev explains why free-to-play isn't evil at GDC F2P Summit

Damion Schubert, former lead designer on Star Wars: The Old Republic, will share lessons learned from the MMORPG's remarkably successful conversion from subscription-based to free-to-play in his GDC 2015 talk "Free-to-Play Is Not (Necessarily) Evil."
Schubert believes the success of games like League of Legends and Star Wars: The Old Republic show that free-to-play games are no longer just a distant possibility for AAA developers -- the future is now, and we need to adapt. There's big success to be had within the bounds of F2P design, but if done carelessly it can alienate your fans.

See the world of Far Cry 4 deconstructed at GDC 2015

Ubisoft's efforts to render the fictional setting of Kyrat for Far Cry 4 drove the development of new graphical features that tap the power of new hardware in interesting ways, and 3D programmer Stephen McAuley is coming to GDC 2015 in March to explain exactly how they work.
Check out McAuley's talk, Rendering the World of Far Cry 4", if you're a designer, artist or developer looking for some new technical tricks and a bit of insight into how the Ubisoft culture affects the way it makes games.

QWOP creator shares physics engine tips at GDC Indie Games Summit

Modern indie-friendly frameworks like Unity use physics engines (like Box2D or PhysX) to simulate the game world. That makes it easy to prototype your game -- except that when you want hard collisions between heavy objects, everything tends to glitch out and/or explode.
You can't tune it to feel tight or realistic, and you wind up with a game that feels 'floaty'. You don't want to get a degree in advanced physics, you just want to know how to make your game feel solid without writing your own physics engine.
Independent developer Bennett Foddy (QWOP, Sportsfriends, GIRP) figured out how to stop making floaty games, and in his GDC 2015 talk "Designing with Physics: Bend the Physics Engine to Your Will" he'll show you how to do the same.

Make time to play the 2015 Train Jam games at GDC 2015

Earlier this year a group of developers took advantage of a multi-day train ride from Chicago to attend the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco by participating in the first-ever Train Jam, a 52-hour game jam held aboard an Amtrak train with limited connectivity.
Next year the Train Jam organizers are going to do it all again, and GDC officials are proud to support their efforts by providing a dedicated space at the show where organizers will be displaying select games made during the jam.

Discover the design wisdom of early American board games at GDC

Early American board games offer some interesting insights on how culture can shape design -- and vice versa.
In March, Brooklyn-based game designer and Untame (Mushroom 11) creative director Julia Keren-Detar is coming to GDC 2015 to delve into the origins of a few classic American board games and show how the culture of their times influenced the design we see today.
During her talk, "History-Shaping Design: Tales Told by Early American Board Games", Keren-Detar plans to cover the rise of board games in America, their designers, and how the games reflected and were informed by the culture of their times.

Borderlands 2 writer shares advice at GDC 2015's Narrative Summit

Gearbox Software's Anthony Burch believes that, contrary to popular opinion, most people don't care about saving the world in games: they'd rather spend time with a well-written little girl who's learning to cope with grief. At GDC 2015, he'll lay out his case and offer some advice on how you can start writing better characters right away.
Burch served as a writer on the outlandish first-person shooter Borderlands 2 and its ensuing post-release DLC packs, and his experience suggests that people tend to respond more positively (and are more likely to give their attention and money) to character-centric DLC, rather than content that pushes the narrative of your game world forward with "epic" plots and sequences.
By analyzing rough sales figures and critical response to Borderlands 2's DLC, as well as exploring the process of those DLC's creation, Burch will try to convince you to lean on character and charm rather than plot and lore when you write for games in his upcoming GDC 2015 talk, Plot is Dumb, Character is Cool: Writing for DLC.

Pick up new ways to make your studio more Agile at GDC 2015

Agile software development has become remarkably popular since the Agile Manifesto was published over a decade ago, but despite its broad appeal many studios have production methods they can't -- or won't -- sacrifice to adopt Agile principles.
But even if your studio won't go full Agile, maybe there are little things you can do to integrate the best parts of Agile development into your team's production process without disrupting their workflow.
Nathalie Goh-Livorness seems to think so; she worked at Blizzard and Disney.com before joining Microsoft, and at GDC 2015 she'll be outlining five small, key things you can do to make your studio's pipeline more Agile the minute you get back from the conference.
Programmers, producers and studio managers will probably get the most out of her talk, "Five Things You Can Do To Be A Bit More Agile," which straddles the Production and Business, Marketing and Management tracks of GDC 2015 talks.

IGF 2015 Student Competition sees record-setting number of entries

The 17th annual Independent Games Festival -- the longest-running and largest independent games festival worldwide -- is months away, and today officials are proud to announce another year of record entries for IGF 2015's Student Competition.
This year's Student Competition, which will display finalists and show winners at Game Developers Conference 2015 in March, took in over 360 game entries across all platforms -- console, PC and mobile -- from a broad array of the most prestigious universities, games programs, and even high schools around the world.
Together with the Main Competition submissions, this year's IGF has taken in over 1,000 entries total -- once again surpassing the festival's record across the Main and Student Competitions.

Fight toxic online behavior with insight from Riot at GDC 2015

If you make games with an online component, sooner or later you're going to have to tackle the problem of toxic player behavior. It's never easy, but GDC 2015 officials are lining up some expert talks for the March conference that should help you meet the challenge.
Riot Games' Dr. Jeffrey Lin is one such expert, and during his GDC 2015 talk "More Science Behind Shaping Player Behavior in Online Games," Lin will share three years of methods, stories and lessons in his pursuit of improving player behavior in online games.
Dr. Lin serves as the lead designer of social systems at Riot, and if you make time to attend his talk he'll guide you through some basic psychology and social dynamics to teach you how to apply science to game design and (hopefully) design better multiplayer experiences for your players.

Learn how to build a game that can playtest itself at GDC 2015

Developers, would you appreciate the chance to develop on an engine that allows every new build of your game to automatically play itself, from the first level through the final boss, at the push of a button? What if your players could record their best runs and share them via leaderboards using only a handful of kilobytes?
Vblanc Entertainment's Brian Provinciano believes it's possible if you build your next title on a deterministic game engine that can effectively play itself, and at GDC 2015 he'll show you how to pull it off.
In his talk, "Automated Testing and Instant Replays in Retro City Rampage," Provinciano will outline how to build a deterministic game engine with input recording and playback features, using examples from his own work on Retro City Rampage.

F2P Summit returns to GDC with dev-focused talks from experts

The field of free-to-play game design is here to stay, and GDC officials will once again host a series of frank talks on the topic from leading experts as part of the F2P Summit -- one of eight that will take place Monday, March 2nd and Tuesday, March 3rd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco during the first two days of GDC 2015.
Contemporary developers grapple with the creative implications of a world in which gameplay and monetization are intimately intertwined. Seasoned F2P game design consultant Ethan Levy believes the key to ethical monetization lies in how you first approach your game's design, and he'll be running down some concrete methods for doing so in his GDC 2015 F2P Summit talk "New Approaches to F2P Game Design."
Check it out if you're curious to learn practical methods for designing free-to-play mechanics from the start of a project, a method for designing better first-time player experiences and a model for categorizing player types in order to make a monetization system that puts your players' needs first.

Learn about Assassin's Creed Unity's dynamic crowds at GDC 2015

In her role as a senior game designer on Assassin's Creed Unity, AI and systems design ace Christine Blondeau wrestled with the problem of developing a system for marshaling crowds of hundreds of NPCs to create "crowd events" for the player to interact with -- fistfights to stop, pickpockets to catch, and the like.
She and the rest of the Unity team pulled it off, and in March Blondeau will be at GDC 2015 to explain how they did it. During her talk, "Postmortem: Developing Systemic Crowd Events on Assassin's Creed Unity", she'll present the team's initial vision for the system, the difficulties they faced, and the solutions used to trounce them.
Blondeau will also go beyond the crowd to explore how the Assassin's Creed Unity crowd events tech was integrated with the needs of both level and mission design, as well as lay out some potential avenues of improvement for future iterations.

See how Insomniac put the style in Sunset Overdrive at GDC 2015

The stylized post-apocalyptic punk rock art direction of Insomniac's Sunset Overdrive is one of the game's biggest draws, and studio art director Jacinda Chew is coming to GDC 2015 in March to reveal how it came to be.
Chew's talk, Order from Chaos: The Art Direction of Sunset Overdrive", is meant to show how the visual design of Sunset Overdrive was developed to meet the needs of the game's technology, tone and gameplay, rather than pure aesthetics.
Check it out to see a breakdown of the problems Insomniac faced during pre-production (including big headaches like the "attitude" coming off as derivative or dissonant) and how the studio went about solving them.
Chew is aiming her talk at artists, designers and creative types looking for advice on developing a unique art direction that complements their game's design.

Sharpen your game dev toolset with tips from Ubisoft at GDC 2015

Ubisoft's David Lightbown believes the tools we use to make games could use some improvement, and he's coming to GDC 2015 in March to show us how it's done.
Lightbown serves as the user experience director of the technology group at Ubisoft Montreal, and in his Programming track talk "Tools Development at Ubisoft: Building a Shared Vision to Improve the User Experience" he plans to run down a handful of his own user-centric tool design techniques.

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