The organizers of the
2012 Game Developers Conference are highlighting this year's Audio Track, covering Supergiant's indie hit
Bastion, Crytek's big-budget shooter
Crysis 2, and GDC's ever-popular Demo Derby.
These talks all fall within the show's Audio track, just one of
seven main tracks at the show's jam-packed Main Conference. Within this track, the industry's top audio professionals will share their knowledge and experience, offering lectures that span production tactics, technical innovations, aesthetic design, and much more.
The Audio track -- along with the rest of the Main Conference, will take place Wednesday, March 7 through Friday, March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
To gain access to all the notable sessions within the Main Conference, please register for an All Access or Main Conference pass at the
official GDC website. In addition, if you are just interested in the Audio track, a specialized lower cost Audio pass is also available.
Here are the notable talks newly featured in GDC 2012's Audio track:
- Looking back on the success of the indie darling
Bastion, Supergiant Games' audio director, Darren Korb, will host "
Build That Wall: Creating the Audio for Bastion." During this session, Korb will demonstrate how he oversaw and coordinated the game's eclectic music, haunting vocal tracks, and even the its dynamic narration and sound effects, all on a very limited budget.
- Four years after hosting an audio-oriented talk on
Crysis 1, Crytek returns to host a follow-up session, "
Crysis of Audio II." Here, R&D audio engineer Thomas Wollenzin and co-audio director Florian Fuesslin will pick apart the technology and implementation strategies powering the audio of the studio's recent
Crysis 2. Along the way, the pair will present numerous audio and video examples, detailing their audio production process and the pipeline that kept the team on track.
- Elsewhere, the Game Audio Network Guild will once again host its Demo Derby event, offering budding audio professionals a chance to get feedback from top developers working at Valve, Loot Drop, Sony, and more. This year, GDC will feature specialized events for
music and
sound design, and all active, registered members of the Game Audio Network Guild are welcome to submit demos for panel critique -- of course, all other attendees are more than welcome to attend the session.
In addition to the above sessions, the Audio track will also feature talks from
Bungie on eliciting emotion through music,
Obsidian on designing interactive music for
Fallout: New Vegas,
Insomniac Games on what sound designers can learn from Disneyland,
Ubisoft on multi-language voice-overs, and a
compare and contrast session on indie and AAA voice acting.
For more information on these or any other sessions at GDC 2012, please check out the event's official
Schedule Builder, which shows the current (and constantly-growing) lineup for the show so far.
Also be sure to keep an eye on the official
GDC news blog, which will showcase exciting new announcements for the show, in addition to this continuing series of posts pointing a spotlight at the show's most exciting, informative, and usual content.
To keep up-to-date on all the latest news about GDC 2012, please subscribe to updates from the
GDC news page via
Twitter,
Facebook, or
RSS. GDC 2012 will take place March 5 through March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and is owned and operated by Gamasutra parent company UBM TechWeb.
