Develop Conference 2007 Details Confirmed

Officials from Tandem Events have announced that the second annual Develop Conference & Expo will take place in Brighton, England from July 24th to 26th this year. The inaugural event last year attracted around 1,100 attendees from twenty-two territories, with the 2007 event promising fresh speakers and new conference tracks, themes, sessions, workshops and master classes. More than seventy speakers are promised for the two-day event, with LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule, movie special effects expert Peter Chiang, Lionhead's Peter Molyneux, Katie Ellwood from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and Steve Williams from Blitz Studios already confirmed. The conference will include around forty-five sessions split across seven tracks: design, production, coding, business, art, audio and world vision. The latter is new for 2007 and will focus on games development around the world and what can be learned from other countries. Underpinning the seven tracks are four key themes: community, connectivity, creativity and control. Running alongside the conference, Develop Expo will feature around forty different companies demonstrating their latest games development products. Develop Mobile will also take place on July 24th, with a one day specialist conference on wireless development. It will run alongside GAMES:EDU on the same day, which is aimed at educators and serious games creators. “One of our long-standing key themes, social networking and its impact on games, surprised many as the talk of San Francisco, thanks largely to Phil Harrison’s key speech revealing PlayStation Home and Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet”, said advisory board chair Owain Bennallack. “We think developers are now ready to hear a lot more about how the lessons of Web 2.0 can make their games better and more successful, and the Develop conference in Brighton is the only place to do so, as well as picking up plenty more traditional hints and tips about programming, art, audio, and production”, he added. Further information on the conference and expo can be found at the official Develop Conference website.