The early registration period for this year's Game Developers Conference ends Wednesday, January 29th (today!) at 11:59 PM Pacific, so conference organizers encourage anyone interested in attending to register now at a discounted rate!

This is one of the best opportunities to save money on your pass to GDC, which takes place March 16th through the 20th in San Francisco and will once again play host to a smorgasbord of cutting-edge lectures, panels, and tutorials for game makers and other industry professionals.

For example, veteran game developer Koji "IGA" Igarashi will be coming to GDC this year to present "Beginning from Kickstarter: The Development of 'Bloodstained'", an in-depth look at what he learned while shepherding his first crowdfunded game project from Kickstarter to completion.

Expect to learn about the production and development of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, as well as how the team worked through the process of funding the project, which included setting a new record for video game funding on Kickstarter. It promises to be a fantastic talk, so don't miss it!

Plus, in a special Design track talk titled "Becoming a Living Legend: An 'Apex Legends' Postmortem" senior game designer Carlos Pineda will go through the development of the hit game Apex Legends and explore how Respawn identifies opportunities, both from a product design and a game design standpoint.

This promises to be an informative and practical session, especially for anyone seeking insight on Respawn's development process and how to identify opportunities for innovation within a genre, as well as how introspection can be used to identify and combat a team's blind spots. 

If you're more interested in seeing a top-tier game animation system put through its paces, check out "Making the Believable Horses of 'Red Dead Redemption II'", a GDC session from Rockstar North's Tobias Kleanthous that aims to show you how Rockstar's interdisciplinary team approached the design and implementation of naturalistic horse styling and movement.

It's a great opportunity to learn more about how Rockstar devs collaborate on a game, and attendees can expect to leave with insight into Rockstar's development process as well as practical insights about how to best improve the quality and feel of character animation systems!

Plus, in "Battling Burnout: The Side Project Ritual" veteran game developer Laralyn McWilliams aims to give you a guided tour through the many benefits of creative rituals, especially around side projects. Yes, you can build skills or even kickstart your indie career, but more important, side projects can be refreshing, rebooting, and restorative. Even if you whittle away at your side project for years--even if you never release it--the act of ritual creation is part of the evergreen path to both confidence and healing.

And of course, in a very special GDC 2020 Design track talk on "Genesis Mini: Sega's Return to Hardware after 20 Years" Sega Games' Yosuke Okunari and M2 CEO Naoki Horii will share insights into the inception and realization of the project that (in a sense) brought Sega back to the console market. 

It promises to be a great talk that offers novel and intriguing insights into how Sega approaches business development for its classic games and hardware, as well as loads of intriguing Genesis Mini tech trivia, so make sure to register now for GDC 2020 if you haven't already!

This is just a small taste of what's in store for you at GDC this year, and more talks are being announced every week. Of course, a GDC 2020 pass also gets access to the GDC Expo Floor, located within the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, which serves as a showcase for cutting-edge technology from some of the industry's biggest and most influential companies. So make sure to register now at a discounted rate!

For more details on these and all other announced talks head over to the online GDC 2020 Session Scheduler, where you can check out all the sessions on offer at the show this year.

For more details on GDC 2020 visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

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