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Game Developers Conference 2016 - Reasons To Be Cheerful
So, it’s 2016 already, and the 30th (how did that happen?!) edition of Game Developers Conference is almost upon us, rolling towards us pleasantly, imposingly, but inexorably. Here's some tips for interesting happenings at the event...
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So, it’s 2016 already, and the 30th (how did that happen?!) edition of Game Developers Conference is almost upon us, rolling towards us pleasantly, imposingly, but inexorably.
GDC 2016, which I help to organize, takes place in San Francisco next week (March 14th-18th). It features dedicated Summits and Bootcamps on Monday and Tuesday, with the Expo running Wednesday to Friday alongside the Main Conference, as per usual.
You’ve probably already had plenty of people (maybe including us!) social media-ing or emailing you with a whole BUNCH of things to see and do at the show. I wanted to take some time to highlight some of the things I’m excited to see at this year’s GDC, as follows:
Conference Sessions…
– Earlier in the week, we have a whole bunch of Summits, going in-depth with key markets/sectors like eSports, game education, AI, and more.
But new this year alongside Summits on Mon/Tue is the Virtual Reality Developers Conference. Its virtual reality game/entertainment tracks have a killer line-up, including ILM (Star Wars VR?!), Fantastic Contraption, Sony London, Oculus Story Studio, and lots more. Please get there early (and ideally have a VRDC pass to help ensure entry) – it’s gonna be packed, and we have an overflow room at the ready.
– Apparently, it’s the 10th year of the Indie Games Summit at GDC – wow, where does time go? I’ve helped (in various ways) with this Summit for all of the last decade-ish, and this year’s line-up – spread across two rooms – looks top-tier. Featured games/topics include Downwell, SOMA, Dwarf Fortress, Superhot, ‘indiepocalypse’, Keep Talking & Nobody Explodes, plus the traditional Tech Toolbox & Indie Soapbox microtalks, & since we’re double-tracked, there’s more niche content than before, yay.
– Also worth looking at closely are some of the ‘Bootcamps’ on Mon/Tue that are continually expanding into Summit size and quality events.
In particular, check out the Animation Bootcamp (Overwatch! EA UFC!), the Level Design In A Day Bootcamp (Firewatch! Manifold Garden!), Producer Bootcamp (Gearbox! Oculus!), and other neat things like the Producer & Audio Bootcamps and the Game Design Workshop.
– Instead of the ‘Flash Forward’ talk sneak peek we’ve done for the last couple of years (YouTube), we’re holding ‘Flash Backward: 30 Years Of Making Games‘ as an opening ‘keynote’-ish thing on the Wednesday of GDC. It’s microtalks, starting with (C)GDC’s founder Chris Crawford, and including sessions from Raph Koster (MMOs), Seth Killian (eSports), Palmer Luckey (VR), & lots more. S’neat!
– Classic Postmortems are in full effect again this year as part of the Main Conference. You can watch all previous years on GDC Vault & many on our YouTube channel, and this time, we’ve got another stellar line-up. The full list is Tetsuya Mizuguchi on the making of Rez, Steve Golson on how bootleg turned legit classic Ms. Pac-Man got created, and David Brevik on how Diablo got made.
– Then there’s the Main Conference itself, which continues to meticulously program useful, high takeaway talks of all kinds, smartly mentored by our Board. There’s everything under the sun in here in design, art, programming, production, and business tracks.
These span a design talk from Magic: The Gathering’s lead designer to talks on Rocket League, cheating in Day-Z, and the fascinating ‘Game Outcomes Project’, to name but a few. Just browse the whole thing, start at Wednesday, and check some out for yourself.