Game Developers Conference organizers are working hard to program a great lineup of talks at GDC 2016 next March, and today they're excited to debut the first of what promises to be many standout Summit sessions.
The eight focused Summits at GDC fill the first two days of the event with lectures, panels, postmortems, and more to foster community-building within specific sectors of the game industry.
At the ever-popular AI Summit Daniel Brewer, lead AI programmer at Digital Extremes, will share practical advice on crafting great boss AI gleaned from his experience on popular free-to-play online shooter Warframe.
In "Crafting AI for Epic Boss Battles in Warframe," Brewer will explore some of the challenges faced by the Warframe team and offer design and engineering advice for tackling boss battles in action games.
Continuing down the path of free-to-play game design advice, Ninja Metrics CEO Dmitri Williams will run down what games and mechanics create "social value" for players in his Free to Play Summit talk "Social Impact: Leveraging Community for Monetization, UA and Design."
Williams will explain why social impact is something you should consider in your game design process, and back up his points with data is presented in anonymized benchmarks from 500m+ players across all genres and platforms.
Conference officials also look forward to announcing many more GDC 2016 Summit sessions spanning a diverse array of game industry issues in the months ahead.
For now, 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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