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Created March 20, 2024 22:10
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[
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "Drawing on her experience from working as a stand-up comedian for 2 years, and using examples from the development of the acclaimed 'Grace Bruxner Presents: The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game', this talk focuses on the process of creating comedy games. Beyond writing jokes for games, this lecture presents a more nuanced look at building games around humor, and Grace will go into the specifics of writing funny dialogue that doesn't feel stilted or forced by finding the comedy in the ordinary. Along the way, she will also be looking at how games can subvert expectations of genre to aid in silliness, drawing comparisons between 'The Haunted Island' and other recent comedy-focused and/or narrative games.",
"id": "1025651",
"speakers": "Grace Bruxner",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"GDC 2019",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Grace Bruxner",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "Building Games Around Humor: Lessons from 'The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game'",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Naughty Dog, Inc."
],
"description": "Who wants to ride an elephant in a Naughty Dog 'Uncharted' game? According to play testers, everyone. Aren't wild elephants dangerous? Yes. How do you keep this plausible while still supporting the need of the narrative? Design at Naughty Dog often influences story, and story, design. Sometimes, the Naughty Dog team has a design idea so unusual and unique they find a way to incorporate it into the story no matter the complexity and cost. From background character to full, peaceful story moment, this talk covers the story and design evolution of the elephant ride in 'Uncharted: The Lost Legacy'.",
"id": "1025652",
"speakers": "Marianne Hayden",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Game Narrative",
"Marianne Hayden",
"free content",
"Naughty Dog, Inc."
],
"title": "Design vs. Story: How 'Uncharted: The Lost Legacy' Addressed the Elephant in the Room",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft Montreal"
],
"description": "Neither evil nor enlightening, machine learning is about to deeply change your pipelines or the features you offer. A.I. is a hugely misunderstood topic. It has been evolving extremely fast during the last years with machine learning. Although spectacular, those results belong mostly to the academic community and are barely applicable outside of pure research fields. Still, there is a huge consensus that this field is disruptive, and the game industry makes no exception. Beyond buzz and hype, is it time to incorporate those new paradigms in your productions ? And how to reconcile production constraints with an unproven disruptive discipline? This session will explain Ubisoft's strategy to incorporate modern AI in their productions.",
"id": "1025653",
"speakers": "Yves Jacquier",
"tags": [
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Production",
"Ubisoft Montreal",
"free content",
"Yves Jacquier"
],
"title": "The Alchemy and Science of Machine Learning for Games",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Mega Crit Games"
],
"description": "Mega Crit released a rogue-like deck-building game, 'Slay the Spire' into Steam Early Access on November 14, 2017. After a 14 month Early Access period of weekly updates, the game left Early Access on January 23, 2019, and has become one of the top-selling indie games of 2018. But unlike other titles, 'Slay the Spire' didn't sell well in the beginning, due to a low social media presence and lack of press coverage.This talk shares the process and thoughts on adding value to a game, building a community, and how various decisions factored into making 'Slay the Spire' one of the top selling indie games of 2018. The Mega Crit team thinks the game grew because of the weekly patching, community building, internationalization, compatibility, and design decisions that maximized availability to players and this talk will explain how it all came together to make 'Slay the Spire' what it is today.",
"id": "1025667",
"speakers": "Casey Yano",
"tags": [
"Mega Crit Games",
"GDC 2019",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"free content",
"Casey Yano"
],
"title": "'Slay the Spire': Success through Marketability",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"NYU Game Center, Independent"
],
"description": "Despite the onslaught of diverse and experimental work published on Steam and consoles every day, one significant taboo remains in indie games and it's not the one you would think: Indie designers don't sign their work. Unlike actors, musicians, intellectuals, painters, poets, writers, directors, and producers, game designers often publish behind the anonymity of a company, even when working alone. Why do they do this? Where did this norm come from? Who benefits from this situation? And why should it be changed?",
"id": "1025668",
"speakers": "Bennett Foddy, Zach Gage",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"NYU Game Center",
"GDC 2019",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Bennett Foddy",
"Independent Games",
"Zach Gage",
"free content"
],
"title": "Put Your Name on Your Game, a Talk by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sokpop Collective, Sokpop Collective"
],
"description": "Since the start of 2018 Sokpop Collective has been running a subscription service where they release a new game made bythem every 2 weeks for a few dollars a month. After a year they now have almost 1,000 subscribers, getting enough money to keep on going! In this talk, they will talk about this new approach of game development and how it tries to tackle many of the issues indie developers struggle with such as visibility, sustainability, finishing projects and prototyping ideas.",
"id": "1025669",
"speakers": "Tijmen Tio, Aran Koning",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Tijmen Tio",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Aran Koning",
"Independent Games",
"free content",
"Sokpop Collective"
],
"title": "One Year of Sokpop Games Subscription on Patreon",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"League of Geeks"
],
"description": "Digital card and board-game 'Armello' was released in 2015, and found itself gradually transitioning into the melting pot of an ongoing Games as a Service (GaaS) model. As it wasn't something the team had planned for during development, studio League of Geeks had to pivot their strategies for tackling a live game. Lead producer Lisy Kane will walk through the team's learnings and failures throughout GaaS development and serve up some tips, tricks and pitfalls to avoid for expanding your game post-release. She will go through the iterating changes of production processes, tools and services tried and tested by the team, as well as exploring what the future may hold for GaaS.",
"id": "1025670",
"speakers": "Lisy Kane",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Lisy Kane",
"Independent Games Summit",
"League of Geeks",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "Cooking with G.a.a.S: The 'Armello' Approach to Post-Launch Game Content",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Fullbright"
],
"description": "As a game developer in 2019, your biggest asset and your most towering obstacle is the internet. And especially as an indie, you don't have the luxury of just logging off when things get overwhelming. So how do you keep your thumbs on the pulse of the internet while also staying sane? Through the perspective of the internet-induced nervous breakdown Leighton Gray had in the wake of Dream Daddy's success and her desperate clawing back to emotional normalcy and understanding, she'll talk about how to weather success (and failure) by cultivating a healthier relationship with the internet.",
"id": "1025671",
"speakers": "Leighton Gray",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"free content",
"Leighton Gray",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"Fullbright"
],
"title": "Dream Daddies and Fearful Fathers: How Indies Can Cope with Being Terminally Online",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "The Indiepocalypse has happened. No one is making money on Steam anymore. No wait, there are more than 300 games with more than 1,000 concurrent players each. You haven't even heard of most of them. High profile flops have normalized failure. Meanwhile, everyone forgets that more games are making more money on Steam than ever before. This talk will dig into that data, and help you figure out how NOT to waste the next four years of your life on the next high profile flop.",
"id": "1025672",
"speakers": "Jason Rohrer",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"Jason Rohrer",
"GDC 2019",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "2014 vs. 2018: The Shape of Financial Success Before and After the Indiepocalypse",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent, Spoke and Wheel Strategy"
],
"description": "This talk, from an indie marketing/strategy veteran (Dana Trebella) and noted trailer creator (Derek Lieu) will teach a practical and focused step-by-step process to find your indie game's differentiated message, and how to explain the game's hook via strong visuals and trailers. This talk will also cover how to create this message without falling into common pitfalls. Your game should not be referencing other games and relying on a list of features, but rather showcasing the feelings and experience that it evokes! Finally, attendees will learn how developing their message and hook early can focus their marketing, aid their development, and unify all assets for stronger impact.",
"id": "1025673",
"speakers": "Derek Lieu, Dana Trebella",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"GDC 2019",
"Derek Lieu",
"Dana Trebella",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Spoke and Wheel Strategy",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "More Feelings, Fewer Features: Showcasing Your Indie Game Through Messaging and Video",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Finji"
],
"description": "At some point in development your team will have to talk about your game to someone on the outside. But how do you know if what you are saying and showing make sense? Are you soliciting for publishers, for funding, for console co-marketing, for promotional opportunities, or are you going to a convention? In this session, attendees will gain an understanding of how Finji builds and uses pitch documents, key art and game play videos. They will also learn the difference between prototypes, gameplay mechanic tests, and vertical slices and why publishers want them.",
"id": "1025674",
"speakers": "Rebekah Saltsman",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Finji",
"free content",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"Rebekah Saltsman"
],
"title": "So You're Ready to Pitch to a Publisher? You're Not",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"alienmelon, NYU, Bravemule & Ghoulnoise, Bravemule & Ghoulnoise, Hexecutable, Fullbright"
],
"description": "Professionals from varying disciplines discuss creating games for personal expression, coping, empathy, mental health, and methods used to convey personal messages that speak on deeper topics. As much as games are about mastery of a skill, games can be about mastery of emotions, and addressing issues people might be closed off to. Games can help people cope, heal, and find solace. This set of microtalks is a discussion about using game development practices to make a difference.",
"id": "1025675",
"speakers": "Nathalie Lawhead, Jingyu Sui, Priscilla Snow, Kevin Snow, Jenny Jiao Hsia, Nina Freeman",
"tags": [
"Jingyu Sui",
"GDC 2019",
"Jenny Jiao Hsia",
"Nina Freeman",
"NYU",
"Nathalie Lawhead",
"Kevin Snow",
"alienmelon",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Priscilla Snow",
"Hexecutable",
"Bravemule & Ghoulnoise",
"Fullbright",
"free content",
"Independent Games"
],
"title": "Personal Experiences as Games",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"CheckPoint Organisation"
],
"description": "Being a leader is hard work. As well as the obvious demands of resource management, deadlines and delegation, team leaders also become responsible for the stresses and atmosphere of the entire team. Indeed, the ability to validate and contain these anxieties is vital to the health of that team, and when it is done well, it improves motivation, productivity and output. Using evidence based information, CheckPoint founder Dr. Jennifer Hazel will cover models of workplace psychology, educate on how to contain team stress, and discuss interpersonal communication skills and conflict management for indies and mid-sized studios in the games industry. With this knowledge, team leaders will understand better how to maximize their own health, the environment in the workplace, and will see the tangible effects this can have on game quality.",
"id": "1025676",
"speakers": "Jennifer Hazel",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Jennifer Hazel",
"Independent Games Summit",
"CheckPoint Organisation",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "How to Make Games and Influence People: Leading Your Team Effectively and Healthily",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Kitfox Games"
],
"description": "Most management games have a utopian ethos, telling emergent narratives about community growth and economic prosperity. 'The Shrouded Isle', by contrast, is a dystopian simulation, depicting a dwindling, island community that kills its members to serve a dark god. As conventional management mechanics are thematically inappropriate, the gameplay focuses on systems that intentionally subvert players' expectations and drive them to cause their own downfall. This talk will be part design postmortem of 'The Shrouded Isle' and part analysis, examining three techniques that designers can use to create emergent tragedies.",
"id": "1025677",
"speakers": "Jongwoo Kim",
"tags": [
"Kitfox Games",
"GDC 2019",
"Jongwoo Kim",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "A Cruel Fate: Emergent Tragedies in 'The Shrouded Isle'",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Lion Shield, LLC, Lion Shield, LLC"
],
"description": "'Kingdoms and Castles' was developed in about a year and a half and went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies onSteam. Peter Angstadt and Michael Peddicord explain how they course corrected and verified the viability of the game bytesting audience interest before it was released. This talk will also cover how the game was developed and designedquickly and efficiently, and how this was all done without crunching or burn out and with the team able to stay happy, healthy, and friends throughout development.",
"id": "1025678",
"speakers": "Peter Angstadt, Michael Peddicord",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Lion Shield, LLC",
"Peter Angstadt",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"Michael Peddicord",
"free content"
],
"title": "'Kingdoms and Castles' Postmortem",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Nyamakop, Nyamakop"
],
"description": "This talk will explore the notion of \"breaking into\" the independent games space in 2018. It will explore the assumptions about what \"breaking in\" means, where those assumptions falter, and how unorthodox goals for one's debut game might lead to longer term sustainability.This session will use Nyamakop's experiences making their debut title, 'Semblance', as context for framing the talk. Specifically, how the creators made design, business, and marketing decisions to reach both assumed and lateral goals of \"breaking in\". As part of this, the speakers will also delve into the unique challenges/opportunities of making games in an African country.",
"id": "1025679",
"speakers": "Ben Myres, Cukia Kimani",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Ben Myres",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"Nyamakop",
"free content",
"Cukia Kimani"
],
"title": "Squeezing into the Industry: How a Couple African Kids Made a Video Game",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"ClutchPlay Games, LLC"
],
"description": "Let's be real for a minute. It can be tough out there. You can't always predict how well your next indie game will do financially. Yet, you have a great team, your work is top-notch and you want to keep your team together so you can continue to do the work you love. For most indie developers, the solution is obvious. Take on some contact work and everything will be fine, right? Yet, being successful as a contract team isn't as easy as it sounds. You've got to know how to negotiate the right deal that will set your team up for success. But this can be tricky, especially if you aren't aware of your options.In this talk, Amy Dallas will explore some different ways to structure projects, strategies to build lasting partnerships with clients and examine some limiting beliefs that can prevent you from achieving your desired outcome.",
"id": "1025680",
"speakers": "Amy Dallas",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Amy Dallas",
"Independent Games Summit",
"ClutchPlay Games, LLC",
"free content",
"Independent Games"
],
"title": "Tips from the Trenches: An Indie Guide to Contracting",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Return To Adventure Mountain, LLC"
],
"description": "A well-run email list can be 10 times more effective than Twitter and 5 times more effective than Facebook. In thisndetailed and very practical talk, Chris Zukowski will teach you the techniques needed to get players to join your mailing list, boost your open rates, and turn new players into super fans.",
"id": "1025681",
"speakers": "Chris Zukowski",
"tags": [
"Return To Adventure Mountain, LLC",
"GDC 2019",
"Chris Zukowski",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "Build Your Own Fan Club: How to Use Your Email List",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Fantasy Flight Games"
],
"description": "'KeyForge' is a new kind of game that takes the fun of a traditional trading card game and gives it a unique twist by making every deck in existence completely unique. But there are many new challenges and hurdles that come with figuring out how to actually make and print a procedurally generated card game! In this talk, Fantasy Flight Games lead developer Brad Andres will describe the major obstacles the team faced and overcame in bringing this game to life, and will outline the process by which 'KeyForge' decks are created.",
"id": "1025682",
"speakers": "Brad Andres",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Fantasy Flight Games",
"Design",
"Brad Andres",
"free content"
],
"title": "Board Game Design Day: 'KeyForge': Creating the World's First Unique Deck Game",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Leder Games"
],
"description": "In this talk, notable board game designer Cole Wehrle discusses his designs (including the acclaimed 'Root', 'Pax Pamir', 'An Infamous Traffic' and 'John Company') as part of a larger conversation around player interaction. Twenty years ago conflict-driven designs were the norm. Interaction and player-driven chaos were staples of design. Things could not be more different today. Not only have cooperative and solo designs found a massive space in today's board game market, but even complex strategy games have moved away from direct player interaction.Wehrle will mount a defense for competitive multiplayer designs that don't shy away from giving players the ability to disrupt one another. In this light, designing for king-making (the explicit attempt to bolster another player) becomes the central key to enabling players to occupy the complex strategic positions that produce dramatic narratives. Over the past several years Wehrle has designed a series of games which attempt to investigate the subject of player agency and what can be learned from embracing strategies which push against better instincts.",
"id": "1025683",
"speakers": "Cole Wehrle",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Leder Games",
"Design",
"Cole Wehrle",
"free content"
],
"title": "Board Game Design Day: \"King Me\": A Defense of King-Making in Board Game Design",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"UX is Fine!"
],
"description": "Over the past couple of years, game UX expert Jason Schklar has been running a \"Board Game\" UX exercise with various groups of video game developers as a way of thinking about how \"board and pieces\" design influences the learnability of a board game. Specifically, he has participants figure out how to play board games without reading the instructions/rule book. In this talk, Jason will present a summary of findings during these sessions (including sessions with kids at his local elementary school board game club) and some tips for making games easier and more fun to learn.",
"id": "1025684",
"speakers": "Jason Schklar",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"UX is Fine!",
"Design",
"free content",
"Jason Schklar"
],
"title": "Board Game Design Day: Designing Great UX into Your Game Board and Pieces",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Inquisiment"
],
"description": "Constraints are often seen as frustrating and limiting, but in this session Jenn Sandercock, creator of the successfully crowdfunded Edible Games Cookbook, explains how she uses constraints to help her design process and promote innovation. Jenn's baker's dozen of edible games were created by starting from a core constraint that all the games had to involve real-world eating within the gameplay itself. To vary each game's design, Jenn added more constraints, and although most people don't use eating real food as a constraint, this talk will help you consider how to create constraints for an individual game or for a series of games, and use them to innovate.",
"id": "1025685",
"speakers": "Jenn Sandercock",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Jenn Sandercock",
"Inquisiment",
"Design",
"free content"
],
"title": "Board Game Design Day: Edible Tabletop Games: Using Constraints to Innovate",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"MIT, MIT"
],
"description": "Why have hundreds of colonial-themed board games been published during the last two decades? And why are more and more of these games being released every year? In this talk, MIT's Mikael Jakobsson and Rik Eberhardt will present their findings from a year of board game design workshops in Bogot, San Juan, and Bangor with professional designers, students, and representatives of locals and indigenous peoples of the different areas.The purpose of the workshops was to learn what people who live in places that so often are represented in board games actually care about, and create game prototypes based on these themes. Mikael and Rik wanted to make counterexamples to the plethora of games that focus on the European colonialist time period and often represents the indigenous people in a very passive way, or not at all. In this talk, they'll focus on what modern board game developers can learn from their study, showing that there are great untapped opportunities connected to the use of contemporary themes and ascribing greater agency and ownership to representations of local cultures.",
"id": "1025686",
"speakers": "Mikael Jakobsson, Richard Eberhardt",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Mikael Jakobsson",
"MIT",
"Design",
"Richard Eberhardt",
"free content"
],
"title": "Board Game Design Day: Better Board Games Through Cultural Engagement",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Formal Ferret Games"
],
"description": "Many people assume that direct interaction is a given in a board or card game with multiple players. Don't you need to be able to attack your opponent in order for the game to work? This lecture from board game designer Gil Hova ('The Networks') shows that attacking players in a board game isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's just that there are other ways to design a board game.Plenty of board games have achieved critical and commercial success without the players going for each other's throats or backs. The talk will break down player interaction from a theoretical point of view and then walk through games with indirect interaction (like 'Race for the Galaxy') and even zero player interaction (like 'Take It Easy'). Ultimately, this talk will look at how games with indirect or no player interaction can be satisfying, along with common pitfalls to avoid.",
"id": "1025687",
"speakers": "Gil Hova",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Gil Hova",
"Design",
"Formal Ferret Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "Board Game Design Day: Why Indirect or Zero Player Interaction Can Be Great",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Spry Fox"
],
"description": "The Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 and became a huge craze in the '80s. Yet the modern world championships, where people compete to solve the cube and other puzzles in as fast a time as possible, was not established until 2003. Those world championships were not run by the Rubik company, but by an independent international organization of speed-solving enthusiasts, or 'speedcubers'. This community took what was a toy and, without corporate backing, turned it into a game. Then they turned that game into a genre with hundreds of variants and celebrity designers. Growth followed, with 359 competitions registered worldwide in 2013, increasing to 679 by 2016.How did the community achieve this? Was it luck, organization, or both? What type of players does speedcubing attract? What industries sprang up to support the game? How is speedcubing different to the board or video game industry, and how is it the same?",
"id": "1025688",
"speakers": "Andrew Fray",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Andrew Fray",
"Design",
"free content",
"Spry Fox"
],
"title": "Board Game Design Day: Twists and Turns: How the Speed Cubing Community Turned Rubik's Cube into a Competitive Genre",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent, Inquisiment, Independent, Idea Duck"
],
"description": "In this talk, board game and tabletop game developers discuss the ongoing growth, development and diversity of a hobby that continues to showcase original ideas, new approaches and even new technology. The panel will look back over the last twelve months in the industry, mixing their personal reflections and experiences with changing trends and themes, as well as taking questions from the audience.For the GDC's third State and Future of Board Games panel, moderator Paul Dean will be joined by designers Jenn Sandercock (creator of the groundbreaking Edible Games series) and Jonathan Ying (Imperial Assault, Bargain Quest), as well as a third guest TBC. The panel will reflect upon some of the year's biggest titles and talking points, look back on past trends and look ahead to what all of this may mean for the industry. The final third of the session will open up to questions from the audience on these topics and more.",
"id": "1025689",
"speakers": "Paul Dean, Jenn Sandercock, Jonathan Ying, Susan McKinley Ross",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"GDC 2019",
"Inquisiment",
"Susan McKinley Ross",
"Jonathan Ying",
"Design",
"Idea Duck",
"Paul Dean",
"Jenn Sandercock",
"free content"
],
"title": "Board Game Design Day: The State and Future of Board Games",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"NYU Game Center, Empathy Box, Kitfox Games, Sketchbook Games, E-Line Media, Wadjet Eye, Council Of Fools, LLC"
],
"description": "In five short-format talks, leading innovators in game narrative will share stories behind their innovative creations: the ambitions they had, the challenges they faced, the solutions they invented. Each speaker will reveal in detail the experimental techniques they developed to mark new advances in narrative design, dissecting particular problems and revealing the strategies they deployed to tackle them.",
"id": "1025690",
"speakers": "Clara Fernandez Vara, Matthew Weise, Tanya X. Short, Mark Backler, Whitney \"Strix\" Beltran, Dave Gilbert, Allen Turner",
"tags": [
"NYU Game Center",
"Empathy Box",
"Kitfox Games",
"Clara Fernandez Vara",
"GDC 2019",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Game Narrative",
"Tanya X. Short",
"Mark Backler",
"Sketchbook Games",
"Dave Gilbert",
"E-Line Media",
"Whitney \"Strix\" Beltran",
"Wadjet Eye",
"Council Of Fools, LLC",
"Allen Turner",
"free content",
"Matthew Weise"
],
"title": "The Narrative Innovation Showcase 2019",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Unknown Worlds Entertainment"
],
"description": "'Subnautica' almost failed. Unknown Worlds Entertainment almost went bankrupt. Initially, Early Access sales were weak. Fast forward three years and 'Subnautica' sold two million copies, growing fast. How did they turn it around? Is it replicable?In this talk Jonas explains how open development saved 'Subnautica': what it is, what it means, and how it affects every part of the independent game making process. The talk is about listening to your game, iterating on feedback, growing communities, and finding customers along the way. It is about how to thrive on Early Access.Jonas will show in detail how the Unknown Worlds Entertainment team found and doubled down on the core spikes, which make 'Subnautica' stand out, and how the process can be generalized for other games. He will show how they were able to tell a story in a nonlinear open world game. He'll show how to gather and process massive amounts of player feedback. Finally, of course, he will also show you what went right and what went wrong during development, the challenges faced, the changes made along the way and the lessons learned.",
"id": "1025691",
"speakers": "Jonas Boetel",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Jonas Boetel",
"Unknown Worlds Entertainment",
"free content",
"Independent Games"
],
"title": "'Subnautica' Postmortem",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Actual Humans, Team Gotham, Hidden Variable Studios"
],
"description": "Failure often teaches you so much more than success. This annual session of rare honesty and transparency is dedicated to developers willing to open up about failures in their work, giving space for you to celebrate and learn from both the ups and the downs of independent game development. This year, Charley Price will discuss the deletion of all the Skullgirls Mobile user data (and how they recovered), Juan de la Torre will talk about a contract he should not have signed, and Jon Remedios will talk about his struggles with mental health during the development of 'Shoot Shoot Mega Pack'.",
"id": "1025692",
"speakers": "Jon Remedios, Juan de la Torre, Charley Price",
"tags": [
"Juan de la Torre",
"Charley Price",
"GDC 2019",
"Team Gotham",
"Actual Humans",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Hidden Variable Studios",
"Jon Remedios",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "Failure Workshop 2019",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Batterystaple Games"
],
"description": "This session will discuss concrete tactics for building, maintaining, and leveraging a game's Early Access community for maximal feedback quality, feedback quantity, and player retention.",
"id": "1025693",
"speakers": "Chris King",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Batterystaple Games",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Chris King",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "Thriving in Steam Early Access: Turning 20XX's Slow Launch into Success",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Mountains"
],
"description": "How do you tell a love story in a mobile game? Mountains Creative Director Ken Wong discusses the journey of designing 'Florence'. Ken will cover the project's inception and turbulent design evolution, and how the game achieved its emotional resonance. He'll also talk about the pressures of building a team from scratch, working with Annapurna Interactive, and following up 'Monument Valley'.",
"id": "1025694",
"speakers": "Ken Wong",
"tags": [
"Mountains",
"Ken Wong",
"GDC 2019",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "Letting Go: A 'Florence' Postmortem",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Nolla Games"
],
"description": "'Noita' is a rogue-lite set in a procedurally generated physics based destructible world. In this talk, co-creator Petri Purho talks about the technical details of the physics engine, including scaling up the falling sand simulation to support large continuous worlds and integrating destructible rigid body physics, while demonstrating the emergent physics based gameplay.",
"id": "1025695",
"speakers": "Petri Purho",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Petri Purho",
"Nolla Games",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "Exploring the Tech and Design of 'Noita'",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Anemone Hug Interactive, Inc., Temple Gates Games, Kitfox Games"
],
"description": "These 10-min microtalks will give realistic examples of how to run a small game studio without a surprise runaway hit. These game studios have been in business for about 5 years, and employ each between 4-10 people. The microtalks are: \"How to get client work and how to balance it against original IP development\" by Christopher Langmuir of Anemone Hug Interactive. \"How to support game development through hardware and IP partnerships\" by Theresa Duringer of Temple Gates Games. And finally, \"How to grow a studio's fanbase to have increasingly successful titles and bootstrap that development with Kickstarters\" by Kim Jongwoo of Kitfox Games.",
"id": "1025696",
"speakers": "Christopher Langmuir, Theresa Duringer, Tanya X. Short",
"tags": [
"Theresa Duringer",
"Temple Gates Games",
"Kitfox Games",
"GDC 2019",
"Christopher Langmuir",
"Tanya X. Short",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Anemone Hug Interactive, Inc.",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "How to Run a Studio Without a Surprise Hit",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Dry Cactus"
],
"description": "Identify your niche and unique selling points, find your audience, build strong communities, enable meaningful social experiences, provide value to streamers and youtubers, leverage social media to enable your players to be your advocates. These are just some of the things you can do to increase Discoverability for your games organically. By looking at a few examples taken from 'Poly Bridge' and other games you will learn how you can implement these strategies to reach your audience.",
"id": "1025697",
"speakers": "Patrick Corrieri",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"free content",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Patrick Corrieri",
"Dry Cactus",
"Independent Games"
],
"title": "Community Driven Discoverability for Indies",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"ella guro, Indie MEGABOOTH, Independent, Q-Games, Ltd., White Owls, Inc., Ska Studios, EpicArts, Draknek, Etsy, Red Hook Studios"
],
"description": "Ten indies take the stage to share what's on their minds in this ever-popular conclusion to the summit! Individual topics range as widely as the individuals themselves, but these microtalks are sure to provoke, educate, and inspire.",
"id": "1025698",
"speakers": "Liz Ryerson, Kelly Wallick, Kara Stone, Dylan Cuthbert, Mr. SWERY, Michelle Silva, Mwaaba Mugala, Alan Hazelden, Catt Small, Chris Bourassa",
"tags": [
"Mwaaba Mugala",
"Q-Games, Ltd.",
"Ska Studios",
"Alan Hazelden",
"ella guro",
"Independent",
"Kara Stone",
"GDC 2019",
"EpicArts",
"Michelle Silva",
"Indie MEGABOOTH",
"Independent Games",
"Etsy",
"Draknek",
"Dylan Cuthbert",
"Independent Games Summit",
"free content",
"Catt Small",
"Mr. SWERY",
"Kelly Wallick",
"Liz Ryerson",
"Chris Bourassa",
"White Owls, Inc.",
"Red Hook Studios"
],
"title": "Indie Soapbox",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent, UC Santa Cruz, Independent, Secret Lab, Universal Happymaker, Doborog Games, Independent"
],
"description": "Have you ever bumped into another developer and noticed they're using a code snippet, tool or plugin that you feel like you could've used a million times? Are tool-discussions your favorite part of postmortems? In this collection of technical microtalks, each speaker will take you through one of their homemade tools, solutions, or hacks that could benefit or inspire you. The Tech Toolbox presents interesting solutions to interesting problems, or bits of tech that create new affordances in game design from a broad set of independent developer perspectives.",
"id": "1025699",
"speakers": "Nicole He, Max Kreminski, Em Lazer-Walker, Jon Manning, David Mershon, Erik Rydeman, Jonatan Van Hove",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"Em Lazer-Walker",
"Erik Rydeman",
"Universal Happymaker",
"GDC 2019",
"Jon Manning",
"UC Santa Cruz",
"Jonatan Van Hove",
"David Mershon",
"Doborog Games",
"Max Kreminski",
"Secret Lab",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"Nicole He",
"free content"
],
"title": "Tech Toolbox",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Night in the Woods, Pixel Pushers Union 512, Motion Twin, Talespinners, Night in the Woods"
],
"description": "Scott Benson ('Night in the Woods'), Ted Anderson ('Tonight We Riot'), Ian Thomas ('TaleSpinners'), and Steve Filby ('Motion Twin') discuss life as indie developers, share their experiences forming workers co-ops, and talk about the benefits of the co-op model for small and midsize studios.",
"id": "1025700",
"speakers": "Scott Benson, Ted Anderson, Steve Fillby, Ian Thomas, Bethany Hockenberry",
"tags": [
"Scott Benson",
"Motion Twin",
"GDC 2019",
"Pixel Pushers Union 512",
"Bethany Hockenberry",
"Talespinners",
"Steve Fillby",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Ian Thomas",
"Independent Games",
"Ted Anderson",
"free content",
"Night in the Woods"
],
"title": "Embracing the Co-Op Studio Model in Indie Games",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"USC Game Innovation Lab"
],
"description": "Designer Tracy Fullerton discusses the design challenges behind of translating Henry David Thoreau's classic work Walden into a game and what game designers can learn about creating experimental play from this 19th century philosopher-hermit. This session will discuss specific design problems with translation of a work, which is at its core a rejection of the common aspirations that underlie traditional living, and, by extension, traditional gameplay systems. How can the designer set player expectations in a game world where more is not necessarily better; where time is both a resource to be managed and a simple stream to be experienced, and where the value of actions, items and rewards may not be as simple as they first seem?",
"id": "1025701",
"speakers": "Tracy Fullerton",
"tags": [
"Tracy Fullerton",
"GDC 2019",
"Independent Games Summit",
"USC Game Innovation Lab",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "Ten Years with Thoreau: What a Hermit Can Teach About Game Design",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "This talk is for indie developers looking to finish their game while working a full-time job. David Wehle explains the tactics he used to finish his successful indie project 'The First Tree' even while working over forty hours a week at The VOID and taking care of two kids with his wife. Marketing and production tips are shared on how to maximize the little time devs have so that the chances of a successful launch are increased.",
"id": "1025702",
"speakers": "David Wehle",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"GDC 2019",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"David Wehle",
"free content"
],
"title": "No Time, No Budget, No Problem: Finishing 'The First Tree'",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Artificer"
],
"description": "Reviewers say Creative Forge conveys its themes well. This is a design postmortem of 'Phantom Doctrine' (cold war espionage turn-based tactical), narrowly-focused on fleshing out a theme using gameplay systems. Kacper will talk about tricky relationships between theme and scope, systems, gameplay interactions and loops, and more, providing design methods, ways of thinking and step by step guides on how certain issues can be avoided, especially in system-heavy games like 'Phantom Doctrine'.",
"id": "1025703",
"speakers": "Kacper Szymczak",
"tags": [
"Kacper Szymczak",
"Artificer",
"GDC 2019",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "Theme Oriented Design: The Case of 'Phantom Doctrine'",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Abiding Bridge"
],
"description": "Elizabeth Maler released two indie social impact games: 'A Normal Lost Phone' and 'Another Lost Phone: Laura's Story'. Both games were successful critically, commercially, and as social impact tools. In this talk, she presents her innovative ways of designing, writing and playtesting social impact games, and gives advice on how to ensure their impact. She also discusses the responsibility of artists to think about the messages they propagate with their games and how to ensure the best possible representation of the people they want to talk about.",
"id": "1025704",
"speakers": "Elizabeth Maler",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Elizabeth Maler",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games",
"Abiding Bridge",
"free content"
],
"title": "Games that Change Lives: Social Impact Done Right",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Wizards of the Coast, Wizards of the Coast"
],
"description": "Wizards of the Coast creates a variety of in-person play and online gaming experiences under powerful brand names, 'Magic: The Gathering' and 'Dungeons & Dragons'. Wizards and their fans are members of a global community bound together by a passion for games and the community built by the people who play them. Over the past 25 years, Wizards has worked closely with local gaming stores to share their knowledge and to encourage them to shape and empower their own community. In this discussion Wizards will share how they have translated that same experience into the digital space with online influencers.",
"id": "1025705",
"speakers": "Aland Failde, Michelle Sutterfield",
"tags": [
"Community Management Summit",
"GDC 2019",
"Community Management",
"Aland Failde",
"Michelle Sutterfield",
"Wizards of the Coast",
"free content"
],
"title": "25 Years of Building Community at Wizards of the Coast",
"track": "Community Management Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"No More Robots"
],
"description": "There are plenty of talks out there about community building and management, but not so many about how to even start a community for your game in the first place. Mike Rose from publishing label No More Robots ('Descenders', 'Not Tonight') has built numerous successful communities via Discord for his games over the years, with thousands of eager members for each - and in this talk, he'll share exactly how he did it, and how any developer can follow his steps and bring together their own community.",
"id": "1025706",
"speakers": "Mike Rose",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Mike Rose",
"Business & Marketing",
"No More Robots",
"free content"
],
"title": "Game Discoverability Day: Building a Community for Your Game from Scratch",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "As the number of new game releases continues to rocket each year, marketing becomes increasingly important for studios to help raise visibility for their games and get them noticed by the people who matter most for success: influencers, online communities and prospective customers.In this session, Joel Dreskin (The MIX) will provide overarching marketing strategies and tactics that have been effective for studios large and small. He will include guidelines about when and how to start, where to focus at different stages of campaigns leading up to a game's release, ranking and prioritizing programs for different key marketing channels (influencers, press, streamers, social media channels, online communities at Discord, Reddit and elsewhere), and more. The session will share examples and case studies from a variety of recent game releases.",
"id": "1025707",
"speakers": "Joel Dreskin",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Independent",
"Joel Dreskin",
"Business & Marketing",
"free content"
],
"title": "Game Discoverability Day: Getting Your PC/Console Game Noticed: A Comprehensive How-To Guide",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"ICO Partners"
],
"description": "Crowdfunding for games has evolved a lot over the years, and it has become an exercise in community building and communication, with its own codes and best practices. Drawing on Thomas' insights built from extensive data-mining on Kickstarter and similar platforms, as well his work across 30+ campaigns for games on different platforms, the talk will go over the current state of crowdfunding for video games, the different platforms that are now available to game makers, what type of projects have the best chance of getting funded, and what techniques work the best to run a successful campaign.",
"id": "1025708",
"speakers": "Thomas Bidaux",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Thomas Bidaux",
"Business & Marketing",
"ICO Partners",
"free content"
],
"title": "Game Discoverability Day: Crowdfunding Your Video Game in 2019",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Iron Horse Games, LLC"
],
"description": "Bootstrapping your own marketing spend and generating the biggest possible return on investment for that spend is incredibly important for small and medium-sized companies in the mobile space. In this talk, Iron Horse Games' Mike Gordon (publisher of 'Tap Tap Dig' and 'Idle Apocalypse') will touch on different marketing strategies, the strengths of different marketing networks and easily avoidable mistakes that you can use to market and grow your game on iOS and Google Play. The talk will be focused on how to practically market your games, including the approach to managing user acquisition budgets and strategies and the proper use of attribution partners.",
"id": "1025709",
"speakers": "Michael Gordon",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Michael Gordon",
"Business & Marketing",
"free content",
"Iron Horse Games, LLC"
],
"title": "Game Discoverability Day: Paid Acquisition for Smartphone Games: A Scrappy, Practical Guide",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Kitfox Games"
],
"description": "What goes into a \"hit\"? Luck? Virality? A catchy game title? 'Boyfriend Dungeon' certainly seemed like an instant success, amassing a large following and reaching its $65k crowdfunding goal in just over 6 hours , but the work that goes before, during, and after are often not known to the public. It's time to break it down. What strategies worked... and didn't? How did the Kitfox Games team attract press? Did social media matter that much? How did a 5 person team manage? How did their community help? Let's lift the veil on the numbers and technical aspects behind the indie discoverability grind!",
"id": "1025710",
"speakers": "Victoria Tran",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Victoria Tran",
"Business & Marketing",
"free content",
"Kitfox Games"
],
"title": "Game Discoverability Day: NOTICE ME: The Grind Behind the $272K Funding Success of 'Boyfriend Dungeon'",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Fellow Traveller"
],
"description": "In this talk, Felix Kramer (Tunic, Neo Cab producer) will make the case for discoverability being a high priority before the work on your game even begins. You're probably a person who has been making an innovative piece of commercial art... for a while now. Or perhaps you're just starting to pitch your idea. Thinking of discoverability as storefront placement or SEO at launch is going to lead to problems, because, well, how are publishers going to find you to fund you? How is a community supposed to rally around your game and champion it before launch? How are you being seen, and are you making it easy for others to see you? Designing with discoverability in mind during development is going to make the late-stage discoverability everyone stresses about much, much easier.",
"id": "1025711",
"speakers": "Felix Kramer",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Fellow Traveller",
"Business & Marketing",
"free content",
"Felix Kramer"
],
"title": "Game Discoverability Day: Discoverability from Day Zero",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Radiangames"
],
"description": "Luke Schneider of Radiangames ('Inferno', 'Slydris') came back to mobile game development in 2018 after 3 years away. His biggest failure as a solo developer was a free mobile game in 2013, and he'd achieved repeatable moderate success with paid mobile games from 2011 to 2015, but the industry constantly changes. In his talk, Schneider will reveal detailed metrics for multiple free and paid game launches in today's market - on iOS and Android from late 2018 and early 2019. In particular, you'll find out how discoverability around developing and promoting the games change for small and medium developers who don't have large marketing spend, when you switch from paid to free (and vice versa).",
"id": "1025712",
"speakers": "Luke Schneider",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Radiangames",
"Luke Schneider",
"free content"
],
"title": "Game Discoverability Day: Free vs. Paid: Discoverability for Smaller Mobile Games",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Stray Fawn Studio"
],
"description": "Nowadays, few game developers try to start forums for their game/studio. Discord, Facebook groups and Subreddits are the new buzzwords when it comes to community building. However, after trying out all these alternatives, Stray Fawn Studio decided to use a forum as its main community hub. This talk gives insight into how a forum, especially when extended with modern plugins, can still keep up with the newer options. Hear why the Stray Fawn team and other indie studios of different sizes have decided on the forum option, how to keep your forums alive and why it makes sense to include other community hubs alongside them.",
"id": "1025713",
"speakers": "Philomena Schwab",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Philomena Schwab",
"Business & Marketing",
"Stray Fawn Studio",
"free content"
],
"title": "Game Discoverability Day: Why Forums Can Be Great for Indie Community and Discoverability",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"5CA, CodeCombat, Future Games of London"
],
"description": "You are never in a stronger position to negotiate than just before you accept a new role. So why do so many people bypass this critical step? Well, probably because it's terrifying! Only a few are given the training needed to really excel, and getting started can be daunting to the extreme. This talk will cover why negotiation is important for your career, why you should never work for free, real-world examples, and strategies for getting started with your own negotiations. Making great games is awesome. Making great games and being paid what you're worth? Even better!",
"id": "1025714",
"speakers": "Tara Brannigan, Robin Yang, Elizabeth Sampat",
"tags": [
"CodeCombat",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Future Games of London",
"Elizabeth Sampat",
"Robin Yang",
"5CA",
"Tara Brannigan",
"free content",
"Career Development"
],
"title": "Frag You, Pay Me: Getting Started with Salary Negotiation",
"track": "Career Development"
},
{
"companies": [
"Zachtronics, Everybody's Talking At Once"
],
"description": "Imagine shipping puzzles in a game that you haven't solved yourself, confident that players will find interesting and creative solutions on their own. That's not unusual at Zachtronics, the studio behind open-ended puzzle games such as 'SpaceChem', 'SHENZHEN I/O', 'Opus Magnum', and 'EXAPUNKS'. In this session, podcaster Drew Messinger-Michaels talks to Zachtronics founder and creative director Zach Barth about the studio's puzzle design process, from the initial foundation to the basic mechanics, to the way story is integrated.",
"id": "1025715",
"speakers": "Zach Barth, Drew Messinger-Michaels",
"tags": [
"Zach Barth",
"GDC 2019",
"Drew Messinger-Michaels",
"Zachtronics",
"Design",
"Everybody's Talking At Once",
"free content"
],
"title": "Open-Ended Puzzle Design at Zachtronics",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"EA Sports"
],
"description": "As a deaf game developer and the EA Sports Accessibility Lead, Karen Stevens will give a practical presentation to demonstrate best practices in creating games that the deaf and hard-of-hearing can still play fully. Some of the topics covered (with concrete examples and suggestions for best practice) will include captioning and subtitles (and the difference between the two), alternate cues, audio channels, and more.",
"id": "1025716",
"speakers": "Karen Stevens",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Karen Stevens",
"EA Sports",
"Advocacy",
"free content"
],
"title": "I Can't Hear You: Considering Deaf Gamers",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sweet Baby, Inc."
],
"description": "The current thinking on diversity is that it is an external force advocating for inclusion, but the reality of authentic representation is that it must be part of the narrative conception and design process. New stories and new perspectives are not simply nice-to-haves or ways to check certain inclusive boxes; they are a form of innovation and of creating truly groundbreaking games.In this session, writer and narrative designer Kim Belair guides you through her own experiences as a minority creator, highlights the pitfalls that often see developers telling the same old story, and offers solutions to help craft stronger narratives and recruit new voices.",
"id": "1025717",
"speakers": "Kim Belair",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Advocacy",
"Kim Belair",
"free content",
"Sweet Baby, Inc."
],
"title": "Now You See Me: Representation as Innovation",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Miami University, Concordia University, University of Utah, Rochester Institute of Technology"
],
"description": "In yet another year where video games have been blamed for violence, the World Health Organization proposed including gaming disorder in the International Classification of Disease, and news media implicate video games as a leading factor in unemployment, how do games industry professionals talk about the work they do? This fast paced, information rich panel provides attendees with the tools to have a meaningful dialogue about the games industry. The talk aims to provide industry professionals with the fodder they need to competently reply to those opposed to the work of the games industry. Much more pointed and logical than a rant, this panel aims to equip industry professionals with the knowledge to explain why many of the trending opposition to the games industry are misaligned.",
"id": "1025718",
"speakers": "Lindsay Grace, Mia Consalvo, Roger Altizer, Andy Phelps",
"tags": [
"Miami University",
"GDC 2019",
"Advocacy",
"free content",
"Concordia University",
"University of Utah",
"Roger Altizer",
"Rochester Institute of Technology",
"Andy Phelps",
"Mia Consalvo",
"Lindsay Grace"
],
"title": "How to Talk About Games, Today",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"The AbleGamers Charity/The University of York, The AbleGamers Charity"
],
"description": "The AbleGamers Charity returns to GDC with data and design knowledge that will help inspire developers and their teams to create great accessible designs. With data from hundreds of players with disabilities, we will show attendees what technology players with disabilities use, the options they prefer and show you the surprising results about the overlaps of technology use between groups of players with disabilities. We will present attendees with a broad range of games players with disabilities play, and describe the value that games bring to this distinct group of players. We will close by introducing attendees to a new design thinking tool derived from this player data, the Accessible Player Experience (APX) design patterns. APX is 22 design patterns that you can easily integrate into your design process to inspire you and your team to innovate more accessible game experience for players. Using APX to make accessibility decisions early in your design than is current practice, this means you save cost in time and money not having to retrofit accessibility later in the development cycle.",
"id": "1025719",
"speakers": "Christopher Power, Mark Barlet",
"tags": [
"Mark Barlet",
"The AbleGamers Charity",
"GDC 2019",
"Christopher Power",
"Advocacy",
"The AbleGamers Charity/The University of York",
"free content"
],
"title": "Accessible Player Experiences: A New Approach to Data Informed Design for Accessible Games",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Pixonic"
],
"description": "This session will talk about aggressive monetization. It's assumed that nudging players and pressuring them into making in-game purchases affects the future of a game poorly. However, business believes in numbers, not vague threats of postponed doomsday.Speaker Vladimir Krasilnikov will discuss how a drastic change of in-game economy in 'War Robots' brought amazing financial results in the beginning, but upset a large part of the audience, so caused some key metrics to decline. Also, he'll show how his team fixed the situation and kept everyone pleased on a project with more than $5 million monthly revenue.",
"id": "1025720",
"speakers": "Vladimir Krasilnikov",
"tags": [
"Pixonic",
"Vladimir Krasilnikov",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "Monetization Design: The Dark Side of Gacha",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Glow Up Games, Disruptor Beam, Independent, Polytundra, LLC, Independent, TRU LUV, Independent, GLITCH"
],
"description": "GDC Advocacy Microtalks are back for the third year! It's a tried-and-true format: each speaker gets only 20 slides, every one of which is displayed for exactly 16 seconds, giving each speaker exactly five minutes and 20 seconds to share their radical new ideas. From thoughtful and fresh perspectives on design, to working with marginalized groups, to sharing practical steps for doing more inclusive work, the microtalks bring the best of the advocacy track with talks that pack a short-but-powerful punch.",
"id": "1025721",
"speakers": "Mitu Khandaker, Heidi McDonald, Leah Miller, Jarryd Huntley, Karinya Song, Brie Code, Latoya Peterson, Evva Kraikul",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"Brie Code",
"Latoya Peterson",
"GDC 2019",
"Evva Kraikul",
"Karinya Song",
"Polytundra, LLC",
"TRU LUV",
"Advocacy",
"GLITCH",
"free content",
"Disruptor Beam",
"Glow Up Games",
"Heidi McDonald",
"Mitu Khandaker",
"Jarryd Huntley",
"Leah Miller"
],
"title": "Advocacy Microtalks: 20 Slides for Healing and Growing in 2019",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Grounding, Inc., Grounding, Inc."
],
"description": "In this session, Yukio Futatsugi and Kentaro Yoshida will speak about the concepts for the art and design of the 'Panzer Dragoon' series on the Sega Saturn. This session will include not only talk of the original 'Panzer Dragoon', but also of 'Panzer Dragoon Zwei' and 'Panzer Dragoon Saga', which have rarely been discussed before. More specifically, they will disclose what they had intended with the idea of making an unusual shooting game that combines dragons and homing lasers, the thought process that went into planning the world's unique atmosphere, and how they decided on the art style for the dragons. They will also talk about the concepts for the art and game design for Zwei, as well as what they had hoped to achieve with with Saga and what had to be done to make it a reality. While they are unfortunately unable to join the session, the materials that will be presented were made with the help of Tomohiro Kondo and Masanobu Kusunoki, who were pivotal members of the development team at Team Andromeda.",
"id": "1025722",
"speakers": "Kentaro Yoshida, Yukio Futatsugi",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Grounding, Inc.",
"Yukio Futatsugi",
"Design",
"Kentaro Yoshida",
"free content"
],
"title": "Classic Game Postmortem: 'Panzer Dragoon', 'Panzer Dragoon Zwei', and 'Panzer Dragoon Saga'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"USC, Die Gute Fabrik, UC Santa Cruz, ArenaNet, Double Fine, Independent, Zachtronics, Antidote Games, Insomniac Games, Oculus"
],
"description": "The GDC Microtalks are back with another year of deep game design thought, future-looking vision, and inspiration! The Microtalks concept is simple: each speaker gets 20 slides, every one of which is displayed for exactly 16 seconds before automatically advancing, giving each speaker a total of five minutes and 20 seconds to dispense their game design wisdom.Don't know how this session can fit ten game design talks into just one hour? Come along and check out the fun as nine great thinkers about games and play, alongside Microtalks curator and MC Richard Lemarchand, give you a super quick tour of the freshest game design thinking.",
"id": "1025724",
"speakers": "Richard Lemarchand, Douglas Wilson, Katherine Isbister, Jennifer Scheurle, Lauren Scott, Nicky Case, Matthew S. Burns, Mohini Freya Dutta, Ryan Smith, Marcus Montgomery",
"tags": [
"USC",
"Richard Lemarchand",
"Douglas Wilson",
"Katherine Isbister",
"Nicky Case",
"Independent",
"GDC 2019",
"Oculus",
"Insomniac Games",
"Antidote Games",
"Jennifer Scheurle",
"Marcus Montgomery",
"ArenaNet",
"Lauren Scott",
"free content",
"Die Gute Fabrik",
"UC Santa Cruz",
"Zachtronics",
"Design",
"Mohini Freya Dutta",
"Ryan Smith",
"Double Fine",
"Matthew S. Burns"
],
"title": "GDC Microtalks 2019: Lightning Fast Game Design",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Happion Laboratories, LLC"
],
"description": "This unique format of a Classic Postmortem features a design 'deep dive' from Jamie Fristrom, technical director and designer on Treyarch's 2004 game 'Spider-Man 2', into its widely acclaimed web-swinging mechanics. He'll talk about the trade-offs the team made while developing the locomotion of 'Spider-Man 2', the lessons they learned the hard way, and compare them to other swinging games such as 'Bionic Commando Rearmed' and Insomniac's 2018 version of 'Spider-Man'. Swinging mechanics are an interesting beast in that they tend to err on the side of *too* challenging, knocking players right out of a \"flow\" state, and developing 'Spider-Man 2' was mostly a process of finding ways to make a very difficult challenge accessible. Physics, the controls, flow, ease of use, cosmetics, tutorializing and more will be discussed.",
"id": "1025725",
"speakers": "Jamie Fristrom",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Happion Laboratories, LLC",
"Design",
"free content",
"Jamie Fristrom"
],
"title": "Classic Game Design Postmortem: Swinging with Spider-Man",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"IndieCatapult & Motion Twin"
],
"description": "'Dead Cells' has sold over 2 million copies since launching on Steam's Early Access in 2017. This deep dive will look at how the team behind 'Dead Cells' achieved these results. The session will cover the marketing process and development of strategy, production management, costing and results. Attendees should leave the room with a clear understanding of how much it cost to market 'Dead Cells', what the team did and how it was done as well as detailed knowledge of how anyone can apply the same principles to their own game.",
"id": "1025726",
"speakers": "Steve Filby",
"tags": [
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"IndieCatapult & Motion Twin",
"Production",
"Steve Filby",
"free content"
],
"title": "Decorticating 'Dead Cells': A Business and Marketing Deep Dive",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Nordeus"
],
"description": "Giving back to your community via charity donations and other efforts is an important, overlooked part of game development. For Nordeus, an independent games company and creators of \"Top Eleven\" from Belgrade, Serbia, giving back has been at the company's core since its inception back in 2010. After an initial foray into the health and education sector, the company has learned a lot about how to conduct a \"company giving\" strategy; one that maximizes the impact for the community, as well as raises the company profile in positive ways.",
"id": "1025727",
"speakers": "Milos Paunovic",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"free content",
"Milos Paunovic",
"Advocacy",
"Nordeus"
],
"title": "Giving Back to the Community as a Game Developer: A Case Study",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent, DigiPen Institute of Technology, Bungie, iThrive Games Foundation, Harebrained Schemes"
],
"description": "Sometimes having a diverse workplace isn't enough. Game developers today must strive to make their studios more inclusive, and doing so involves providing a safe place to work and making everyone feel welcome. The members of this panel are all actively working towards more inclusive cultures and games at their respective studios, from advocating for more sensitive language and design approaches to forming internal inclusivity review boards to evaluate game content before release. During this panel, these diverse speakers will share their unique personal and professional perspectives and provide actionable ways that game developers can change their studio cultures to be more welcoming and supportive of underrepresented employees.",
"id": "1025728",
"speakers": "Alexandra M. Lucas, Sonia Michaels, Chris Wright, Cat Wendt, JC Lau",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"iThrive Games Foundation",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Cat Wendt",
"Bungie",
"free content",
"Chris Wright",
"Harebrained Schemes",
"Production",
"Advocacy",
"Sonia Michaels",
"Alexandra M. Lucas",
"JC Lau",
"DigiPen Institute of Technology"
],
"title": "Building an Inclusive Game Studio Culture",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "A trailer is the single most important marketing asset for a game, but making trailers isn't as simple as an exciting piece of music, and cutting it with the most beautiful shots in the game. From his years of experience producing both gameplay and narrative trailers ('Firewatch', 'Spelunky 2', 'Dead Cells', 'Subnautica', 'Ooblets','Tacoma' & many more), Derek Lieu will teach you what makes a successful game trailer, and the key questions to ask during production to stay on the right path. Along the way, he'll sketch out a list of the easily fixable, but extremely common pitfalls many game trailers fall into.",
"id": "1025729",
"speakers": "Derek Lieu",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"Visual Arts",
"GDC 2019",
"Derek Lieu",
"Business & Marketing",
"free content"
],
"title": "Trailer Made: What Makes a Successful and Memorable Game Trailer",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "Beyond the regular (and mostly exaggerated) attacks the game industry is getting regarding addiction, loot boxes, or violence, it is important for developers to get a clear understanding of their ethical responsibilities as content providers. Discussions around ethics in the game industry are still too rare. This talk proposes to analyze what scientific research says about the potential problems video games can create in terms of addiction, violence, loot boxes, and dark patterns (without the fear-mongering) and will invite attendees to think on where the industry should draw the line.",
"id": "1025730",
"speakers": "Celia Hodent",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Independent",
"Celia Hodent",
"free content",
"Advocacy"
],
"title": "Ethics in the Game Industry",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Mega Crit Games"
],
"description": "The first game from Mega Crit Games is 'Slay the Spire', a fusion of deck-building and rogue-likes that sold over 1 million copies in its first year after launching on Steam Early Access. This talk tackles how the team approached balancing for 'Slay the Spire'. In particular, it looks at how the Mega Crit team took a metric- driven focus early in development, and continued to make heavy use of data driven development throughout the early access process. It'll also look at how they utilized and engaged with community feedback on game balance, while maintaining game feel and difficulty over a year of constant updates and changes.",
"id": "1025731",
"speakers": "Anthony Giovannetti",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"Anthony Giovannetti",
"Mega Crit Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "'Slay the Spire': Metrics Driven Design and Balance",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Arkane Studios"
],
"description": "'Mooncrash' was an unconventional project for Arkane studios. What began as a standard DLC follow-up to their 2016 title 'Prey' evolved into a creative experiment that was eye opening for both fans of the original as well as those of the design team. Not only did it add roguelike elements and multiple playable characters to the formula, but it abandoned a traditional linear narrative structure. In this talk, level design lead Rich Wilson dissects the unusual project to extract common themes, like what it takes to motivate a team to break form, what you can learn by dismantling your existing mechanics and how you can integrate other genres into your game to breathe life into it.",
"id": "1025732",
"speakers": "Rich Wilson",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Rich Wilson",
"Design",
"Arkane Studios",
"free content"
],
"title": "'Mooncrash': Resetting the Immersive Simulation",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Electronic Arts"
],
"description": "One of this year's Classic Postmortems will give you a rare look at the development of a coin-op classic. John Salwitz, a veteran creator who's worked on everything from 'Rampart' through 'Klax' to 'Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault', will deliver a Classic Game Postmortem of Atari's 1985 arcade hit 'Paperboy'! Salwitz was a co-creator of 'Paperboy', and at GDC he'll walk you through the design and development process that culminated in the creation of a modern classic. Expect to get an inside perspective on working at Atari, the nuts and bolts of arcade game design in the '80s, and the untold story of developing a timeless game that features plenty of inadvertent window-shattering and running away from bees.",
"id": "1025733",
"speakers": "John Salwitz",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"John Salwitz",
"Design",
"free content",
"Electronic Arts"
],
"title": "Classic Game Postmortem: 'Paperboy'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Larian Studios"
],
"description": "\"The same but sexier, deeper and more engaging\" Those were the marching orders for 'Divinity: Original Sin 2'. In this talk, Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke takes a look at all the things that were planned to make 'Divinity: Original Sin 2' a better game than 'Divinity: Original Sin 1', and how they turned out. Vincke is a strong believer in the power of iteration, and D:OS 2 is a game where his team applied iteration at every level, with varying levels of success. The team learned a lot about how to design and organize for iteration, and the talk will focus on these lessons. This talk comes with plenty of examples of both success and failure.",
"id": "1025734",
"speakers": "Swen Vincke",
"tags": [
"Larian Studios",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Production",
"Design",
"Swen Vincke",
"free content"
],
"title": "The Making of 'Divinity: Original Sin 2'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Failbetter Games"
],
"description": "'Fallen London' is approaching its tenth birthday. It is a live narrative game that supports all of Failbetter's other projects, meaning that the company can more easily afford to take creative risks. This session will look at the difficulties of maintaining a live narrative game and how Failbetter has adapted to surmount them. These adaptations have created a supportive fan base, benefited the company financially and fostered an environment that supports employee well-being. Olivia is writer, editor and content manager at Failbetter, and as such is involved in several of the disciplines required to maintain the success of 'Fallen London'. Join her in this session to hear the story behind it.",
"id": "1025735",
"speakers": "Olivia Wood",
"tags": [
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Olivia Wood",
"Failbetter Games",
"Design",
"Production",
"free content"
],
"title": "Feeding the Maw: Managing a Live Narrative Game in 'Fallen London'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Rockstar North"
],
"description": "In many video games, the player has control of the camera. However, the developer can control what's on screen through use of the environment to direct the player's movements and attention. Miriam Bellard has been referring to this as spatial cinematography. Miriam's talk explores spatial cinematography in theory and practice using examples from GTA V Online DLC (pre-production to final art). A truly cinematic experience can be developed by adapting film concepts such as shots, editing and 2D screen design as well as understanding how the player interacts with and perceives the game environment. Miriam discusses the effect of the 3D environment on the cinematic experience, including through movement, player attention, and spatial design.",
"id": "1025736",
"speakers": "Miriam Bellard",
"tags": [
"Visual Arts",
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"Miriam Bellard",
"Rockstar North",
"free content"
],
"title": "Environment Design as Spatial Cinematography: Theory and Practice",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"V&A"
],
"description": "Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt' was an acclaimed headline exhibition on contemporary video game design and culture at the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). The exhibition brought together rarely seen artifacts from the design process of ground-breaking contemporary video games, alongside newly commissioned AV exhibits and immersive installations. In this in-depth talk, the exhibition's lead curator, Marie Foulston (Wild/Mild Rumpus) will discuss the show's conception, insights into the curatorial research and practice, and will reflect on the show's ambition to define a new curatorial language for the medium.",
"id": "1025737",
"speakers": "Marie Foulston",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Advocacy",
"Marie Foulston",
"free content",
"V&A"
],
"title": "Design, Play, Disrupt: Curating the V&A's Videogame Exhibition",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "Data shows that most players choose to play with subtitles turned on. Yet subtitles in games have had a pretty bad rap, with gamers often left unhappy with their content and structure and the systems and design patterns used to display them.This is quickly changing. Studios are making huge strides in how to give people who prefer or need subtitles something that really works for them, with great reception from deaf and hearing gamers alike. Player expectations are changing, the kind of things that are cutting edge today will be expected as standard tomorrow.This talk will give a clear picture of the current state of the industry with examples of current efforts and a clear set of good practice guidelines. It will demonstrate not just how to keep pace with current advances, but how to surpass them and give a great experience to as many players as possible.",
"id": "1025738",
"speakers": "Ian Hamilton",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Ian Hamilton",
"free content",
"Advocacy",
"Independent"
],
"title": "Subtitles Are Changing, Don't Be Left Behind",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Electronic Arts"
],
"description": "Game development is a fast-paced field with titles coming out by the hundreds each year. Not only that, each year older titles are being re-released with higher graphical fidelity and improved mechanics. Are you prepared for the future? To analyze the preservation of IPs, Electronic Arts' Garrett Fredley will expose the struggles and challenges of his work preserving releases for multiple AAA sports franchises and detailing processes that can apply to nearly every game team.Issues addressed in this session include the construction of guidelines for how preserved work that correlates to several teams (engineering, content, marketing, web and mobile companion apps, etc) should be handled, and convincing teams to follow protocols that best support future re-mastering (convincing them to keep documentation, utilizing version control solutions, etc).This becomes increasingly complex for large-scale organizations like Electronic Arts; even more so, given their sports titles being some of the largest and most complex franchises in their portfolio. Tech issues include the challenges around leveraging tools and technology to take existing, production work and translating that into an \"archived\" state at such a rate that it can support yearly release cycles such as their sports franchises. This talk will provide practical tips for organizations of all sizes on preservation.",
"id": "1025739",
"speakers": "Garrett Fredley",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"free content",
"Garrett Fredley",
"Advocacy",
"Electronic Arts"
],
"title": "Game Preservation Best Practices: A Real Life EA Case Study",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"A Sharp, LLC"
],
"description": "Indie cult classic 'King of Dragon Pass' was released in 1999. Despite critical accolades and enthusiastic fans, its blending of myth, storytelling, and simulation remained unique until its spiritual successor, 'Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind' came out last year. Designer David Dunham will share how the distinctive design elements work in 'Six Ages'. He'll show how the pieces fit together to create a re-playable emergent narrative with an overall story arc, interesting and helpful advisors, and a strategic simulation of politics. He'll explain how a text-based game achieves immersion, and describe the tools that let a small team create a game with as much text as the first four Harry Potter novels.",
"id": "1025740",
"speakers": "David Dunham",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"A Sharp, LLC",
"Design",
"free content",
"David Dunham"
],
"title": "Designing 'Six Ages', a Storytelling Strategy Game",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"11 bit studios, 11 bit studios"
],
"description": "11 bit studios is a team creating serious, mature games like 'This War of Mine' and 'Frostpunk'. What are the rules that drive the team to reach a goal? What conceptions are being considered? What do they pay attention to and how do they plan to realize meaningful entertainment in the end? How are art and design organized to work together to create challenging projects such as 'Frostpunk'? Art director and creative director at 11 bit studios, Przemyslaw Marszal and Michal Drozdowski, will explain their unique approach to the design and development processes and how they lead the team and apply specific work culture to make their vision come true. In this session, they'll present their rich experience in the field.",
"id": "1025741",
"speakers": "Przemyslaw Marszal, Michal Drozdowski",
"tags": [
"Przemyslaw Marszal",
"11 bit studios",
"Michal Drozdowski",
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"free content"
],
"title": "Why Make Games? Lessons from 'Frostpunk' and 'This War Of Mine'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Quantic Foundry"
],
"description": "This is a data-driven talk based on survey data from 400,000+ gamers. Quantic Foundry's Co-founder and Analytics Lead, Nick Yee, will take a deep dive into each of the 12 motivations in the Gamer Motivation Model to 1) describe their psychological underpinnings, 2) identify specific game mechanics/features they are linked to, 3) provide specific game examples along the spectrum of the motivation, and 4) surface idiosyncratic aspects of the motivation (e.g. gamers in China are much more driven by this motivation).",
"id": "1025742",
"speakers": "Nick Yee",
"tags": [
"Quantic Foundry",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Design",
"Nick Yee",
"free content"
],
"title": "A Deep Dive into the 12 Motivations: Findings from 400,000+ Gamers",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "After 6 years, and many accolades, the 'BANNER SAGA' trilogy saw its completion in summer 2018. In this session, Composer Austin Wintory will give a postmortem for all three scores, detailing their creative and logistic challenges and solutions. This will involve looking at specific musical choices, production choices (such as where and why to record specific ensembles and soloists), how the contracts were structured to enable maximum value and how all these processes evolved across the trilogy.",
"id": "1025743",
"speakers": "Austin Wintory",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Independent",
"Austin Wintory",
"Audio",
"free content"
],
"title": "The 'Banner Saga' Franchise: Making Indie Sound AAA",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"description": "Ever wonder how Blizzard Entertainment brings a new character to life in 'Heroes of the Storm'? This session will cover the art and animation process from first concept to final implementation through the lens of Orphea's development process. In this talk, Senior Animator Lana Bachynski will detail what it takes to bring a new character into a pre-established eco-system, finding balance between multiple franchises with distinctly different art styles, and the techniques used to create powerful silhouettes, and intuitive motion all around a set of beliefs that value \"gameplay first\".",
"id": "1025744",
"speakers": "Lana Bachynski",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"Lana Bachynski",
"free content",
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"title": "Bringing Orphea to 'Heroes of the Storm'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Unknown Worlds"
],
"description": "This talk will cover the design of 'Subnautica' and how it created feelings of exploration, discovery and the unknown. Starting with creating and adhering to specific design pillars and capturing emotion in the initial prototypes and the prototyping process, then through studies of game features big and small, including the hows and whys of its crafting system, embracing player phobias, mysterious tooltips and adding structure to a sandbox through radio signals. Also covered are examples of story beats that didn't overly direct or guide the player and how it's possible to reframe problems when development is stuck.",
"id": "1025745",
"speakers": "Charlie Cleveland",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Charlie Cleveland",
"Design",
"free content",
"Unknown Worlds"
],
"title": "The Design of 'Subnautica'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Interactive Entertainment"
],
"description": "In October 2018, Japan Studio's ASOBI Team released 'ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission' for PSVR, a platformer which went on to become one of the highest rated VR titles of all time. In this session, Creative Director Nicolas Doucet talks about the origins of the project, how the team tried new ideas and the ups and downs that went into reinventing one of the world's oldest game genres in VR.",
"id": "1025746",
"speakers": "Nicolas Doucet",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Sony Interactive Entertainment",
"Design",
"free content",
"Nicolas Doucet"
],
"title": "Making of 'ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission': Reinventing Platformers for VR",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ogre Games"
],
"description": "In this installment of the Classic Postmortem series, 'Lemmings' co-creator Mike Dailly will discuss the creation of the seminal DMA Design puzzle-platform game starring those allegedly suicidal rodents, which debuted on Amiga in 1991 and subsequently appeared on a multitude of other platforms. Covering both the original title and also its immediate expansions and sequels (including Lemmings 2 and 3), Dailly will look at the genesis of the idea, the refining of the gameplay, and just how the clever game developed into a smash hit for the company and its publisher Psygnosis.",
"id": "1025747",
"speakers": "Mike Dailly",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Ogre Games",
"Design",
"free content",
"Mike Dailly"
],
"title": "Classic Game Postmortem: 'Lemmings'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent, Disruptor Beam, Freelance, Schnoodle Media, LLC, Freelance"
],
"description": "Working remotely is increasingly the norm; while convenient, this method of game development comes with a unique set of challenges. These America- and Canada-based writers and designers have worked remotely with game studios of varying sizes all over the world, from Pakistan to the UK to Ukraine. They will share their expertise for navigating remote international collaboration, including tips regarding taxes, visas, scheduling meetings across time zones, and more.",
"id": "1025748",
"speakers": "Alexandra M. Lucas, Heidi McDonald, Michelle Clough, Toiya Kristen Finley, Patrick Coursey",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"Patrick Coursey",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Freelance",
"free content",
"Michelle Clough",
"Schnoodle Media, LLC",
"Disruptor Beam",
"Heidi McDonald",
"Alexandra M. Lucas",
"Toiya Kristen Finley",
"Career Development"
],
"title": "Have Laptop, Will Telecommute: Working Globally in Games",
"track": "Career Development"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "Whether driven by a need to build experience, by unemployment, or by a proactive choice to give their loyalty to a project rather than to a particular company, many developers will become freelancers at some point in their careers. In this talk, Greg Buchanan (writer of 'No Man's Sky: Atlas Rises') will discuss strategies to cope with the positive and negative aspects of freelance work both financially and psychologically, and ultimately build your craft and reputation through international work.",
"id": "1025749",
"speakers": "Greg Buchanan",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Greg Buchanan",
"free content",
"Career Development"
],
"title": "Freelancing: How to Live the Dream and Avoid the Nightmare",
"track": "Career Development"
},
{
"companies": [
"University of Oxford"
],
"description": "The American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have called for studies investigating video game addiction. The APA has identified \"Internet Gaming Disorder\" and the WHO has flagged \"Gaming Disorder\" as conditions possibly meriting treatment though it is not clear what these controversial moves mean for developers or scientists. In this talk, Professor Andrew Przybylski will explain the specific decisions taken by these health bodies, and what scientists know, don't know, and want to know about problematic play. The discussion will focus on the practical implications of the evidence and concrete ways developers can help advance science.",
"id": "1025750",
"speakers": "Andrew Przybylski",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Andrew Przybylski",
"University of Oxford",
"free content",
"Advocacy"
],
"title": "When the Fun Stops: The Science of Addiction",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Supercell"
],
"description": "'Brawl Stars' was conceived as an ambitious mobile game: a multiplayer shooter that should be able to reach a large global audience. With controls much more demanding than those in previous Supercell games, a lot of design and prototyping effort was put into making them as simple and as well-suited for mobile touchscreen devices as possible. At the same time, a very small team with only a handful of developers needed to design a long-term player progression system that would be a good match for the team's limited content creation capacity.After the game soft launched in June 2017, its player metrics weren't quite reaching the ambitious goals. This prompted the game team to try to improve the game: not just polishing it up, but making major changes as well, while that was still possible. What followed was a more than one-year long beta where the team tried to decide between two control models but ended up with a third, and redesigned the progression system twice, both fundamental core aspects of the game. This session will present the different controls and progression solutions, and based on metrics, argue that they were all good designs and any one of these six iterations of core elements could have worked.",
"id": "1025751",
"speakers": "Antti Summala",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"Supercell",
"Antti Summala",
"free content"
],
"title": "Designing Two Tasty Cores Three Times Over: The Case of 'Brawl Stars'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Mew and Me"
],
"description": "Empathic design allows you to experience what your end user experiences, and its application is growing in popularity. A user can only articulate so much, so spending a moment to understand them can vastly improve the quality of your games. Who better to teach you that ability other than the humble house cat?Making games for cats is extremely challenging. They cannot communicate, and most of the time will want nothing to do with whatever you need them to do. But it turns out that, just like any human user, you can put yourself in their shoes, or paws, if you will. Cats have a few quirks that once understood, can be overcome to make engaging experiences for an animal that would otherwise not care.",
"id": "1025752",
"speakers": "Willem Delventhal",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"Mew and Me",
"Willem Delventhal",
"free content"
],
"title": "What Cats Can Teach You About Empathic Game Design",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"The Deep End Games"
],
"description": "Sure, you can walk and chew gum at the same time, but can you crunch and still be happy? Time sickness is the belief that time is always slipping away, that there is never enough of it, and that you must go faster and faster to keep up. Those in the games industry can get both physically ill as well as suffer time sickness during crunch. While crunching on 'Perception' while caring for four children (including one toddler and one infant), Amanda Gardner HAD to learn to be flawless with her time management to insure the success of her debut game, in addition to being there for her family. The strategies she used helped free her from the constraints of not having too many hours in the day, and not enough energy to push through. She hopes to share her ideas to help elevate the industry's general well-being regarding crunch.",
"id": "1025753",
"speakers": "Amanda Gardner",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"The Deep End Games",
"Amanda Gardner",
"Advocacy",
"free content"
],
"title": "Time IS on Your Side: Personal Time Management Strategies for Crunch",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Creative Assembly"
],
"description": "Drawing from his own experiences as a color-blind gamer and developer, Creative Assembly's Douglas Pennant will give a practical talk about how the color blind see the world, and how this can make some video games very difficult to play. Using examples from the development of Creative Assembly's 'Alien: Isolation' and 'Halo Wars 2', and referencing a number of other titles, this talk will expose attendees to best practices and solutions that can help make their games more accessible to the color blind.",
"id": "1025754",
"speakers": "Douglas Pennant",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Creative Assembly",
"Douglas Pennant",
"free content",
"Advocacy"
],
"title": "Solving an Invisible Problem: Designing for Color-Blindness in Games",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Take This, Geogrify, Supergiant Games, Spry Fox, Team Meat"
],
"description": "The opportunity to make games is a wonderful thing. Nevertheless, no industry is without its challenges or hurdles, and the games industry is no exception. For some, it might not be fitting in with a particular studio's culture. For others, it might be periodic, or worse, regular, long hours. How do people learn to overcome these challenges? Maybe it's learning to overcome personal factors like intense self-doubt? It could be all of the above and more. Regardless of what stressors you face, join this panel of respected, industry veterans as they discuss how they maintain both their careers and love of games in spite of the challenges.",
"id": "1025755",
"speakers": "Raffael Boccamazzo, Kate Edwards, Amir Rao, David Edery, Tommy Refenes",
"tags": [
"Amir Rao",
"Geogrify",
"Supergiant Games",
"GDC 2019",
"Spry Fox",
"Kate Edwards",
"Advocacy",
"free content",
"Team Meat",
"Take This",
"David Edery",
"Tommy Refenes",
"Raffael Boccamazzo"
],
"title": "Beating the Burnout: Finding Success Under Stress",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Riot Games"
],
"description": "Game designers love solving problems, perfecting games until they sing. But sometimes you hit a design problem so thorny that you just can't find a solution, and maybe never will. This may be a \"cursed problem\": a problem with some inherent contradiction of goals. Consider the kingmaker problem. A designer wants to emphasize certain player skills, but also wants free-for-all PvP, which incentivizes politics in favor of those skills. Cursed problems like these haunt designers across game and genre. And somehow all designers have to deal with them.In this talk, Alex Jaffe (Riot Games) will present a theory of cursed problems. He'll show case studies of decades-old problems, and he'll explore the four design paradigms that have helped developers face these problems and survive.",
"id": "1025756",
"speakers": "Alex Jaffe",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Riot Games",
"Alex Jaffe",
"Design",
"free content"
],
"title": "Cursed Problems in Game Design",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Owlchemy Labs, Owlchemy Labs"
],
"description": "Hear from Owlchemy Labs as they share stories of success, failure, and lessons learned developing their latest original virtual reality game 'Vacation Simulator'. Since pioneering early standards for VR interaction in 'Job Simulator', Owlchemy Labs has new insights about the latest best practices for room-scale VR. Hear from the team as they cover several topics, including advanced interaction with objects and characters, zone-based teleportation, accessible design, and more, that anyone doing VR development can apply to their current and future projects.",
"id": "1025757",
"speakers": "Devin Reimer, Andrew Eiche",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Owlchemy Labs",
"Andrew Eiche",
"Design",
"Devin Reimer",
"free content"
],
"title": "Lessons Learned from 'Job Simulator' to 'Vacation Simulator': Advanced Interactions for Room-Scale VR",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Devolver Digital, Nerial, HBO"
],
"description": "Licensed games have undergone a renaissance over the past few years, evolving from quick cash grabs to become some of the most interesting and talked about releases each year. While licensed games like 'Spider-Man' and 'Star Wars' grab most headlines, this panel will explore the possibilities that smaller studios and indie developers might have in licensed games. Using the development and production of 'Reigns: Game of Thrones' as a case study, the panel will explore the perspectives from the developer Nerial, the publisher Devolver Digital and the licensor HBO.",
"id": "1025758",
"speakers": "Nigel Lowrie, Francois Alliot, Jeff Peters",
"tags": [
"HBO",
"Devolver Digital",
"Jeff Peters",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Nigel Lowrie",
"free content",
"Francois Alliot",
"Nerial"
],
"title": "'Reigns: Game of Thrones': A Song of Fire and License",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Paranoid Productions, Spry Fox, Bungie, Schell Games, Microsoft, Game On The Rails"
],
"description": "Are there rules for designing games that no one has told you yet? As the craft of game design matures, there's a lot of established best practices that most people agree on. But some of the most unique designers have their own sets of game design techniques that are not common knowledge. In this talk you get to find out what they are. The popular Rules of the Game session returns for GDC 2019 to invite five more veteran designers to talk for ten minutes each about a technique they use that sets them apart from common design practices. The aim of this session is to keep each lecture as advanced and technical as possible, diving right into the details of what makes a given \"rule\" work. Whether you agree or disagree with the techniques presented, they're sure to get you thinking about game design in entirely new ways.",
"id": "1025759",
"speakers": "Richard Rouse III, Daniel Cook, Lisa Brown, Jesse Schell, Deborah Hendersen, Brian Upton",
"tags": [
"Richard Rouse III",
"Brian Upton",
"GDC 2019",
"Spry Fox",
"Paranoid Productions",
"Bungie",
"Lisa Brown",
"Daniel Cook",
"free content",
"Design",
"Jesse Schell",
"Schell Games",
"Deborah Hendersen",
"Microsoft",
"Game On The Rails"
],
"title": "Rules of the Game 2019: Five New Techniques from Especially Astute Designers",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Bungie"
],
"description": "Everyone has stories of development projects from Hell. This isn't one of them. With 'Destiny 2: Forsaken', Bungie delivered an ambitious new game mode called Gambit that combined PvE with a smidge of PvP. In this session, Senior Technical Designer Peter Sarrett dives into how that mode was created: the concept, pillars, iteration, and innovation. What were the team's goals, and how did those goals shape how the pieces came together? He'll talk about how and why each component of the mode came to be, how the team iterated on that component, and why they made the decisions they made. It's the story of a passionate, empowered team that set out to create one thing, but stumbled into success by throwing out one of their initial design pillars. It's the story of development gone delightfully right.",
"id": "1025760",
"speakers": "Peter Sarrett",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"Bungie",
"Peter Sarrett",
"free content"
],
"title": "Designing Gambit Mode in 'Destiny 2: Forsaken'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "One might think that working with such a well-known IP and character like 'Spider-Man' would make the development process easier. One might believe, \"hey, I already have the answers to the test.\" However, that's never the case. There were several challenges when proving out the creative vision on 'Marvel's Spider-Man'. This talk will discuss three major hurdles and how Insomniac Games overcame them in order to hit the creative/narrative goals that were set for the game.",
"id": "1025761",
"speakers": "Bryan Intihar",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Bryan Intihar",
"Design",
"free content",
"Insomniac Games"
],
"title": "Conquering the Creative Challenges in 'Marvel's Spider-Man'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Bungie"
],
"description": "In the broad landscape of multiplayer shooters, 'Destiny' Crucible announcer, Lord Shaxx, provides a striking and unique voice and tone. Shaxx, voiced by Lennie James, serves as a personalized voice in each player's ear, relaying critical game state information while also reacting to player actions and offering relentless support and encouragement to his \"favorite Guardian.\"Join Bungie writer Jonathan To as he details the process that led to Shaxx's creation as Crucible announcer and how the character grew from supporting character to fan favorite through iteration and refinement across multiple releases. Jon will also share some of the techniques learned through this process, how these lessons informed other announcers, and lessons that may be carried into your own projects.",
"id": "1025762",
"speakers": "Jonathan To",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Jonathan To",
"Design",
"free content",
"Bungie"
],
"title": "This is Amazing! Writing the Supportive Space Coach in 'Destiny'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Vlambeer, Arkane Studios, Junub Games, BURA, Posibillian Tech, Instinct Games"
],
"description": "#1ReasonToBe features speakers from emergent territories around the world discussing game development in their country in their own, personal way. Through 8-minute presentations, they will each share their #1ReasonToBe in the game industry, and tell the audience their stories of game development, community, culture and opportunities in their home country. With speakers from all over the world, #1ReasonToBe will show you just how much more globe there actually is in the industry's global medium.",
"id": "1025763",
"speakers": "Rami Ismail, Ehsan Ebrahimzadeh, Lual Mayen, Camila Gormaz, Juan de Urraza, Nourhan ElSherief",
"tags": [
"Junub Games",
"Juan de Urraza",
"BURA",
"Nourhan ElSherief",
"GDC 2019",
"Rami Ismail",
"Advocacy",
"Instinct Games",
"Posibillian Tech",
"Camila Gormaz",
"free content",
"Arkane Studios",
"Ehsan Ebrahimzadeh",
"Vlambeer",
"Lual Mayen"
],
"title": "#1ReasonToBe",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Capcom, Capcom, Capcom"
],
"description": "In this Western talk, Capcom's Hideaki Itsuno, director of classic games including 'Power Stone 2', 'Dragon's Dogma', 'Rival Schools' and multiple titles in the 'Devil May Cry' series, partners with his colleagues Michiteru Okabe (senior producer) and Matt Walker (producer) to discuss the team's approach to making standout, impressive action games through the lens of 'Devil May Cry 5'. In this lecture, Itsuno will discuss how he works backward from a player experience and vision-based goal to build out compelling gameplay for the newest title in the 'Devil May Cry' franchise, and the visceral specifics that lead to a winning formula.",
"id": "1025764",
"speakers": "Hideaki Itsuno, Michiteru Okabe, Matt Walker",
"tags": [
"Michiteru Okabe",
"Hideaki Itsuno",
"GDC 2019",
"Capcom",
"Design",
"Matt Walker",
"free content"
],
"title": "'Devil May Cry 5': Creating a Standout Action Game",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "There is much discussion on managing the scope and implementation of procedural systems so that their final output may benefit from manual polish. The presentation describes the open world pipeline of 'Marvel's Spider-Man' and how each procedural system was originally designed to support iterations, and dependencies. Of course, the reality of production provided a larger set of tasks for procedural systems. These dependent elements and areas of the game were in vastly different stages of completion and created parallel pipelines. Insomniac's resulting procedural systems were used to author, modify and monitor much more content than planned. The anticipated and unforeseen challenges became success stories and have laid a road-map for future projects.",
"id": "1025765",
"speakers": "David Santiago",
"tags": [
"Visual Arts",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Insomniac Games",
"David Santiago",
"free content"
],
"title": "Procedurally Crafting Manhattan for 'Marvel's Spider-Man'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"[unnamed next venture], Popcannibal"
],
"description": "Quality is overrated. Disheartened by all of the noise in the mobile ecosystem, speakers Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott set out to determine the lowest bar for success on App Stores. They flooded the market with over 1,500 auto-generated slot machine games, got 1.6 million installs, made money (!!), received some very strange emails, made it big in Iran, and garnered a stupefying number of good reviews on Google Play. They even enlisted the talents of an honest-to-God MIT statistician.Take a fantastic tour of the weird, dark underbelly of the mobile app market. Marvel as the speakers share their experience with pushing the limits of automation as well as the rate limits of every public API under the sun. Silently judge the questionable ethics of their enterprise. By the end, you may be reconsidering your life choices as Alex and Ziba debate the merits of quantity over quality.",
"id": "1025766",
"speakers": "Alex Schwartz, Ziba Scott",
"tags": [
"Alex Schwartz",
"Popcannibal",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Ziba Scott",
"[unnamed next venture]",
"free content"
],
"title": "1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Walt Disney Imagineering, Walt Disney Imagineering"
],
"description": "In Disney's Parks & Resorts around the world, Imagineers use a blend of technology and storytelling to allow guests to explore mysterious jungles, step into fantasy kingdoms, journey to a galaxy far far away and suit up with the Avengers. Multi-disciplinary teams have the power to create new worlds of possibility for Disney guests. Join Disney Imagineers as they talk about the opportunities and challenges of building physical, interactive worlds and explore the overlap between designing theme parks and video games.",
"id": "1025767",
"speakers": "Brent D. Strong, Sara Thacher",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Other",
"Sara Thacher",
"Brent D. Strong",
"free content",
"Vision",
"Walt Disney Imagineering"
],
"title": "Playing with Magic: Interactive Worlds and Walt Disney Imagineering",
"track": "Vision"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "'God of War' is a new beginning for Kratos as well as for the Sony Santa Monica development team. While Kratos struggled to build a meaningful relationship with his son, this talk will detail how the development team worked to make Atreus a fully realized companion AI. From conception through several approaches and iterations, how do you maintain Kratos' iconic combat style while making Atreus feel vital and important to gameplay? How do you do all of this while simultaneously reimagining Kratos' style of combat from the ground up? Delving into the different archetypes explored, as well as pitfalls to each iteration along the way, this talk will take attendees through the process of designing and building a compelling AI that is as integral to the gameplay as he is to the story.",
"id": "1025768",
"speakers": "Hayato Yoshidome",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Hayato Yoshidome",
"Design",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio",
"free content"
],
"title": "Raising Atreus for Battle in 'God of War'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft Quebec, Ubisoft Quebec"
],
"description": "'Assassin's Creed Odyssey' has been an adventure that gave birth to the largest world ever produced for an 'Assassin's Creed' game. Ubisoft's Benjamin Hall (World Director) and Thierry Dansereau (Art Director) will share their personal thoughts, perspectives and challenges they faced throughout the creation of a place that no longer exists, ancient Greece.",
"id": "1025769",
"speakers": "Benjamin Hall, Thierry Dansereau",
"tags": [
"Visual Arts",
"Thierry Dansereau",
"Ubisoft Quebec",
"GDC 2019",
"Benjamin Hall",
"free content"
],
"title": "Building a Living World from Ancient Ruins in 'Assassin's Creed Odyssey'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Avalanche Studios"
],
"description": "It's known that the game industry is predominantly white and male. You have listened to talks and seen data that it is a problem. You agree improved diversity and increased inclusion is good for this industry fueled by creativity and passion. But how do you make that happen? Avalanche Studios New York, which makes AAA games in an indie culture, has started D&I and maintains an active D&I initiative. How did they start it and how they we able to maintain it? What does it cost and how much time is needed, how many people does it require? This talk is your starter kit for D&I, so you can achieve impeccable results in just 2 years.",
"id": "1025770",
"speakers": "Joahanna Thomas",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Joahanna Thomas",
"Avalanche Studios",
"free content",
"Advocacy"
],
"title": "Diversity and Inclusion Starter Kit",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"USC, Freelance, Love Conquers All Games, NYU Games Center, Pixelberry Studios, Independent, Seemingly Pointless, NYU Game Center, Blushbox Collective"
],
"description": "Everyone on this panel has experience creating games about or with themes of sex and intimacy. From censorship to technical challenges, they will discuss how and why they create their games in spite of the challenges.",
"id": "1025771",
"speakers": "Aubrey Isaacman, Michelle Clough, Christine Love, Robert Yang, Jennifer Hepler, Saf Davidson, Joe Cox, Naomi Clark, Kim Allom",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"NYU Game Center",
"USC",
"Love Conquers All Games",
"GDC 2019",
"Naomi Clark",
"Freelance",
"Blushbox Collective",
"Aubrey Isaacman",
"Seemingly Pointless",
"Jennifer Hepler",
"Kim Allom",
"Robert Yang",
"Michelle Clough",
"Advocacy",
"NYU Games Center",
"Joe Cox",
"Pixelberry Studios",
"Saf Davidson",
"free content",
"Christine Love"
],
"title": "Sexy Microtalks: Making Intimacy, Romance, and Sex in Games",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Subset Games"
],
"description": "'Into the Breach' took Subset Games four long years to develop after finishing FTL. This talk will detail that process from the early design drafts to the final balancing decisions. Diving into years of cut content and iteration, this talk will show how Subset Games approaches difficult design challenges. How do you decide which feature to cut? How do you successfully \"steal\" design elements from other games while remaining original? How do you decide on the correct difficulty? How much RNG should you use?",
"id": "1025772",
"speakers": "Matthew Davis",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Subset Games",
"Design",
"free content",
"Matthew Davis"
],
"title": "'Into the Breach' Design Postmortem",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Monomi Park"
],
"description": "The market for games becomes more crowded every day and shows no sign of slowing down. Hear from Monomi Park CEO and 'Slime Rancher' Game Director Nick Popovich on how you can make your game stand out and survive amongst the thousands of games released every year. Here's a hint: it doesn't involve spending a bunch of money on marketing, but it's also not easy.",
"id": "1025773",
"speakers": "Nick Popovich",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Monomi Park",
"Design",
"Nick Popovich",
"free content"
],
"title": "Making Games That Stand Out and Survive",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Kitfox Games"
],
"description": "Fashion in games is one of the most downplayed parts of the medium; just like in real life, clothing is an outward expression of one's personality. A game's choice of dress or even the ability to HAVE different outfits (and not just color swaps) is both the gamers' expression of themselves and a way to create more diverse and interesting environments. Character customization, after all, could be considered another form of dress up.Offensive or lackluster fashion can be a representation of the troubling perspective that games have no space for \"feminine\" interests. Some have captured fashion well (think 'Splatoon' and 'Persona 5'), but much of game development has to catch up on this, like the infamous Quiet outfit from 'Metal Gear Solid V' or the lackluster outfits from 'The Sims 3'. The benefits to paying attention to style? Just think of the success of 'Overwatch' skins, as one example! This talk from Kitfox Games' Victoria Tran explores the recent history of fashion in games and provides multiple tips for success.",
"id": "1025774",
"speakers": "Victoria Tran",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Advocacy",
"Victoria Tran",
"free content",
"Kitfox Games"
],
"title": "Why Fashion in (Most) Games Sucks, and Why You Should Care",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Hitsparks Games"
],
"description": "'Tetris' is one of the world's best-known games. The Classic 'Tetris' World Championship started in 2010 as a community effort, but has grown rapidly with worldwide regionals, sponsorships from EA, Ubisoft and SEGA, and millions of views online. Carrying on the tradition of the 1990 Nintendo World Championships, the CTWC is an anomaly in esports with its use of 30-year old cartridges and NES systems, augmented with modern technologies to create a compelling competitive environment where one would not normally exist. This session explores how the CTWC format makes the most of odd things like NES Tetris' quirky killscreens, OCR technology, a passionate community low in toxicity and high in intellect, attachment to growing gaming events, explosive memes, and having an amazing role model for a champion. How the CTWC's esports culture reflects back positively to strengthen the 'Tetris' IP and communities will be highlighted.",
"id": "1025775",
"speakers": "Chris Tang",
"tags": [
"Chris Tang",
"Hitsparks Games",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Design",
"free content"
],
"title": "'Tetris' World Championship: Building Explosive Esports on 8-bit Nintendo",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "Sustainable game development isn't just about making a great game, it's about making the right game, and finding your champion to help share it with the world. But why is that so important? And where do you start? And once you find your champion, how do you best arm them to most effectively fight for your game? With 10+ years of experience championing independent games (EGM/1UP.com, PlayStation, Oculus), Suttner will guide you through the answers to these questions, sharing practical insights and anecdotes of how to think about and approach the individuals behind the big platforms, as well as press, publishers, and any potential partner, and explain why it's critical to the success of your game.",
"id": "1025776",
"speakers": "Nick Suttner",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Independent",
"Nick Suttner",
"Business & Marketing",
"free content"
],
"title": "Platforms Are People Too: The Importance of Finding Your Champion",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Amazon Games, Independent, MobilityWare, Independent"
],
"description": "Louis Castle, a game industry veteran known best for co-founding (with fellow luminary Brett Sperry) the trailblazing Westwood Studios, will be coming to GDC 2019 to deliver a Classic Game Postmortem on the landmark real-time strategy game 'Command & Conquer'! Louis will be joined by Erik Yeo, lead designer for C&C and Frank Klepacki, Composer for C&C, and Steve Wetherill, C&C's VP of product development. It promises to be a fascinating hour-long deep dive into the conception, development, and design of 'Command & Conquer', a game that inspired a generation of game designers and helped popularize the real-time strategy game genre. As Westwood's co-founder, Castle was involved from the start, and at GDC 2019 in March he'll take the stage to share his experience and the lessons he took from it. He'll also share insights and anecdotes from key 'Command & Conquer' team members, so this is something you won't want to miss!",
"id": "1025777",
"speakers": "Louis Castle, Frank Klepacki, Steve Wetherill, Eric Yeo",
"tags": [
"Steve Wetherill",
"Amazon Games",
"Frank Klepacki",
"Design",
"Independent",
"GDC 2019",
"Eric Yeo",
"Louis Castle",
"MobilityWare",
"free content"
],
"title": "Classic Game Postmortem: 'Command & Conquer'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Unity Technologies"
],
"description": "Mike presents some broad, sweeping, and perhaps unfair, generalizations about programmers in the industry. He then shares his expectations for what it would mean to strive to be among the very best programmers in the field. Specifically the technical, individual and team skills required for any programmer to solve the hard problems before them. For those programmers where good enough just isn't, and that want to take control of their own learning and careers, but just need to know what their next steps should practically be to have a bigger impact.",
"id": "1025778",
"speakers": "Mike Acton",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Unity Technologies",
"Mike Acton",
"Programming",
"free content"
],
"title": "Everyone Watching This Is Fired",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Niantic"
],
"description": "The future of augmented reality games is about play experiences that weave in and out of your everyday life. In this Vision Track talk, John Hanke, founder and CEO of 'Pokemon GO' and 'Ingress' creator Niantic will provide a deep look at AR today, and help you imagine near and long term AR games and experiences that deliver persistent shared experiences in the real world.Using data and examples from today's leading AR experiences such as 'Pokemon Go', Hanke will paint a picture of the kind of gameplay that new AR technologies will enable. The talk will explore what is fun in the context of real world AR, including design decisions and context from Niantic's titles. He'll also examine how new developments like smart watches, glasses, AR cloud and deep machine learning will all impact AR game design possibilities for the future.",
"id": "1025779",
"speakers": "John Hanke",
"tags": [
"John Hanke",
"Niantic",
"GDC 2019",
"Other",
"free content",
"Vision"
],
"title": "The State & Future of AR Games: Rose-Colored Glasses",
"track": "Vision"
},
{
"companies": [
"Deck Nine Games, King"
],
"description": "How does one get a job as a Narrative Designer or a Game Writer? What skills are needed to become one? How does one even apply for those kinds of jobs? The purpose of this talk is to demystify the application process and provide a general understanding of how to break into the field for aspiring game writers and narrative designers.",
"id": "1025780",
"speakers": "Zak Garriss, Tracey John",
"tags": [
"King",
"Tracey John",
"Game Career / Education",
"Zak Garriss",
"GDC 2019",
"Career Development",
"free content",
"Deck Nine Games"
],
"title": "How to Get a Job Writing for Games",
"track": "Career Development"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "In a society where being social and outgoing is celebrated, it can be difficult to be an introvert. Being an introvert is not uncommon though, as, according to studies, 1/3 to 1/2 of the US population identify as one. Based on personal experiences and research, this talk aims at giving an understanding of what is an introvert, how to see the world as one and the wealth of skills and perspectives they bring to the workplace environment. It will also give some insights on ways of working to enable introverts' growth, contribution and well-being.",
"id": "1025781",
"speakers": "Cecile Hemery",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Independent",
"Advocacy",
"free content",
"Cecile Hemery"
],
"title": "Celebrating Introverts in the Workplace",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Digital Eclipse"
],
"description": "The state of commercial video game preservation is abysmal. While more classic games are in print than ever before, accessibility is all over the place, meaning players have to maintain multiple devices just to get a taste. Worse, lawyers are destroying the historical repositories we call \"ROM sites,\" meaning the 99% of history that will NEVER be reprinted is becoming harder and harder to access. In this talk, Digital Eclipse producer Frank Cifaldi ('SNK' 40th Anniversary Collection, 'Mega Man' Legacy Collection, 'Street Fighter' 30th Anniversary Collection) will give practical advice to those keeping old games in print, go over the current state of video game preservation, and tell you how you can help to make sure video game history never disappears, no matter what your profession is.",
"id": "1025782",
"speakers": "Frank Cifaldi",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Frank Cifaldi",
"Digital Eclipse",
"free content",
"Advocacy"
],
"title": "It's Still Emulation: Saving Video Game History Before It's Too Late",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Tilting Point, Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz PC, IE Law Group, The McArthur Law Firm"
],
"description": "Lawyers are the worst, right? Except when they're helping you decode the hottest, most recent, and most critical legal developments in the game industry! Join attorney Chris Reid (Practical Law for Indies Series) and a panel of game industry legal nerds (and actual nerds) as they discuss (or maybe fight about) the impact for developers of the most important recent legal events and issues in the industry, including things like the 'PUBG/Fortnite' litigation, Nintendo's stance on ROMS, the GDPR privacy regulation, developer takedowns of streamer content, legal action against cheat distributors and any other legal topic, no matter how fresh. The panelists know you love free legal advice, and while they aren't allowed to call it that, they WILL have plenty of time for all your burning audience questions. Stop reading posts that start with \"I'm not a lawyer but...\", and come get a clear understanding of how the law impacts your work in games today.",
"id": "1025783",
"speakers": "Christopher Reid, Gregory Boyd, Mona Ibrahim, Stephen McArthur",
"tags": [
"The McArthur Law Firm",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Gregory Boyd",
"Advocacy",
"Christopher Reid",
"Stephen McArthur",
"Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz PC",
"Mona Ibrahim",
"Tilting Point",
"IE Law Group",
"free content"
],
"title": "Legal Battle Royale: Not Boring Edition",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Grinding Gear Games"
],
"description": "Since its release in 2013, the player base of 'Path of Exile' has grown from hundreds of thousands to millions of active players by having a plan for sustainable long-term development.In this session, Chris Wilson will describe how 'Path of Exile' has been designed to retain and grow its community for the very long term. He will cover how to structure releases into seasons with predictable release dates and scope, how to re-use content for rapid development, how to use procedural generation to keep content from feeling stale, how to employ multiple overlapping axes of randomness for additional replayability, how to design deep gameplay systems that keep players engaged and how to grow a community over a long period of time.",
"id": "1025784",
"speakers": "Chris Wilson",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Grinding Gear Games",
"Design",
"free content",
"Chris Wilson"
],
"title": "Designing 'Path of Exile' to Be Played Forever",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Roblox"
],
"description": "Three months, one dinosaur, 270,000 published games. In June 2018, Roblox launched the first event for its design and coding challenge series in collaboration with the movie, Jurassic World: Falling Kingdom. Participants had the chance to earn Roblox avatar items and prizes by helping Blue, a velociraptor from the Jurassic World films escape an exploding volcano. Featuring step-by-step tutorials, the lessons exposed them to 3D game design concepts while handling coding obstacles and combating falling explosions. Upon launch, the venture garnered more than 4.5 million page views in the first month and ultimately over 270,000 games were published by participants. Creating an all-ages, self-paced, online template within a game engine, not as a stand-alone game, presents unique technical and teaching challenges that may be of broader interest to game developers. In this talk, the Roblox Education team shares its learnings on content scope, template creation and curriculum navigation designed for teaching future game developers.",
"id": "1025785",
"speakers": "Genevieve Johnson",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Roblox",
"Advocacy",
"free content",
"Genevieve Johnson"
],
"title": "Dinosaurs and Volcanoes: Roblox Education's 'Jurassic World' Challenge",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "Everything, everywhere changes. Change is an essential part of life. In creative development change is often the explosive spark that transforms good enough into truly memorable. Several years ago, Santa Monica Studio began the journey of creating a new 'God of War'. The Santa Monica Studio team recognized a special honor and responsibility to create a different and better and truly more memorable experience than before. Cory Barlog realized early on that changes had to be made to every aspect of the game. The road to creating a new 'God of War' was a seemingly endless climb up an impossibly enormous mountain, filled with countless gut-wrenching failures and joyfully sweet successes.",
"id": "1025786",
"speakers": "Cory Barlog",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"free content",
"Design",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio",
"Cory Barlog"
],
"title": "Reinventing 'God of War'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Level You & iThrive Games, Beavl, Nonsense Arts, Artifact 5, Inquisiment, Rochester Institute of Technology, Independent, Feedtank, Independent, Riot Games, Storyteller, Triband, Aalto University, Aalto University, Babycastles, Kitfox Games, Kitfox Games, Sunhead Games, Multiverse Narratives, Funomena"
],
"description": "The Experimental Gameplay Session, which debuted games like 'Katamari Damacy', 'flOw', 'Braid', 'Portal' and 'Storyteller', is back for its 17th year at GDC! In this fast-paced, game-packed session, panelists will showcase a selection of surprising and intriguing prototypes made by innovation-minded game developers from all over the world. By demonstrating games that defy conventions and traditions in search of new genres and ideas, this session aims to ignite the imagination of all game makers. Come see what's happening in the world of Experimental Gameplay, and be inspired!",
"id": "1025787",
"speakers": "Trynn Check, Nicolas Saraintaris, Nicolas Recabarren, Mohannad Al-Khatib, Jenn Sandercock, Shawn Liu, Dennis Carr, Jonah Warren, Jay Tholen, Su Liu, Daniel Benmergui, Tim Garbos, Juuso Toikka, Antti Sandberg, Frank DeMarco, Alex Bull, Jongwoo Kim, Lee-Kuo Chen, Gerben Grave, Robin Hunicke",
"tags": [
"Su Liu",
"Triband",
"Robin Hunicke",
"Jongwoo Kim",
"Storyteller",
"Mohannad Al-Khatib",
"Jenn Sandercock",
"Feedtank",
"Alex Bull",
"Independent",
"Kitfox Games",
"Nicolas Saraintaris",
"GDC 2019",
"Trynn Check",
"Sunhead Games",
"Dennis Carr",
"Funomena",
"Juuso Toikka",
"Artifact 5",
"Inquisiment",
"Level You & iThrive Games",
"Multiverse Narratives",
"Nicolas Recabarren",
"Aalto University",
"Babycastles",
"Rochester Institute of Technology",
"Jonah Warren",
"free content",
"Beavl",
"Lee-Kuo Chen",
"Antti Sandberg",
"Tim Garbos",
"Jay Tholen",
"Gerben Grave",
"Daniel Benmergui",
"Design",
"Frank DeMarco",
"Riot Games",
"Shawn Liu",
"Nonsense Arts"
],
"title": "Experimental Gameplay Workshop",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Motion Twin"
],
"description": "On Aug 2018, 'Dead Cells', Motion Twin's roguevania action game, left its Early Access phase after 1 1/2 years of intense work. Being their first PC/console title, the team of course made lots of discoveries along the way, one of the most significant being the importance of the small details in controls and game design. This session will provide a closer look at how cheating and making player life easier actually made the game more hardcore but without the rage-quits.",
"id": "1025788",
"speakers": "Sebastien Benard",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"Motion Twin",
"Sebastien Benard",
"free content"
],
"title": "'Dead Cells': What the F*n!?",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"White Owls, Inc."
],
"description": "Indie developer SWERY's most recent work, 'The Missing', is a puzzle-action game in which you progress by destroying your own body. Beyond the simple appeal of raw violence, this unconventional game also bears a special, more profound significance, as SWERY aimed to create an experience with complete cohesion of gameplay and narrative, one in which he sought to test the extent to which a game's narrative could influence the player's own life.While looking back on his career to date, SWERY will explain why 'The Missing' was the first game he made after striking out on his own, as well as how he approached integrating gameplay and narrative. He will also explain the ideology and methodology behind his unique style of game design.Note that this session will completely spoil anything and everything about 'The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories'.",
"id": "1025789",
"speakers": "Mr. SWERY",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Mr. SWERY",
"Design",
"free content",
"White Owls, Inc."
],
"title": "'The Missing': An Attempt at Complete Cohesion of Gameplay and Narrative",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Harvard University Desirability Lab"
],
"description": "In this wide ranging Vision Track talk, the Harvard Desirability Lab's Dr. Beth Altringer will talk about how her innovative project applies design, behavioral economics, and psychological research to creative endeavors to help creators embed desirability into their projects - and what game developers can learn from this. Dr. Altringer will explain some of her Lab's research in depth, including a related video game project, and will explain how research into areas like food ingredient desirability might inspire you in your game design.",
"id": "1025790",
"speakers": "Beth Altringer",
"tags": [
"Beth Altringer",
"GDC 2019",
"Harvard University Desirability Lab",
"Other",
"free content",
"Vision"
],
"title": "The Science of Desirability",
"track": "Vision"
},
{
"companies": [
"Valve"
],
"description": "While a speculative technology at the present time, advances in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research are beginning to shed light on how players may interact with games in the future. While current interaction patterns are restricted to interpretations of mouse, keyboard, gamepad, and gestural controls, future generations of interfaces may include the ability to interpret neurological signals in ways that promise quicker and more sensitive actions, much wider arrays of possible inputs, real-time adaptation of game state to a player's internal state, and qualitatively different kinds of gameplay experiences. This talk covers both the near-term and long-term outlook of BCI research for the game industry but with an emphasis on how technologies stemming from this research can benefit developers in the present day.",
"id": "1025791",
"speakers": "Mike Ambinder",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Valve",
"Mike Ambinder",
"Other",
"free content",
"Vision"
],
"title": "Brain-Computer Interfaces: One Possible Future for How We Play",
"track": "Vision"
},
{
"companies": [
"Iron Galaxy Studios"
],
"description": "In 2009, 'Street Fighter IV' revitalized the traditional fighting game genre, kicking off a decade of renewed interest from developers, players and viewers. Nonetheless, even in an era where competitive games like 'Fortnite' and 'Overwatch' are more dominant than ever, mainstream appeal seems to remain slightly out of reach.This talk surveys the ways developers have attempted to broaden the audience for one of the oldest and most exciting genres in the industry. Noah analyzes a wide variety of games released between '09 and '19, revealing how specific design and aesthetic decisions can shape player experiences in unexpected ways.",
"id": "1025792",
"speakers": "Noah Sasso",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Noah Sasso",
"Iron Galaxy Studios",
"Design",
"free content"
],
"title": "'09 to '19: A Decade of Approachability in Fighting Games",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Game Workers Unite International, Game Workers Unite UK, SAG-AFTRA, Writers Guild of America, East, AFL-CIO"
],
"description": "Are you interested in the idea of unionization in the game industry but you have questions about it? Don't know how to resolve a workplace issue and need some advice? Join Emma Kinema (Game Workers Unite), Kevin Agwaze (Game Workers Unite UK), Linda Dao (SAG-AFTRA), Justin Molito (Writers Guild of America, East), and Liz Shuler (AFL-CIO) in this special Q&A session and have all your questions about unions and employment rights answered by a panel of experienced labor organizers from the entertainment industries.",
"id": "1025793",
"speakers": "Emma Kinema, Kevin Gregory Agwaze, Linda Dao, Justin Molito, Liz Shuler",
"tags": [
"Kevin Gregory Agwaze",
"Emma Kinema",
"AFL-CIO",
"Justin Molito",
"SAG-AFTRA",
"GDC 2019",
"Advocacy",
"free content",
"Game Workers Unite International",
"Game Workers Unite UK",
"Writers Guild of America, East",
"Linda Dao",
"Liz Shuler"
],
"title": "Lessons from Labor Union Organizers",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Weather Factory"
],
"description": "'Cultist Simulator' was an experimental project which used consciously unusual design decisions to create an unconventional and even divisive game. It hit #1 on Steam and sold more than 50K copies in the first month - a lot of that was luck, a lot of it was marketing, but some of it was also the result of conscious design decisions. Furthermore, 'Cultist Simulator' was a relatively low-budget game with its total production costs being less than $200K USD, and total production time was less than a year. This imposed specific challenges and constrained the design in fundamental ways. This talk will discuss the challenges and the advantages of the decisions the Weather Factory team made, how they steered a straight course, and what they'd do differently next time.",
"id": "1025794",
"speakers": "Alexis Kennedy",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Weather Factory",
"Design",
"free content",
"Alexis Kennedy"
],
"title": "'Cultist Simulator': Designing an Experimental Game for Commercial Success",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Certain Affinity"
],
"description": "If you are aspiring toward a career in game development this is a lecture you don't want to miss. Richard Vogel will discuss his observations of what it's like working in the games industry for over 20 years and the most important soft skills needed for success.",
"id": "1025795",
"speakers": "Richard Vogel",
"tags": [
"Richard Vogel",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Game Career Seminar",
"Certain Affinity",
"free content"
],
"title": "A Survival Guide for Game Developers",
"track": "Game Career Seminar"
},
{
"companies": [
"Polytundra, LLC"
],
"description": "Networking is difficult! You finish university and are expected to \"start networking\", but no one hands you a guide. Unfortunately such a guide doesn't exist, but Jarryd will speak about what a guide could contain, whether it be his experiences networking at game industry events, in academic settings, or with events outside the game industry. With Jarryd's varied background he will cover a number of things he's learned about networking from his career in many different positions.",
"id": "1025796",
"speakers": "Jarryd Huntley",
"tags": [
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Polytundra, LLC",
"free content",
"Game Career Seminar",
"Jarryd Huntley"
],
"title": "Networking Etiquette for the Modern Games Industry Professional",
"track": "Game Career Seminar"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ludic Legal, 5CA, Independent, Sony Interactive Entertainment, PikPok, Discoglobe Interactive, Inc, Graz University of Technology, Bar SK"
],
"description": "Game Designer, Programmer, Producer: All well-known options for building your career in game development. But what about those roles that aren't often (or ever!) in the spotlight? This talk will be diving into what's great about some of the more specialized roles within the industry. Whether you're just getting started in your career or a seasoned professional looking for new opportunities, this talk will give you insight into a variety of exciting alternative career paths in game dev!",
"id": "1025797",
"speakers": "Angelo Alcid, Tara Brannigan, Jane Cocks, Victoria Dorn, Jayde Marter, Jill Murray, Johanna Pirker, Louie Roots",
"tags": [
"Johanna Pirker",
"Independent",
"Jane Cocks",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Bar SK",
"Angelo Alcid",
"Game Career Seminar",
"Ludic Legal",
"PikPok",
"Sony Interactive Entertainment",
"Tara Brannigan",
"5CA",
"Discoglobe Interactive, Inc",
"Graz University of Technology",
"Jill Murray",
"Victoria Dorn",
"free content",
"Jayde Marter",
"Louie Roots"
],
"title": "Roads Less Traveled: Specialized Careers in Game Dev",
"track": "Game Career Seminar"
},
{
"companies": [
"Goodbye Kansas, Glu Mobile, TRU LUV, Riot Games"
],
"description": "Game development is more than the mere developing of games. The industry is still young, and sometimes immature. As individuals, developers can be fragile and frail, sometimes more enthusiastic than realistic. They build circles of trust out of necessity among family and friends, but can't always think further than the next project. This session will talk a bit about the long term perspective, \"the long run\", about a full (and long) life in game development. The speaker will discuss how developers as individuals, as companies and as a community, can support and encourage life-long careers in game development.",
"id": "1025798",
"speakers": "Henrik Jonsson, Tom Hall, Brie Code, Nicole Lewis",
"tags": [
"Brie Code",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"TRU LUV",
"Nicole Lewis",
"free content",
"Game Career Seminar",
"Goodbye Kansas",
"Riot Games",
"Glu Mobile",
"Henrik Jonsson",
"Tom Hall"
],
"title": "In the Long Run",
"track": "Game Career Seminar"
},
{
"companies": [
"Blizzard Entertainment, Hardsuit Labs, 343 Industries, University of Utah,"
],
"description": "A new developer appears! Entering the world of game development is exciting, especially you're full of passion and drive. But being a new developer can also be daunting, confusing, and full of uncertainty on how to harness all of that energy.While a myriad of resources exist to learn the various tools, languages, processes, and other aspects of a particular discipline, it's also important to practice a variety of soft skills. Learning how to successfully navigate professional relationships and becoming a well-rounded individual can help you quickly level-up your career.",
"id": "1025799",
"speakers": "Chris Morris, Rachel Leiker, Andrew Witts, Roger Altizer, Vivian Wong",
"tags": [
"Andrew Witts",
"Hardsuit Labs",
"343 Industries",
"Game Career Seminar",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Blizzard Entertainment",
"University of Utah",
"Roger Altizer",
"Rachel Leiker",
"Chris Morris",
"free content",
"Vivian Wong"
],
"title": "Being Pro at Being a Noob",
"track": "Game Career Seminar"
},
{
"companies": [
"343 Industries, Gameheads, USC, Crows, Crows, Crows, Crows, Crows, Crows, Insert Credit"
],
"description": "What better way to improve your own games than by building on the successes and failures of those who have come before you? This session highlights the development of three games from three different approaches. Tim Staton-Davis will discuss the triple-A title 'Middle-Earth: Shadow of War', specifically from his perspective as designer. William Pugh and Jan Stroetmann will take a decidedly unique approach when dissecting their indie nightmare adventure comedy 'Accounting+' (you'll have to see it in person). Lastly, students Kai Nyame and Milo Smiley will demonstrate their unique live-action game 'Ideal Meal', which allowed them to showcase at E3 and Indiecade.",
"id": "1025800",
"speakers": "Tim Staton-Davis, Kai Nyame, Milo Smiley, William Pugh, Jan Stroetmann, Brandon Sheffield",
"tags": [
"343 Industries",
"Tim Staton-Davis",
"USC",
"Game Career / Education",
"Gameheads",
"Crows, Crows, Crows",
"GDC 2019",
"Brandon Sheffield",
"Jan Stroetmann",
"Insert Credit",
"free content",
"Kai Nyame",
"Game Career Seminar",
"William Pugh",
"Milo Smiley"
],
"title": "Micro Postmortems",
"track": "Game Career Seminar"
},
{
"companies": [
"Two Hat Security, Blizzard Entertainment, Gaming/Xbox"
],
"description": "When it comes to topics around player behavior, the gaming industry has changed quite a bit in the last few years. These topics are larger than any one individual company, and industry collaboration (like the Fair Play Alliance) is key. The Fair Play Alliance Summit keynote promises a lively discussion around why publishers, game developers, and gaming platforms should consider applying best practices of player behavior and content moderation/online safety approaches as a key element of their design strategies.",
"id": "1025801",
"speakers": "Chris Priebe, Jarrod Doherty, Dave McCarthy",
"tags": [
"Dave McCarthy",
"Chris Priebe",
"GDC 2019",
"Blizzard Entertainment",
"Design",
"Jarrod Doherty",
"Two Hat Security",
"free content",
"Gaming/Xbox"
],
"title": "Fair Play Alliance Keynote (Presented by Fair Play Alliance)",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Niantic, Riot Games, Supercell"
],
"description": "This session consists of a set of micro-talks where several Fair Play Alliance member companies share some of their easy-to-implement tools that can make a real and measurable difference in terms of protecting your users as well as your brand.",
"id": "1025802",
"speakers": "Laura Warner, Kenny Shores, Jess Hollmeier",
"tags": [
"Kenny Shores",
"Niantic",
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"Supercell",
"Riot Games",
"Laura Warner",
"Jess Hollmeier",
"free content"
],
"title": "Basic Tools for Healthy Communities (Presented by Fair Play Alliance)",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
""
],
"description": "In a world of \"live\" games, and amidst an ever-expanding number of 3rd party platforms, not only are player populations growing and becoming more diverse, but HOW people play is fundamentally changing. It is critical, then, that game developers have a better understanding of both player motivations and subsequent in-game (and online!) behaviors. This session will feature a handful of speakers from the FPA at the forefront of research in the field of player behavior, in a series of \"rapid fire\" micro-talks, each lasting no more than six minutes. Come join for an insightful look at how better understanding player behavior ultimately results in a more positive experience for your community.",
"id": "1025803",
"speakers": "Fair Play Alliance Speaker",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"free content",
"Fair Play Alliance Speaker"
],
"title": "Player Behavior Research Microtalks (Presented by Fair Play Alliance)",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Tencent, Fair Play Alliance, Spirit AI, Intel"
],
"description": "This talk is intended to examine result-driven penalization and user reporting designs that members of the Fair Play Alliance including Intel, Riot Games, Tencent Game Security and Two Hat Security have successfully implemented. The talk will include examples that will outline how systems were implemented as well as a look at measurable results from those projects. One underpinning point is to analyze how those best practices can be conducive to reforming player behavior by focusing on providing timely feedback to players, and how penalization practices can be leveraged to produce the desired outcome of fostering productive interactions in games.",
"id": "1025804",
"speakers": "Jiayin Wang, Carlos Figueiredo, Peter Alau, George Kennedy III",
"tags": [
"Fair Play Alliance",
"GDC 2019",
"Spirit AI",
"Design",
"Tencent",
"Jiayin Wang",
"Peter Alau",
"George Kennedy III",
"Carlos Figueiredo",
"free content",
"Intel"
],
"title": "Reporting Metasystem Design and Penalization Strategy Best Practices (Presented by Fair Play Alliance)",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"description": "This talk is intended to dispel some common myths around player behavior and motivations to be disruptive in games and provide alternative theories as to the player motivations. The talk is comprised of learning from several of the companies involved in the FPA including: Blizzard Entertainment, Riot Games, Epic Games, Cold Furnace Studios, Intel, Ubisoft, and academic researchers.",
"id": "1025805",
"speakers": "Natasha Miller",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Natasha Miller",
"Design",
"free content",
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"title": "Dispelling Common Player Behavior Myths (Presented by Fair Play Alliance)",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"League of Geeks, Studio MDHR, 'Cuphead', The Molasses Flood, Moon Studios, Sony Santa Monica Studio, OddBird"
],
"description": "Six animators rapidly deliver their best tips and tricks. They have 5 minutes each to showcase their personal ideas, workflows, and animation techniques.",
"id": "1025842",
"speakers": "Sylvia Chong, Jake Clark, Sophie Evans, Raul Ibarra, Melissa Shim, Zack Wolfe",
"tags": [
"Visual Arts",
"Studio MDHR, 'Cuphead'",
"GDC 2019",
"Melissa Shim",
"Raul Ibarra",
"free content",
"Sylvia Chong",
"Zack Wolfe",
"Moon Studios",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio",
"League of Geeks",
"OddBird",
"Jake Clark",
"Sophie Evans",
"The Molasses Flood"
],
"title": "Animation Bootcamp: Animation Tricks of the Trade",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Blizzard Entertainment, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, BioWare, Chump Squad, BioWare, Kotaku, Pocket Gems, Harmonix Music Systems, Vicarious Visions, Google Daydream, NexonOC"
],
"description": "Finish off the day with these fast-paced, high-energy talks. 1 hour, 10 professionals, all dedicated to educate, entertain and inspire with rants, raves, observations and wild musings on animation and the industry as a whole.",
"id": "1025843",
"speakers": "Lana Bachynski, Yussef Cole, Ryan Duffin, Gwen Frey, Mike Jungbluth, Heather Alexandra MacIntyre, Brandon Nason, Kristin Palach, John Paul Rhinemiller, Nikki Roth, Nikita Taranduke",
"tags": [
"Chump Squad",
"Yussef Cole",
"Ryan Duffin",
"Google Daydream",
"Mike Jungbluth",
"Nikki Roth",
"Heather Alexandra MacIntyre",
"Nikita Taranduke",
"Pocket Gems",
"Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj",
"GDC 2019",
"Blizzard Entertainment",
"Brandon Nason",
"Kotaku",
"Vicarious Visions",
"BioWare",
"Kristin Palach",
"free content",
"Visual Arts",
"John Paul Rhinemiller",
"Harmonix Music Systems",
"Lana Bachynski",
"Gwen Frey",
"NexonOC"
],
"title": "Animation Bootcamp: Animation Microtalks",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"UC Irvine"
],
"description": "Recently, with the rise of what has been referred to as \"toxic gamer culture,\" discrimination and harassment have become important issues for video games. Unfortunately, this toxicity is increasingly finding its ways into the classroom. It is common for game educators, especially women educators, queer educators, and educators of color, to encounter resistance and even hostility from students who insist that discussions of diversity have no place in their education. This talk breaks the silence about this widespread but largely unacknowledged problem in game education today and provides attendees with actionable techniques for thriving in the face of problematic student behavior.",
"id": "1025923",
"speakers": "Bonnie Ruberg",
"tags": [
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"UC Irvine",
"Bonnie Ruberg",
"Educators Summit",
"free content"
],
"title": "What to Do When \"Toxic Gamer Culture\" Enters the Classroom",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
""
],
"description": "The Molecules, developer Media Molecule's in-house \"band\" will be opening with a set created entirely in Dreams. The Molecules started as a concept to show how Dreams could be used in unconventional ways, combining pre-made art and music elements (still made in Dreams) with music and animation performed live in the game's creation tools with the DS4 controller. Showcasing genres from jpop to heavy metal, digital painting and puppeteering, the band highlights the performance capabilities of Dreams.",
"id": "1025974",
"speakers": "",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Other",
"Special Event",
"free content"
],
"title": "Main Stage Pre-show Entertainment: 'DREAMS' Live Concert",
"track": "Special Event"
},
{
"companies": [
"Microsoft, Hello Games, Media Molecule"
],
"description": "New to GDC, The GDC Main Stage is a space for larger discussions on the state of game development. This year's presentation, The Developer's Journey, is a first-of-its-kind combined talk that kicks off with Media Molecule's Siobhan Reddy presenting opening remarks on how her team's upcoming title, 'Dreams' plans to unlock player creativity in unprecedented user-generated detail, following a special musical performance using the game. Next up, Hello Games' Sean Murray takes us behind the scenes during the intense and dramatic launch of one the biggest selling new IPs in recent years, 'No Man's Sky'. He will demonstrate how his team found the grit to deal with releasing an innovative and polarizing game into an increasingly vocal gaming landscape. Finally, game development veteran Laralyn McWilliams then draws on 15+ years of dev experience to close out the session with a talk about finding resolve and inspiration in a stressful environment. Using practical tools and techniques, she'll describe how to stay optimistic and inspired through unforeseen challenges. Part 1: 'Dreams': Unlocking Creativity in Everyone (Siobhan Reddy) In her talk, Reddy will discuss the evolution of Dreams from 3D sculpting tool to full blown game creation engine in the journey to bring the hobby of game creation into the living room for the modern generation. She will also cover how building a studio culture of \"jamming\" has resulted in everything from creative solutions to development problems, new games within Dreams and literal jams - musical and otherwise - in the tools. Part 2: 'No Man's Sky': Grit (Sean Murray)A small and unlikely team was behind one of the most ambitious and anticipated games of 2016. Hello Games' Sean Murray takes us behind the scenes during the intense and dramatic launch of one the biggest selling new IPs in recent years. He demonstrates how his team found the grit to deal with releasing an innovative and polarizing game into an increasingly vocal gaming landscape, and details how through determination and love in 2019 they have built to record player numbers and positivity amongst their most negative detractors. This candid and open discussion will show the power of focusing on what you do, rather than what you say, in the face of adversity.Part 3: I Don't Want Your Lemons: Optimism Fuel for Weary Devs (Laralyn McWilliams)Game development is a hard business. You've all been through the wringer, whether you're indie or commercial developers, long-time veterans or folks in their first few years as a professional. It's easy to become cynical, and that's the start of the short path to burnout. It's not your fault: there's solid evidence that stress makes creativity difficult if not impossible, especially when it's prolonged. Yet some of us persist, through crunches, layoffs, relocations and even your company closing down. What is it that keeps you here and keeps you creative? This inspirational talk provides practical tools and techniques to stay positive and creative in game development despite the bumps (and craters) in the road, drawn from the experiences of fellow developers with 15+ years in the business. By finding common threads, everyone can find a way to make life's manager take the lemons back.",
"id": "1025975",
"speakers": "Laralyn McWilliams, Sean Murray, Siobhan Reddy",
"tags": [
"Siobhan Reddy",
"GDC 2019",
"Media Molecule",
"free content",
"Laralyn McWilliams",
"Hello Games",
"Other",
"Special Event",
"Sean Murray",
"Microsoft"
],
"title": "GDC Main Stage: The Developer's Journey",
"track": "Special Event"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent, Riot Games, Insomniac Games, Valve, Epic Games, Alison Kelly Consulting"
],
"description": "As the game industry has become increasingly competitive, it has also become more difficult for artists to break into the industry and obtain recognition for their work. There are, however, both positive and negative ways to stand out from the crowd. This panel, which consists of art directors and lead artists from Epic, Firaxis, Riot, Valve and Insomniac, will expose portfolio pitfalls and how to avoid them, as well as providing real world examples of how to succeed in getting, and holding, an art director's attention. The panel will also discuss common hiring practices and variations among the studios. The panel will be followed by a 2 hour session for individual portfolio reviews.",
"id": "1026103",
"speakers": "Greg Foertsch, Moby Francke, Gavin Goulden, Claire Hummel, Wyeth Johnson, Alison Kelly",
"tags": [
"Gavin Goulden",
"Independent",
"Epic Games",
"Game Career / Education",
"Claire Hummel",
"GDC 2019",
"Valve",
"Moby Francke",
"Insomniac Games",
"Wyeth Johnson",
"Game Career Seminar",
"Alison Kelly",
"Riot Games",
"Alison Kelly Consulting",
"free content",
"Greg Foertsch"
],
"title": "Killer Portfolio or Portfolio Killer Part 1: Advice from Industry Artists",
"track": "Game Career Seminar"
},
{
"companies": [
"RPG - Rio PUC Games"
],
"description": "What happens when students become the protagonists in a game development group? What can an educator expect from this process? This talk is about the lessons learned when establishing an academic group solely ran by students in a university that currently does not have any specific major for game development. This includes difficulties faced trying to create a network of students, to motivate and define a healthy production pipeline, to be recognized as a formal group in the university and most importantly to define what was wanted for each person to take from the group.",
"id": "1026104",
"speakers": "Daniel Oliveira",
"tags": [
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Daniel Oliveira",
"Game Career Seminar",
"RPG - Rio PUC Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "10 Lessons Learned About Establishing an Academic Group as Students",
"track": "Game Career Seminar"
},
{
"companies": [
""
],
"description": "The Game Developers Choice Awards are the premier accolades for peer-recognition in the digital games industry, celebrating creativity, artistry and technological genius. Industry professionals from around the world nominate for the awards, free of charge, ensuring that the recipients reflect the community's opinions. Learn more about the GDCA at www.gamechoiceawards.com.",
"id": "1026105",
"speakers": "",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Other",
"Special Event",
"free content"
],
"title": "19th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards",
"track": "Special Event"
},
{
"companies": [
""
],
"description": "The IGF was established in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers. At the awards ceremony, the IGF gives out eight awards and over $50,000 in total prize money to the most innovative independent games. The awards are held in conjunction with the Game Developers Choice Awards. Learn more about the IGF at www.igf.com.",
"id": "1026106",
"speakers": "",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Other",
"Special Event",
"free content"
],
"title": "21st Annual Independent Games Festival Awards",
"track": "Special Event"
},
{
"companies": [
"Unity Technologies"
],
"description": "Fresh off the back of scaling one of the fastest growing games of all time, Apex Legends, Multiplay takes to the stage to talk game server hosting. Joined by key members of the technical team from Respawn, Larry Rye will provide insight into Multiplay's tools for solving complex problems such as scaling your world across platforms and patching your game. Whatever stage of development you're at, this talk will help you take another step towards the perfect player experience.",
"id": "1026180",
"speakers": "Larry Rye",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Unity Technologies",
"Larry Rye",
"Programming",
"free content"
],
"title": "Mastering the Apex of Scaling Game Servers (Presented by Multiplay)",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Riot Games, Riot Games"
],
"description": "Although important, punitive systems are only a small piece of how we can foster healthy player interactions. This segment examines ways to address or redress behaviour patterns and enhance player cohesion through systems and game design, and includes learnings from several companies. Wherever possible we will pull concrete examples from live games to illustrate key points. Topics include best practices for player-to-player interplay and communication (verbal and non verbal) as well as systems that foster stronger social cohesion in game and in the larger playerbase. We will also discuss known and potentially hidden factors for designers to consider when designing new games or assessing live games.",
"id": "1026493",
"speakers": "Naomi McArthur, Kenny Shores",
"tags": [
"Kenny Shores",
"GDC 2019",
"Naomi McArthur",
"Design",
"Riot Games",
"free content"
],
"title": "Impact of Social Systems and Game Design on Player Interactions (Presented by Fair Play Alliance)",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Microsoft Devices, Craig Hospital"
],
"description": "The Xbox Adaptive Controller required a new development approach that was drastically different from how the Microsoft Devices team typically runs a program. To intentionally bring more people with limited mobility into gaming, the team needed to challenge their biases and assumptions, rethink how they designed and engineered controllers, and move the goalposts on how they measure a program's success. This session will share their experiences and give you tips on how you can design better control schemes or input for people with limited mobility in your hardware or games.",
"id": "1026494",
"speakers": "Bryce Johnson, Erin Muston-Firsch",
"tags": [
"Bryce Johnson",
"GDC 2019",
"Microsoft Devices",
"Advocacy",
"Craig Hospital",
"Other",
"Erin Muston-Firsch",
"free content",
"Vision"
],
"title": "The Making of the Xbox Adaptive Controller",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "'Marvel's Spider-Man' is Insomniac's biggest game to date. This talk looks back at how their technology evolved to make it possible, and the setbacks and pitfalls along the way. This session will discuss the challenges of rapidly growing asset count, and adapting rendering, streaming, and lighting to build a New York City that fits on a Blu-Ray. It will cover the procedural tools for marking up Manhattan, and how their approach to building the city changed over time. Also discussed will be how the pedestrians, traffic, street vignettes, and random crimes grew from humble beginnings to an interactive part of a living city. Lastly, this session will cover making the wrong vertical slice, the perils of pre-baked lightmaps, how Photo Mode came together one volunteer contribution at a time, and more.",
"id": "1026496",
"speakers": "Elan Ruskin",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Insomniac Games",
"Programming",
"Elan Ruskin",
"free content"
],
"title": "'Marvel's Spider-Man': A Technical Postmortem",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
""
],
"description": "How do you reinvent a game already regarded as perfect? How do you take an IP with dozens and dozens of iterations over 30 years and make it feel fresh again? And how do you balance old and new, what to keep and what to change, in the latest version of one of the most beloved games of all time? Join producers Tetsuya Mizuguchi and Mark MacDonald and director Takashi Ishihara as they detail their attempts to do just that with 'Tetris Effect', through a combination of extensive pre-production, prototyping, iteration, and user testing.",
"id": "1026528",
"speakers": "",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"free content",
"Advocacy"
],
"title": "Making 'Tetris Effect'-ive",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"thatgamecompany"
],
"description": "As thatgamecompany began to build an ever-expanding online story world for their new game 'Sky', they had to evolve their story development process to create an emotionally-driven game anchored in \"connection and altruism\" for a multiplayer narrative setting. Story writer Jennie Kong will present the studio's unique re-iterative method to finding the emotional engine for their story and player narrative. This includes a look at the studio's approach on evolving the linear structure to create multiplayer emotion, creating a world with layered non-verbal story content, and crafting compassionate behavior within a community through beta testing narrative design.",
"id": "1025649",
"speakers": "Jennie Kong",
"tags": [
"thatgamecompany",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Game Narrative",
"Jennie Kong"
],
"title": "Evolving Emotional Storytelling in thatgamecompany's 'Sky'",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"NYU Game Center"
],
"description": "For an elective on procedural generation, AP Thomson designed a unique assignment: students were tasked with designing and programming puzzles, items, and enemies for the same game. The catch: their work would be mixed together in a single procedurally generated level and they couldn't know for certain what their classmates would create. The results were sometimes messy, sometimes surprising, and always interesting. This talk presents a close look at \"Stone Soup\", including the technical design of the assignment, the on-boarding process for students, and some of the challenges involved in teaching students to design for the unknown.",
"id": "1025655",
"speakers": "AP Thomson",
"tags": [
"NYU Game Center",
"member content",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"AP Thomson",
"Educators Summit"
],
"title": "Stone Soup: Procedurally Mixing Student Projects to Teach Flexible System Design",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Double Coconut"
],
"description": "Hyper-casual games are one of the (few) viable success stories in mobile gaming this year. To an outsider, these titles may look like cloned, low-quality schlock. But, much like the pop music industry, success in hyper-casual involves an extremely polished nugget of gameplay wrapped in carefully calibrated image and shared with the world via a well-established but very-hard-to-enter distribution model. This session will pull back the curtain and look at how this all really works and where quality really matters.",
"id": "1025656",
"speakers": "David Fox",
"tags": [
"David Fox",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games",
"Double Coconut"
],
"title": "The 'Flappy Bird' that Laid the Golden Egg: Success in Hyper-Casual",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Debevoise & Plimpton"
],
"description": "Done well, using loot boxes to monetize your game can result in increased commercial success. Done poorly, it can result in government bans on your game, fines and, at least in theory, jail time. Will Bucher distills what he has learned in his legal practice regarding the regulation of loot boxes in the U.S., the EU, and China to provide a brief and accessible overview of the potential pitfalls in using loot boxes, and some strategies for avoiding them. Topics include an overview of which countries ban loot boxes entirely, when a publisher needs to disclose the odds associated with a loot box, and what form that disclosure should take.",
"id": "1025657",
"speakers": "Will Bucher",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Will Bucher",
"Debevoise & Plimpton",
"Business & Marketing",
"member content"
],
"title": "Loot Boxes: Legal Pitfalls and Loopholes",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Zeptolab"
],
"description": "Dylan Tredrea will present his analysis of the opportunities and risks in soft launch, the fundamental forces teams should understand, a high level strategy for soft launch planning, specific practices and processes for running soft launches, and specific examples from his career and Zeptolab's portfolio where this kind of approach has been successful.",
"id": "1025658",
"speakers": "Dylan Tredrea",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Dylan Tredrea",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Production",
"Zeptolab"
],
"title": "Soft Launch Planning and Management",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sound Librarian"
],
"description": "The immersive impact of virtual reality is critically reliant on the effectiveness of the audio that supports the experience. The best VR experience will collapse with inadequate audio support, where a more basic experience can become significantly more impactful with good audio design.This session will explore and analyse three VR projects worked on by the presenter. It will describe a range of creative techniques specifically designed to maximize the impact for the audience, but it will also explore the various technical approaches utilized across Unity, Unreal Engine and utilizing both Wwise and core Unreal audio functionality. By combining creative techniques specifically designed for virtual reality with an understanding of the available tools, attendees will be better armed to undertake virtual reality project work.",
"id": "1025659",
"speakers": "Stephan Schutze",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Stephan Schutze",
"Design",
"Audio",
"Sound Librarian"
],
"title": "Three-Way VR Audio Postmortem",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"343 Industries"
],
"description": "Tools developers are always pushing to make the best tools that they can, but at some point they need to make a few compromises. On a case by case basis this isn't a big issue, but what happens when you only concentrate on one tool at a time instead of looking at the bigger picture of how they interact with each other? Over a 40 hour development week, those small compromises from each tool start to compound on each other, resulting in a frustrating user experience. In this talk, Workflow UX Designer Laura Teeples will walk through how to develop tools as a system rather than a set of individual features and how to maintain balance without always needing to introduce new tools. She will also walk through some practical exercises for evaluating the effectiveness of your systems so you can make bigger improvements, better compromises, and a more cohesive tool set.",
"id": "1025806",
"speakers": "Laura Teeples",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"343 Industries",
"Laura Teeples",
"member content",
"Programming"
],
"title": "Tools Tutorial Day: The System of Tools: Reducing Frustration in a Daily Workflow",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Bungie"
],
"description": "Over the last 2 years Bungie transitioned its development environment to support small teams working in their own dedicated branches. This new ecosystem required distribution of roles and responsibilities to ensure each team was empowered to manage and maintain their branch. Among the responsibilities is ensuring that iteration can happen as rapidly as necessary and stability is maintained in accordance with the teams' self-set standards. This session will go into the details of the development process updates and tooling created especially for the purpose of supporting small-team-managed branches. It'll look at the implications of distributing work in a complex ecosystem, and dive into both technical and UX design challenges met in standing up a dedicated tool. Finally, this talk will touch on the human aspect of creating new responsibilities.",
"id": "1025807",
"speakers": "Irina Zaugolnikova",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Bungie",
"Production",
"Irina Zaugolnikova"
],
"title": "Tools Tutorial Day: Tooling for Small Team Workflows",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Infinity Ward"
],
"description": "Modern medicine has the Hypocratic Oath. The first tentpole of which is \"First, do no harm.\" This talk will enumerate the necessary steps that tools engineers should to employ to ensure that their changes reach the hands of users in a maximally constructive way: thoughtful, stable, and performant.",
"id": "1025808",
"speakers": "Geoff Evans",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Infinity Ward",
"Production",
"Geoff Evans"
],
"title": "Tools Tutorial Day: Shipping Features Responsibly",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Machine Zone"
],
"description": "Having a fast moving studio is more than just having tools that can do a lot of things. Discussed here is an approach to looking over workflows with an eye to reducing the number of steps and interactions that need to happen to get things done, going over both what that means at a high level and practical approaches that can be used to improve the tools you already have to enable faster and smaller workflows. This talk will use several simple real tools used in mobile game development, including examples of taking a tool and polishing it slightly to significantly improve the workflow.",
"id": "1025809",
"speakers": "Philip Bloom",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Philip Bloom",
"Machine Zone",
"Programming",
"member content"
],
"title": "Tools Tutorial Day: Analyzing for Workflow Reduction: From Many to One to Zero",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"the Good Evil GmbH"
],
"description": "The talk provides insights into the workflow and tool chain created over the past 4 years at the Good Evil. As a small team, it was important for them to create a flexible framework that ensures control for every department, be it game design, art or animation, as well as speed up their production workflow for content heavy games. The core philosophy behind this framework is to empower the game and level designers to change almost anything at anytime without touching the code base and the need for \"hard coding\". The framework is free of game play related design decisions and with few restrictions. It consists of three main elements: content management, visual scripting and additional utilities to smooth out the workflow through batch processing. It's called the Evil System.",
"id": "1025810",
"speakers": "Linda Kruse",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Linda Kruse",
"Programming",
"the Good Evil GmbH",
"Production"
],
"title": "Tools Tutorial Day: Perfecting Workflows: Tool Development to Empower Designers",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Electronic Arts"
],
"description": "Frostbite Vancouver has been building cinematic tools for all of EA's games and along the way, they learned a few things. This session will talk about high-level approaches, processes, and technical challenges the Frostbite team faced over the years as they scaled their workflows to work with a diverse set of games such as 'Dragon Age', 'FIFA', and 'Battlefield'.",
"id": "1025811",
"speakers": "Ludovic Chabant",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Ludovic Chabant",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Electronic Arts"
],
"title": "Tools Tutorial Day: 9 Things Learned While Building Frostbite's Cinematics Tools",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Bungie"
],
"description": "As game tools developers our goal is to build software that enables our colleagues to work faster and more creatively. But what happens when you've built a tool that misses the mark, or no one wants to use it? How do you prevent that situation from happening in the first place? This talk covers methods for investigating your users' needs and assessing usability at multiple points in the development process. We'll also cover strategies for collecting feedback from users who are under deadline and short on time.",
"id": "1025812",
"speakers": "Caroline Colon",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"member content",
"Caroline Colon",
"Bungie"
],
"title": "Tools Tutorial Day: The Science of Customer-Focused Tools Development",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft"
],
"description": "In this session, Francois will present how Ubisoft can integrate 3D game assets from any of its studios into its internal asset bank automatically through a Deep Neural Network (DNN). The DNN recognizes the 3D game assets and classify them, lowering the human cost to organize and standardize our assets across multiple studios and cultures, leading to a better search and browsing experience. This session will cover from research of the neural network and business needs to production use and a 2 years later report. It will also cover the gains the Ubisoft team made, and some unforeseen pitfalls they have faced.",
"id": "1025813",
"speakers": "Francois Nadeau",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Ubisoft",
"Francois Nadeau"
],
"title": "Tools Tutorial Day: 3D Asset Recognition with Deep Learning",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"AMD, Ubisoft Massive"
],
"description": "Snowdrop is a AAA game engine developed by Massive, Ubisoft, that powers 'The Division' and its sequel. In this presentation you will learn some of the tricks and techniques used in 'The Division 2' to achieve maximum performance on both PC and console. This presentation will explain how the game engine works as if you were going to join the Snowdrop team tomorrow. You'll learn about its architecture, about how it was designed to support new hardware features, graphics APIs and platforms. You'll learn how to structure a frame so asynchronous compute can get the most out of the GPU. The talk will cover how the developers use multi-threading, intrinsics and even a trick to submit command lists faster than usual (this is a fast paced talk, bring coffee!).",
"id": "1025814",
"speakers": "Raul Aguaviva, Calle Lejdfors",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Ubisoft Massive",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"AMD",
"Raul Aguaviva",
"Calle Lejdfors"
],
"title": "Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial: Efficient Rendering in 'The Division 2'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Croteam"
],
"description": "For 'Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass', designers at Croteam wanted huge levels with no fake world scaling. In his session, Croteam CTO Alen Ladavac will describe various techniques they used to render a 128x128 km terrain tessellated down to 1 cm, using GPU-based procedural generation of terrain features, forests and shrubs, grass, rocks and other fine details.",
"id": "1025815",
"speakers": "Alen Ladavac",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"member content",
"Alen Ladavac",
"Croteam"
],
"title": "Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial: Four Million Acres, Seriously: GPU-Based Procedural Terrains in 'Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"AMD, NVIDIA"
],
"description": "This is a joint session of two 30-minute lectures, \"\"Surfing the Wave(front)s with Radeon GPU Profiler\" and \"Dissecting Realtime Rays: How to Debug and Profile DXR & Vulkan Ray Tracing Applications.Surfing the Wave(front)s with Radeon GPU ProfilerDominik Baumeister (Developer Technology Engineer, AMD)AMD's Radeon GPU Profiler (RGP) is a state-of-the-art profiler for graphics and compute APIs running on AMD Radeon GPUs. This talk will walk you through its major features and abilities, showing you how to use RGP to analyze and optimize performance, using traces taken from a AAA PC game title as the example. RGP has the ability to dive into the low-level details of execution on Radeon GPUs, so you'll come to understand how to determine and interpret GPU occupancy, GPU synchronization primitives, the interaction and synchronization between the GPU and the host CPU driving it, expensive events and event details, context rolls, and pipeline state that affects what happens when you submit. You'll leave the talk with a great understanding of how to start using RGP to optimize your DirectX 12 or Vulkan game title for GCN and Vega GPUs.Dissecting Realtime Rays: How to Debug and Profile DXR & Vulkan Ray Tracing ApplicationsAurelio Reis (SWE Director of Graphics Developer Tools, NVIDIA)Aurelio Reis will go into detail on the tools that NVIDIA has developed for debugging and profiling realtime ray tracing. In this talk, he'll discuss real world issues that NVIDIA has seen as well as demonstrate how to resolve these using Nsight Graphics, NVIDIA's standalone graphics debugger and profiler.",
"id": "1025816",
"speakers": "Dominik Baumeister, Aurelio Reis",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"AMD",
"NVIDIA",
"Dominik Baumeister",
"Aurelio Reis"
],
"title": "Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial: \"Surfing the Wave(front)s with Radeon GPU Profiler\" & \"Debugging and Profiling DXR & Vulkan Ray Tracing\"",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Saber Interactive, Saber Interactive"
],
"description": "This talk presents a handful of solutions implemented by Saber Interactive's technical art and rendering departments for its latest 'World War Z' game. The Saber Interactive team will talk about their approach to the complex problem of rendering diverse crowds of zombies within strict performance budgets. They will also discuss visual features supporting zombie-shooting mechanics such as gibbing and decals. These concepts are mainly evolution of common ideas, but this talk provides a couple of twists and a good summary of how these technologies are used together under the hood.",
"id": "1025817",
"speakers": "Anton Krupkin, Denis Sladkov",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Anton Krupkin",
"Programming",
"Saber Interactive",
"Denis Sladkov"
],
"title": "Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial: High Zombie Throughput in Modern Graphics",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ready at Dawn"
],
"description": "The recent wave of \"explicit\" graphics APIs such as Vulkan and D3D12 require that programmers make use of barriers, events, fences, and other GPU-side synchronization primitives in order to obtain correct results. For programmers new to GPU programming or who are used to other APIs that don't require barriers, it's not at all obvious why barriers are needed or what they're actually doing under the hood. This presentation aims to remove much of the mystery around barriers by explaining how they work on modern PC and console GPU architectures.",
"id": "1025818",
"speakers": "Matt Pettineo",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Matt Pettineo",
"Programming",
"Ready at Dawn"
],
"title": "Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial: Breaking Down Barriers: An Introduction to GPU Synchronization",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Studio Wildcard, NVIDIA"
],
"description": "This session will focus on the challenges that were faced during the implementation of simulation of water surfaces for 'Atlas', a new massive multiplayer online game by Studio WildCard, and the solutions that were designed and implemented, including simulating and rendering ocean surfaces and the interactive effects (gameplay physics and graphics effects), as well as synchronizing multiple servers and players to achieve best visuals and seamless gameplay.",
"id": "1025819",
"speakers": "Mark Mihelich, Tim Tcheblokov",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Tim Tcheblokov",
"Mark Mihelich",
"Programming",
"NVIDIA",
"Studio Wildcard"
],
"title": "Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial: Wakes, Explosions and Lighting: Interactive Water Simulation in 'Atlas'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"EA DICE, Electronic Arts"
],
"description": "In this presentation Peter and Krista present the story of how they generated enough buy-in to build a 3D spatial telemetry viewer to understand player behavior, first as a prototype on a single game, then as a functional MVP for DICE, and finally as a company-wide solution available to all titles at EA. Their story is one of shared vision, hard won buy-in, and the power of aligning UX goals with business strategy. The presentation will showcase concrete design examples of how a UX spatial data tool was used to improve the experience in games like 'Battlefield V', and highlight the hard lessons learned during their time spent developing the telemetry viewer at EA.",
"id": "1025820",
"speakers": "Peter Vesti Frendrup, Krista Parham",
"tags": [
"EA DICE",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"UX Summit",
"Peter Vesti Frendrup",
"Krista Parham",
"Electronic Arts"
],
"title": "Building Buy-In: Creating Design Tools for Better Player Experiences at EA",
"track": "UX Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Digipen Institute of Technology"
],
"description": "Understanding the science of player spatial coding behavior holds a potential wealth of information for game designers. Research in this area illustrates how players learn to navigate game environments through spatial mapping schemas, mental rotation, and feature detection activation for attention-grabbing stimuli. This talk demonstrates how these kinds of spatial coding schemas can be utilized to craft more nuanced approaches to user experiences in game design. This talk is a continuation or \"Part 2\" from last year's GDC UX Summit talk, \"The Schema is Mightier than the Sword\" and provides attendees ways to \"test\" their own cognitive spatial coding schemas.",
"id": "1025821",
"speakers": "Vanessa Hemovich",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Vanessa Hemovich",
"Design",
"UX Summit",
"Digipen Institute of Technology"
],
"title": "The Schema is (Still) Mightier than the Sword: How Cognition Predicts Player Spatial Coding Systems",
"track": "UX Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Bethesda"
],
"description": "Much like responsive web design, building a clean, usable game interface for a good array of mobile devices, from small and wide phones to large and narrow tablet screens, is a challenge in flexibility and a dent on game budget. So who in their right mind would want to design, code, and test an interface twice over, in both landscape *and* portrait, only to offer players the freedom to rotate their device screens at will? Bethesda did it. But why? How? And was it worth the time and energy investment?",
"id": "1025822",
"speakers": "Marie Jasmin",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Marie Jasmin",
"Design",
"Bethesda",
"UX Summit"
],
"title": "Building the Interface of 'The Elder Scrolls: Blades' in Landscape and Portrait",
"track": "UX Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Pocket Gems"
],
"description": "After many years building AAA console games for franchises such as 'Burnout', 'Battlefield', 'Star Wars', 'Harry Potter' and 'Split Second', James switched over to work in the mobile games space. This talk will explain how he tackled updating the user experience design for a live mobile product and improved early player retention. He will touch on how he helped facilitate a phased UX redesign roll out to an active worldwide player base, and discuss the value of constant community involvement, citing lessons from Pocket Gems' game 'War Dragons'.",
"id": "1025823",
"speakers": "James Lipscomb",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Pocket Gems",
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"UX Summit",
"James Lipscomb"
],
"title": "Changing Navigation Mid-Flight: 'War Dragons', a UX Redesign on Mobile",
"track": "UX Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"XAMA Creative"
],
"description": "How do you keep a player motivated on their journey to greatness, when they start with almost nothing? Visual progression is an important feedback system within UX that communicates player growth over invested time. It is the idea of personal improvement and growth that can keep players engaged and not leave. But how do you figure out which progression visuals are best for your game? And how do you know if your team has the resources to develop it? This session will cover several tips and methods on how you can design and develop visual progression within games.",
"id": "1025824",
"speakers": "Steph Chow",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Steph Chow",
"XAMA Creative",
"Design",
"UX Summit"
],
"title": "From Zero to Hero: Visualizing Player Progression within UI/UX",
"track": "UX Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Graz University of Technology, Rarebyte"
],
"description": "The audience of your game is not only the players of your game, but can also be viewers watching someone playing your game. In this session, the speaker will talk about designing games with a focus on both the player's and the audience's experience. The presentation will demonstrate how to design user interfaces and game mechanics that are best suited for a live gaming experience or for streamed games.",
"id": "1025825",
"speakers": "Johanna Pirker, Rainer Angermann",
"tags": [
"Johanna Pirker",
"member content",
"Design",
"GDC 2019",
"Rainer Angermann",
"Rarebyte",
"UX Summit",
"Graz University of Technology"
],
"title": "Tackling Audience Experiences in Games",
"track": "UX Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "While there is no recipe for crafting successful video games, there are specific ingredients that we can rely on and a specific process that can guide developers along the way. The ingredients come from our understanding of the human brain. The process comes from the scientific approach and from design thinking. Considering them both allows developers to adopt a user experience (UX) mindset for their project, empowering them to accomplish their goals faster and more efficiently. Former director of UX at Epic Games explains in this talk how such UX strategy was developed on Fortnite.",
"id": "1025826",
"speakers": "Celia Hodent",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Celia Hodent",
"Design",
"UX Summit"
],
"title": "Developing a UX Mindset on Fortnite",
"track": "UX Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"NYU Game Center"
],
"description": "This session takes a painfully detailed look at the iteration of a single game: the mobile title 'Losswords'. Through dozens of screenshots, mock-ups, and wireframe schematics, this session will trace the development of the game from fundamental changes through the minutiae of detailed refinement. Along the way, the speaker will touch on a number of key issues that connect UX and game design, from core mechanics to narrative interfaces. Iteration is a double-edged sword: join this session to hear the hard lessons learned, both good and bad.",
"id": "1025827",
"speakers": "Eric Zimmerman",
"tags": [
"NYU Game Center",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"UX Summit",
"Eric Zimmerman"
],
"title": "One Hundred Versions of 'Losswords'",
"track": "UX Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "Prior to 'Marvel's Spider-Man', Insomniac worked on numerous action games: 'Ratchet & Clank', 'Sunset Overdrive' and 'Resistance' to name a few. They thought they knew how to make combat and could hit the ground running. They were wrong. This will be a discussion of the largest problems and changes that were made to Insomniac's AI during the development of 'Marvel's Spider-Man'.",
"id": "1025828",
"speakers": "Adam Noonchester",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Insomniac Games",
"GDC 2019",
"Adam Noonchester",
"AI",
"AI Summit"
],
"title": "'Marvel's Spider-Man' AI Postmortem",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Magic Leap, Magic Leap/Weta Workshop"
],
"description": "In 2018, the world saw the developer release of the spatial computing platform, the Magic Leap One. Two unique experiences, 'Dr. Grordbort's Invaders' and 'Create' were developed alongside the hardware to showcase its technological capabilities and creative potential for mixed reality. Each of these titles presented new opportunities for NPC or companion characters to adapt and better integrate with both the game world and the real world. Find out how each experience extended traditional game mechanics, AI behavior and interactivity into this new frontier of character and player engagement, all while adhering to the technical limitations of a developing platform.",
"id": "1025829",
"speakers": "Andrew Moran, Jordan Carlton",
"tags": [
"Andrew Moran",
"member content",
"Magic Leap/Weta Workshop",
"Magic Leap",
"GDC 2019",
"Jordan Carlton",
"AI",
"AI Summit"
],
"title": "Magic Leap: Enhancing Game Experiences with Character AI",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"XEODesign, Inc."
],
"description": "Without emotion there is no game. This talk demonstrates how to model AI after emotion-creating structures used in popular films. Together, you will unpack the stage mechanics from 4 popular films (such as The Matrix and the Shape of Water) and 4 popular games (such as 'Assassin's Creed Odyssey' and 'Lone Echo') to explore new opportunities for AI beyond branching narrative, dialog mazes, and believable NPCs. Like a film, every layer of your AI must resonate with emotion.Come see how The Hunger Games inspired 'Fortnight' / 'Battle Royale' and how these and future AI techniques enhance emotions, multiplayer, and replayability.",
"id": "1025830",
"speakers": "Nicole Lazzaro",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Nicole Lazzaro",
"AI",
"XEODesign, Inc.",
"AI Summit"
],
"title": "Red Pill Blue Pill: Narrative AI for Deep Emotions",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Zynga"
],
"description": "No matter how great your behavior logic or robust your procedural narrative system, if you aren't also leveraging AI to help you run your business more effectively, then you aren't making the most of what AI can do for your games. In this session, Luke Dicken discusses how Zynga uses AI to support their portfolio of mobile games. From coordinating ad sales and user acquisition through to predictive systems, task automation, and ensuring your community is healthy and happy, AI is playing a significant role across the whole of Zynga's business so come learn what it can do for you!",
"id": "1025831",
"speakers": "Luke Dicken",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Luke Dicken",
"GDC 2019",
"AI",
"Zynga",
"AI Summit"
],
"title": "Beyond NPCs: AI for Game Operations",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Monash University"
],
"description": "To compute paths for virtual characters we often transform a continuous environment into a simplified grid or a navigation mesh. However, pathfinding algorithms developed for grids and meshes usually return only approximate shortest paths, with unnecessary detours and additional turns being common side-effects. In this session, the speaker will discuss a range of \"any-angle\" techniques that can help you overcome such difficulties. The presentation will also describe Anya and Polyanya, two new algorithms which not only guarantee to compute actual shortest paths but which can also run 10-100+ times faster than traditional grid-based A* search.",
"id": "1025832",
"speakers": "Daniel Harabor",
"tags": [
"Daniel Harabor",
"Monash University",
"GDC 2019",
"AI",
"member content",
"AI Summit"
],
"title": "New Ideas for Any-Angle Pathfinding",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "There's a lot of information out there about driving NPC's towards violence. A quick glance at previous years at GDC will show a plethora of violent AI agents. But what about the other guys? What do you do when you need to populate a world with townspeople? This talk holds the key! It will discuss an NPC scheduling system along with several other techniques for driving non-combat oriented behavior.",
"id": "1025833",
"speakers": "Rez Graham",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Rez Graham",
"AI",
"AI Summit"
],
"title": "Stop Fighting! Systems for Non-Combat AI",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Square Enix Co., Ltd."
],
"description": "This session introduces a method that leads to more aware, expressive, and lively agents that can answer their own needs and interact with the player. Notably, this session covers the use of an emotional component coupled with a liking-disliking environment awareness system, a play on truth and lies, and the addition of a layer of communication (speech) to allow more immersive and interactive AIs. While the original application is for VR, it can be applied to any game where there is a need for more immersive and interactive agents.",
"id": "1025834",
"speakers": "Gautier Boeda",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Square Enix Co., Ltd.",
"AI",
"AI Summit",
"Gautier Boeda"
],
"title": "NPCs Have Feelings Too: Verbal Interactions with Emotional Character AI",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Zynga, Digipen Institute of Technology, XEODesign, Inc., Independent, Havok, Magic Leap, Spirit AI"
],
"description": "Sometimes things just need to be said. Saying them out loud in a room filled with (hopefully) like-minded people just makes it all the more interesting and cathartic. In a perennial favorite AI Summit session, AI developers from all corners of the industry will deliver quick, to-the-point tirades about what's on their mind. Sometimes they are informative. Sometimes they are funny. Sometimes they are inspirational. Some of them are all of the above! But they are always \"ranty!\"",
"id": "1025835",
"speakers": "Luke Dicken, Steve Rabin, Nicole Lazzaro, Rez Graham, Ben Sunshine-Hill, Brian Schwab, Emily Short",
"tags": [
"Brian Schwab",
"Independent",
"member content",
"Havok",
"Luke Dicken",
"Rez Graham",
"GDC 2019",
"Spirit AI",
"Magic Leap",
"Nicole Lazzaro",
"Emily Short",
"Steve Rabin",
"Zynga",
"Ben Sunshine-Hill",
"AI",
"XEODesign, Inc.",
"AI Summit",
"Digipen Institute of Technology"
],
"title": "Turing Tantrums: AI Devs Rant!!",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "At the beginning of the project, Sony Santa Monica Studio was given the challenge to reinvent and reinvigorate the 'God of War' franchise. It was early in the process that the Santa Monica team decided that 'God of War' as a franchise could not exist without its main character Kratos. The challenge was to present Kratos in a new light to the audience, a side not motivated by rage and revenge. This chapter was to focus not in the warrior side of Kratos, rather on the flawed man he is. Because of this they had to have a fresh new approach to our animation pipeline and that meant starting over in many ways. This talk will focus on the process of transforming their approach to how they animate their main character and how they evolved in delivering the narrative experience.",
"id": "1025836",
"speakers": "Bruno Velasquez",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Bruno Velasquez",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"title": "Animation Bootcamp: 'God of War': Breathing New Life into a Hardened Spartan",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Amata K.K., Amata K.K."
],
"description": "This talk will focus on the techniques used by Lead Animator Atsuko Fukuyama to help players feel connected to characters that are unable to speak or unable to use words the player understands. It will also touch on workflow changes that she has made over the years to optimize her output. The examples used in this talk will primarily pull from Atsuko's work on 'Last Labyrinth', but will also include some examples from ICO and 'Shadow of the Colossus'.'Last Labyrinth' is a VR Escape-the Room game where the player awakes in a strange mansion to find themselves strapped to a wheelchair, unable to move. Their only hope of escape lies in working together with Katia, a young girl who cannot speak a language the player can understand, to solve the mysteries around them. Atsuko and the team at Amata are striving to have players feel a bond with Katia and to feel that they are communicating with her, despite their inability to use language to do so.",
"id": "1025837",
"speakers": "Atsuko Fukuyama, Alexis Broadhead",
"tags": [
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Atsuko Fukuyama",
"GDC 2019",
"Alexis Broadhead",
"Amata K.K."
],
"title": "Animation Bootcamp: Animating Memorable Characters that Communicate Without Words",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "An overview of what went into animating the iconic final villain in 'Marvel's Spider-Man'. From concept, to model, to rig, to game, join this session to see what it takes to bring WAY too many legs to the screen.",
"id": "1025838",
"speakers": "Sophie Brennan",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Insomniac Games",
"Sophie Brennan",
"member content",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Animation Bootcamp: Animating the Main Villain in 'Marvel's Spider-Man' (or \"What, I'm Rigging HOW Many Legs?!\")",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "The telling of an entirely new story for a character that has lived within the public consciousness for more than 50 years is a daunting task. Not only have many done so before, but the mixed results truly heighten the pressure. At the outset of 'Spider-Man' it was estimated that the Insomniac team would develop roughly 2 hours of cinematic content before ship, and the animation team would be key to visualizing this story. Are you interested in hearing more about the journey to tell Parker's tale? In this talk, Lead Animator Brian Wyser will provide a thorough walk-through of the Insomniac Game's cinematic process for 'Marvel's Spider-Man'. He will explore more about what it's like to be an animator, and how he operated at the intersection between the page and screen. Making things move was the team's primary concern, yet cinematography, editing, and overall visual storytelling were equally as important on 'Spider-Man'.",
"id": "1025839",
"speakers": "Brian Wyser",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Insomniac Games",
"member content",
"Brian Wyser",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Animation Bootcamp: Script to Screen: The Development Diary of 'Marvel's Spider-Man'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"BioWare Austin, BioWare Edmonton"
],
"description": "Creating video game characters that look and feel great to play requires close collaboration between design and animation. In this talk Bioware speakers will have a look at the process they used to create some of the more exotic traversal abilities players have at their disposal in 'Anthem'. Starting with the character physics, they will look at what methods that were employed to get that movement looking and feeling great. They will then look at how Bioware authored animations to mesh with the character physics in the best way possible. The speakers will discuss what type of dialogue between animation and design enabled Bioware to achieve a successful end result and they will provide plenty of examples in the form of videos from development to help illustrate their workflow.",
"id": "1025840",
"speakers": "David Hoang, Daniel Nordlander",
"tags": [
"BioWare Edmonton",
"member content",
"Visual Arts",
"GDC 2019",
"Daniel Nordlander",
"BioWare Austin",
"David Hoang"
],
"title": "Animation Bootcamp: Rocket Man: Creating Flight for 'Anthem'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Wild & Wooly, LLC"
],
"description": "Freelance animation in the games industry has become a viable work option over the past few years. In this talk, Freelance Animator John Malaska will make sense of remote and on-site freelance animation work requirements, and walk through best practices that'll make the most of your freelance experience. He'll look at the many ways to get hired, and how to navigate the artistic, financial, legal, production, communication, and sales challenges that come with it. Anyone interested in freelance animation is welcome to attend, whether you're a new graduate looking for your first gig, a seasoned vet working on your side hustle, a lead looking to hire out for help in a pinch, and anywhere in between.",
"id": "1025841",
"speakers": "John Malaska",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"John Malaska",
"member content",
"Wild & Wooly, LLC",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Animation Bootcamp: Freelancing for Animators",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Concordia University, UC Santa Cruz, NYU Game Center"
],
"description": "This panel brings together educators who have been part of developing more than one game education program. Collectively, the panelists have taught in programs at 9 institutions in the US, Canada, and Europe. They will share stories about the ways a school's local context (geography, institutional structure, faculty) can have a big impact. They will discuss which teaching ideas worked well in one place and translated well at another, as well as which ideas definitely didn't. The panel will share tips for what to do if you are considering moving to a new school and trying to apply what you know.",
"id": "1025844",
"speakers": "Mia Consalvo, Katherine Isbister, Eric Zimmerman",
"tags": [
"NYU Game Center",
"member content",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"UC Santa Cruz",
"Katherine Isbister",
"Concordia University",
"Educators Summit",
"Mia Consalvo",
"Eric Zimmerman"
],
"title": "Been There, Done That: Lessons from Developing >1 Game Program",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Hampshire College, Schell Games, NYU Game Center"
],
"description": "Puzzles are integrated into many games both digital and analog, but designing a great puzzle can be an elusive challenge: too easy bores the player, too hard frustrates them. With the rising popularity of escape rooms and similar digital VR experiences, puzzles can often be the core of the gameplay. In this session, each panelist will present a case study of how they teach puzzle design at their institution, using real-world examples from students and/or professional work. This talk will discuss challenges and best practices specific to teaching puzzle design, and predict the future of puzzles in game design.",
"id": "1025845",
"speakers": "Ira Fay, Jesse Schell, Naomi Clark",
"tags": [
"NYU Game Center",
"member content",
"Hampshire College",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Naomi Clark",
"Ira Fay",
"Educators Summit",
"Jesse Schell",
"Schell Games"
],
"title": "Teaching Puzzle Design",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"NYU Game Center"
],
"description": "This session unpacks a single course in detail: the introductory game design class that every new MFA student at the NYU Game Center takes. The course (and the talk) offers several frames for understanding how to design games: as sets of rules, as the human experience of play, as storytelling systems, or as designed culture. The session will offer key design concepts and hands-on exercises that explore each of these topics, all of which can be brought into your own design practice or program.",
"id": "1025846",
"speakers": "Eric Zimmerman",
"tags": [
"NYU Game Center",
"member content",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Educators Summit",
"Eric Zimmerman"
],
"title": "How to Teach Game Design: A Fundamentals Class",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"ITU & Broken Rules"
],
"description": "Making games is as much an attitude as it is a profession. As such, it requires a specific mindset. This talk is rooted in experience gained from 15 years of teaching this specific mindset. The core of this talk is a teaching philosophy that aims to give game students (independent of specialization in art, design, or technology) ways of understanding the essence of what they work with. Concrete examples of the application of this philosophy are explored across curriculum design, course design, and exercise design.",
"id": "1025847",
"speakers": "Martin Pichlmair",
"tags": [
"Martin Pichlmair",
"member content",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"ITU & Broken Rules",
"Educators Summit"
],
"title": "Of the Essence: Leading Students to a Personal Design Philosophy",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"NYU Game Center"
],
"description": "Told through the story of grant budgets from 3 academic institutions in New York State, this talk from the NYU Game Center reveals what can be done with ~$3,000,000 over a 3 year period, and what can't. A quick overview of each school's budget, goals, and missteps provides insight into the value of setting and completing goals for game communities with grant funding. The second half of the talk focuses on how to plan and accomplish similar goals without funding and is applicable to both academic institutions as well as independent creator communities.",
"id": "1025848",
"speakers": "Toni Pizza",
"tags": [
"NYU Game Center",
"member content",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Educators Summit",
"Toni Pizza"
],
"title": "Extreme Makeover Game School Edition: Do It with or without a Grant",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Yaya Play Games, Tufts and Harvard University"
],
"description": "There is just one Game Design class in the Computer Science and Film and Media departments at Tufts University. It delivers the material of five semesters of traditional game design curriculum in a single term. Think it can't be done? Come learn about this crazy-pants class that, according to another educator, \"breaks all the rules of traditional game design education.\"",
"id": "1025849",
"speakers": "Jason Wiser",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Yaya Play Games, Tufts and Harvard University",
"Jason Wiser",
"Educators Summit"
],
"title": "How to Teach 5 Semesters of Game Design in 1 Class",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent, Mobile Game Doctor, Xbox Game Studios"
],
"description": "Dave Rohrl, Juan Gril, and Steve Meretzky continue their annual recap of the mobile game industry's highlights, surprises, and trends. This heavily-researched must-see presentation traditionally kicks off the Mobile Game Summit, and offers a great industry-wide overview to set the stage for the next two days of mobile games sessions.",
"id": "1025850",
"speakers": "Steve Meretzky, Dave Rohrl, Juan Gril",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"Juan Gril",
"Dave Rohrl",
"Mobile Game Doctor",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"member content",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games",
"Steve Meretzky",
"Xbox Game Studios"
],
"title": "The Year in Mobile Games: 2019 Edition",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Kongregate"
],
"description": "In 2017 a mobile game could still be a runaway success on its feature potential alone. Apple and Google were kingmakers, and user acquisition and organic growth were additive bonuses to really take a game down a successful road, driving profit for all involved. But in 2018, with increasing competition, rising marketing costs, and huge brands taking larger and larger market shares, launching a mobile game isn't what it once was. Kongregate has launched over 60 mobile titles in 6 years, from Editor's Choice nominations to complete flops. This talk will take a look at year by year differences to see what the modern mobile business looks like today. The talk will cover such topics as platform featuring, user acquisition, test markets, feature sets, performance improvements, competition, game updates, and more.",
"id": "1025851",
"speakers": "Peter Eykemans",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games",
"Kongregate",
"Peter Eykemans"
],
"title": "60 Games in 6 Years: Lessons from the Modern Mobile Market",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"King, King, King"
],
"description": "How do you grow the world's most popular mobile game? Released six years after 'Candy Crush Saga', 'Candy Crush Friends Saga' is the fourth title in the hit franchise. This session will walk through the process of how the development team expanded the game world and built upon this billion-dollar IP to create a more accessible game, including adding collection and other gameplay elements, redesigning the look of the characters, and retrofitting a new narrative foundation.",
"id": "1025852",
"speakers": "Tracey John, Jeremy Kang, Robert Mackenzie",
"tags": [
"King",
"member content",
"Tracey John",
"Robert Mackenzie",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games",
"Jeremy Kang"
],
"title": "Expanding the World of 'Candy Crush': A Postmortem on 'Candy Crush Friends Saga'",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Electronic Arts"
],
"description": "'Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes' just celebrated its three-year anniversary and continues to add exciting new content every other week. In-game events in 'Galaxy of Heroes' inspire players to collect a plethora of characters and ships from all of the movies and TV shows to date. This includes fan-favorites such as Yoda, Princess Leia, Revan and BB-8 to Darth Vader's TIE Advanced and the Millennium Falcon. Based on the core concepts of diversity, nesting utility, and authenticity, events in 'Galaxy of Heroes' are one of the core ways the developers continue to entertain millions of players daily. Nicolas Reinhart will discuss how to balance the Force, the players, the game and the IP with the practicalities of a high-profile, hectic live environment, while focusing on the role these live events play in 'Galaxy of Heroes'.",
"id": "1025853",
"speakers": "Nicolas Reinhart",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games",
"Nicolas Reinhart",
"Electronic Arts"
],
"title": "Live Ops in 'Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes'",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"King"
],
"description": "Ensuring your game stands out is a constant challenge.To guide the creation of blockbuster games, developers really need to understand their players and their preferences. At King, they've found that affinity data can be a powerful tool to help achieve this and can have a big impact on the success of games. They've mapped the mobile gaming market based on affinity and how this relates to audience preferences. But what is it that they develop an affinity for? Can game designers use that information to market games better or even decide what kinds of games to make? This session explores those questions!",
"id": "1025854",
"speakers": "Ishai Smadja",
"tags": [
"King",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games",
"Ishai Smadja"
],
"title": "To Affinity and Beyond: Lessons Learned Mapping the Mobile Games Market",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Niantic"
],
"description": "In July 2016, Niantic Inc. launched 'Pokemon GO', which grew into a worldwide phenomenon. However, it was not until December 2018 when the development team added a directly competitive, player-versus-player feature. In this session, Engineering Combat Lead Rob Giusti will discuss why Niantic chose to build this new feature at this point in the game's lifecycle, and what decisions were made to make the feature true to its roots in the Pokemon franchise, while also creating a foundation for further game development in a live, growing game.",
"id": "1025855",
"speakers": "Rob Giusti",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Niantic",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"Rob Giusti",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games"
],
"title": "When Trainers' Eyes Meet: Creating Real-Time Combat for 'Pokemon GO'",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Wooga, AppAgent"
],
"description": "Mobile real-time multiplayer games are hot, but your blood will freeze when you realize the costs to support soft launch. Beyond the UA expense, you must manage servers, time zones, demands on bots intelligence and data analytics. Industry expert Peter Fodor presents a 3-stage process to a successful global launch, including 5 case studies from his work plus insights from top gaming publishers. Playable ads are becoming a powerful tool in F2P. Tim will share Wooga's learnings about the entire process of how to best design and produce playables plus technical implications for dealing with several platforms and evaluating performance.",
"id": "1025856",
"speakers": "Tim Shepherd, Peter Fodor",
"tags": [
"AppAgent",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games",
"Wooga",
"Tim Shepherd",
"Peter Fodor"
],
"title": "Marketing Stories: Multiplayer Soft Launch and Playable Ads",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Miami University, UC Irvine, UC Irvine"
],
"description": "This joint session presented by Phill Alexander (Miami University), Amanda Cullen (Ph. D. student, UCI Informatics), and Matt Knutson (Ph. D. candidate, Visual Studies) will consist of two 30-minute talks about building more diverse and inclusive esports communities.Phill Alexander will bring attendees up to speed on what is actually happening, fighting through the (no pun intended) white noise that is created by lore and anecdotal evidence to deliver a clear sense of what techniques are working right now to increase inclusion, and offer of a plan of action that can be embraced by esports community builders and players.Amanda Cullen and Matt Knutson will share the UC Irvine Esports Arena staff's work collaborating with campus academics to examine esports scholarship players' code of conduct and contract language in order to develop policies that promote inclusion and protections from harassment, especially identity-based harassment.",
"id": "1025857",
"speakers": "Phill Alexander, Amanda Cullen, Matt Knutson",
"tags": [
"Miami University",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"UC Irvine",
"Matt Knutson",
"Phill Alexander",
"member content",
"Design",
"Amanda Cullen"
],
"title": "Esports Day: Diversity and Inclusion in Esports: Where It Is, Where It's Going, and How It's Being Done",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Intersport, Twitch"
],
"description": "This joint session presented by Walter Padilla (Director of Esports, Intersport) and Pablo Montero (Partnerships Associate, Twitch) will consist of two 30-minute talks.Pablo Montero will speak on the internationalization of esports through competitive gaming leagues and content creation, how they foment the growth of a game's player base and diversify the competitive landscape. This will be done by analyzing cases such as 'Overwatch' League, DBFZ World Tour, Play! 'Pokmon' leagues (among others) and discussing pain points that must be tackled to achieve international growth for games, leagues and players all across the globe.Walter Padilla will provide an in-depth look into the Latin American esports community, touching on tips for helping these players feel included in an international esport, breakdowns on current active circuits in the region and their approach to the market, platform preferences, and strategies for recruiting prominent community figures to engage their local audiences.",
"id": "1025858",
"speakers": "Walter Padilla, Pablo Montero",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Pablo Montero",
"Walter Padilla",
"Intersport",
"Twitch"
],
"title": "Esports Day: Internationalizing Esports: How to Engage Players Across the World",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"1HP"
],
"description": "As esports has grown into a robust industry, competitors' injuries have reached the point where they threaten not just their ability to play games they enjoy, but their entire careers. Physical therapists are in a unique position to help players, teams, and leagues through preventive health and wellness programming, injury evaluation and treatment, and community education.",
"id": "1025859",
"speakers": "Caitlin McGee",
"tags": [
"1HP",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Caitlin McGee",
"Business & Marketing",
"Design"
],
"title": "Esports Day: Stop Living on 1HP: Health and Wellness in Esports",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"CORSAIR"
],
"description": "Esports teams originated from the dreams of five friends becoming the best in the world. Today's landscape is entirely different with VCs and traditional sports teams investing in teams part of international franchised leagues. But even though esports growth is impressive, the expectation on ROI is questionable at best, and more dangerous still, it may be headed for the worst crash in the industry's history.This session will discuss the business models of esports teams and tournaments in both past and present, as well as what you'll need to adjust to achieve the future esports professionals all believe in.",
"id": "1025860",
"speakers": "Frank Fields",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Business & Marketing",
"CORSAIR",
"Frank Fields"
],
"title": "Esports Day: Course Correcting the Runaway Valuation of Esports",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Intersport"
],
"description": "Varsity collegiate esports programs have grown at an explosive rate over the past years. Based on demand and growing interest in esports on college campuses across the country, institutions seek direction beyond game rules and schedules to find an appropriate fit. What are the potential advantages and costs associated with traditional university governance inclusion in the collegiate esports ecosystem?",
"id": "1025861",
"speakers": "Kurt Melcher",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"member content",
"Kurt Melcher",
"Intersport"
],
"title": "Esports Day: University Esports Governance/Leadership: Varsity Programs and the Future of Collegiate Esports on Campus",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"AnyKey"
],
"description": "The booming expansion of esports as an industry has outpaced many of the player practices and grassroots community structures that originally defined the competitive cultural space. Building a more sustainable, diverse, and inclusive esports ecosystem will require an evolution in the way players compete and spectate together. In this talk, Morgan Romine will discuss how sportsmanship philosophies and the tools of traditional sports coaching can be applied to esports to help mediate social problems like toxicity, exclusion, team failure, and player burn-out.",
"id": "1025862",
"speakers": "Morgan Romine",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Morgan Romine",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Design",
"AnyKey"
],
"title": "Esports Day: Coaching Good Sportsmanship in Esports: Teaching Players Better Ways to Compete Together",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Super Bit Machine"
],
"description": "Tournaments have been a big part of online-enabled games. From 'Halo' to 'Smash 4', to now today when it's said that online games have modes specifically for tournaments. This session will dissect various ways developers and communities have created methods for online tournaments, and use them to create an effective online tournament for your next competitive game. It'll look into various aspects such as streaming, spectators, third-party tools in order to create the best tournament experience for games in 1v1, 5v5 and battle royale genres.",
"id": "1025863",
"speakers": "Ryan Stevenson",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Super Bit Machine",
"Ryan Stevenson",
"Design"
],
"title": "Esports Day: WiFi Warriors: How Developers and Organizers Can Improve Online Tournaments",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Rosemary Branch, LoadingReadyRun"
],
"description": "This joint session presented by Adam Savidan (LoadingReadyRun) and James Murff (Rosemary Branch) will consist of two 30-minute talks.Adam Savidan will discuss how to highlight the personalities and characters that are present in esports, with an emphasis on the fighting game community, in order to humanize players and let the audience connect with them on an emotional level.James Murff will share techniques for using data gathering and visualization as tools to humanize your players, create interesting competitive narratives, and increase engagement among your audience.",
"id": "1025864",
"speakers": "James Murff, Adam Savidan",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"LoadingReadyRun",
"James Murff",
"Design",
"Rosemary Branch",
"Adam Savidan"
],
"title": "Esports Day: Storytelling in Esports: It's Pro Wrestling, with Data",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Riot Games"
],
"description": "In creating VFX, it's often an unclear road from \"good enough\" to \"something special.\" This talk is about getting your work over that hump by pushing your creativity. The talk is structured around different ways of thinking about VFX that can be used as tools for adding depth and originality to your work along with practical examples of applying those mindsets.",
"id": "1025865",
"speakers": "Jeremy Griffith",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Riot Games",
"member content",
"Jeremy Griffith",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Visual Effects Bootcamp: Grounding the Impossible: Pushing Creativity in VFX",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"NVIDIA"
],
"description": "This session looks at destruction from the ground up. Effects artists are tasked with creating destruction large and small: from staged event destruction to true real time destruction for their real time project. This talk sifts through various types of destruction, dynamics, states, visual effects, visual effects parameters, and best practices when working with other artists to create the best destruction.",
"id": "1025866",
"speakers": "Fred Hooper",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Fred Hooper",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"NVIDIA"
],
"title": "Visual Effects Bootcamp: Sorting Through the Rubble: A Review of Destruction Techniques",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"id Software"
],
"description": "What does it take to be a successful real-time VFX artist? Where to start and how to improve as you learn the craft? And then what to do, to keep going, to always be as excited, as you were working on very first effects assignment? This talk will cover growing and improving yourself at all stages of your VFX career.",
"id": "1025867",
"speakers": "Wirginia Romanowska",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"id Software",
"member content",
"Wirginia Romanowska",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Visual Effects Bootcamp: Growing as a VFX Artist",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Avalanche Studios"
],
"description": "How do you go about adding a fresh spin to the VFX while still remaining true to legacy of the genre? This session will take a look at the combat and world visual effects of 'Rage 2', and how color was used to give them their own identity and that \"over-the-top\" feeling.",
"id": "1025868",
"speakers": "Oscar Bernelind",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Avalanche Studios",
"Oscar Bernelind",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Visual Effects Bootcamp: The VFX of 'Rage 2': Adding Color to the Post-Post-Apocalypse",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Undertone FX"
],
"description": "Hitting a high quality bar is always the aim, with the ideal being that every effect you create will be the best version of it ever to have been created. The first step in doing the best work possible, is understanding what has been done before. David Johnson will discuss techniques and approaches for hitting a high quality bar using reference montages and demonstrate techniques for using filmed source footage to achieve the most realistic effects possible in real time",
"id": "1025869",
"speakers": "David Johnson",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Undertone FX",
"member content",
"David Johnson",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Visual Effects Bootcamp: Hitting the Highest Quality Bar Possible: Reference and Realism in VFX",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"ILMxLAB"
],
"description": "In part one of this two part VFX Bootcamp session, Martin La Land Romero will talk about how creating visual effects is about tricks and techniques to create a final output. He'll discuss how this is especially true when recreating effects from film in real-time. The presentation will show different techniques that were combined to closely match a stylized feature film in real-time VR.",
"id": "1025870",
"speakers": "Martin La Land Romero",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Martin La Land Romero",
"ILMxLAB",
"member content",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Visual Effects Bootcamp: Bringing Feature Film Effects to Real-Time VR: Part 1",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"ILMxLAB"
],
"description": "In part two of this session, Te \"Ford\" Hu will continue the conversation on tricks and techniques to create a final output in visual effects. Ford will show different techniques that were combined to closely match a stylized feature film in real-time VR.",
"id": "1025871",
"speakers": "Te \"Ford\" Hu",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"ILMxLAB",
"member content",
"Te \"Ford\" Hu"
],
"title": "Visual Effects Bootcamp: Bringing Feature Film Effects to Real Time VR: Part 2",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Rare, Ltd."
],
"description": "Whether it influences the gameplay or not, visualizing player interaction plays a major part in grounding the experience of being in the game world. In this talk Technical Artist, Joakim Mellergard, will dive into ways of visually rewarding the player, using the environments and effects as tools. To limit the cost of adding these details, he'll also be take a look at how these effects can be integrated into assets for easy maintenance, automatic population and consistency.",
"id": "1025872",
"speakers": "Joakim Mellergard",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Rare, Ltd.",
"Joakim Mellergard"
],
"title": "Visual Effects Bootcamp: Player Interactions Visualized",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"CheckPoint Organisation"
],
"description": "With accurate and empathetic representation of mental illness, not only do characters become more relatable, but the game itself can be used as a tool to advocate for and protect the most vulnerable people in society. Join Dr. Jennifer Hazel, psychiatric doctor and founder of CheckPoint, for a detailed overview of why this topic is so important, and how to begin implementing realistic portrayals of mental illness in your game right now.",
"id": "1025873",
"speakers": "Jennifer Hazel",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Jennifer Hazel",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Game Narrative",
"CheckPoint Organisation"
],
"title": "How to Represent Mental Illness in Games",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"One More Story Games, Lonely Egg Studio, Infinity+2"
],
"description": "Serious topics such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sexual Trauma, Disordered Eating and Mental Illness are being increasingly explored through game narrative. In this session, Jean Leggett covers Charlaine Harris' 'Lily Bard Mysteries: The Body in the Park', and how the 2D mystery game was designed to mindfully explore PTSD from sexual trauma. Ella Lowgren discusses 'Shrinking Pains', a semi-autobiographical visual novel, and how it fosters empathy and understanding for sufferers of anxiety and eating disorders. Jessica Fong shares the development of her upcoming game 'In the Keeper's Shadow', a surreal 2D hand-painted adventure that reimagines her ongoing struggle to overcome the trauma of child abuse.",
"id": "1025874",
"speakers": "Jean Leggett, Jessica Fong, Gabriella Lowgren",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Lonely Egg Studio",
"Gabriella Lowgren",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Jessica Fong",
"Game Narrative",
"Jean Leggett",
"One More Story Games",
"Infinity+2"
],
"title": "Stories that Haunt and Heal: Mental Health and Game Narrative",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Playlines"
],
"description": "How do you design narratives that are as real as the player wants them to be? Drawing on his work designing location-based immersive AR, experience designer and Creative Director of AR studio Playlines Rob Morgan will break down the challenges of designing branching digital narratives for real spaces and real players. Rob will show how AR allows developers to dramatize and contextualize real spaces with layers of gameplay and story, with the potential for brand new kinds of immersion through co-operating with the player's imagination, instead of competing with it.",
"id": "1025875",
"speakers": "Robert Morgan",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Robert Morgan",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Game Narrative",
"Playlines"
],
"title": "(P)Layer Character: Designing Immersive Narratives for Location-Based AR Layers",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Timberview Productions & Meridian Adventure Co."
],
"description": "Real world immersive experiences, from theme parks, to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, to Sleep No More in NYC, are exploding in popularity. These experiences can range in scale from intimate, one-on-one theater performances to hundreds of people moving through sequential escape room games or haunted houses. A well-crafted immersive environment has complicated mechanics and design choices working to invisibly convey stories, bestow agency, and move people through narrative worlds.",
"id": "1025876",
"speakers": "Laura E. Hall",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Timberview Productions & Meridian Adventure Co.",
"GDC 2019",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Game Narrative",
"Laura E. Hall"
],
"title": "Environmental Narrative: Telling Stories in Spaces Without Saying Anything Aloud",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Historiated Games"
],
"description": "This session shares insights from Dr. James Coltrain, a history professor and game developer, on researching and designinghistorically themed games. Dr. Coltrain will discuss choosing historical topics, accumulating historical sources, and soliciting help from scholars. He will also discuss using historical thinking to get inside the minds of past people to understand their culture, and uncover fascinating and unfamiliar facts to enrich game stories, characters, and environments. The presentation will draw upon existing games, as well as Dr. Coltrain's work on 'Cassius', an upcoming narrative mystery game confronting the legacy of the American Founding Fathers.",
"id": "1025877",
"speakers": "James Coltrain",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Historiated Games",
"GDC 2019",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Game Narrative",
"James Coltrain"
],
"title": "A Historian's Guide to Researching Your Historical Game",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"ArenaNet, ArenaNet"
],
"description": "Satisfying the needs and wants of a global audience takes a big, diverse development team. But finding qualified creatives from all walks of life is a difficult challenge. To tackle this problem, the ArenaNet Narrative Team sought to invest in the future via mentorship. Join Associate Narrative Director Bobby Stein and Writer/Narrative Designer Novera King in a 30-minute lecture that details the successes and failures they experienced in ArenaNet's first outreach program.",
"id": "1025878",
"speakers": "Bobby Stein, Novera King",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"ArenaNet",
"Game Narrative",
"Novera King",
"Bobby Stein"
],
"title": "Investing in the Future: Narrative Mentorship",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"IO Interactive"
],
"description": "This talk will consist of three sections. First, Mette will cover framing and the analysis that sparked a change in the way the 'Hitman 2' team approached level design. Next, she will present an analysis of what happens when you look at game spaces as social spaces, and how that played out in the pre-production design of the levels in 'Hitman 2'. Finally, Mette will discuss how the results of this exercise resulted in coining some new phrases and concepts that affected 'Hitman 2' from pre-production onward.",
"id": "1025879",
"speakers": "Mette Podenphant Andersen",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Design",
"IO Interactive",
"Mette Podenphant Andersen"
],
"title": "Level Design Workshop: 'Hitman' Levels as Social Spaces: The Social Anthropology of Level Design",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "Reinventing and reimagining the level design of 'God of War' was a huge challenge for the level design team. With 10+ years of existing design rules and 7 games in the series, the team set out to break those existing rules and create a new experience. Lead Level Designer Rob Davis will talk through the process of creating 6 new level design rules for 'God of War' and discuss best practices for taking levels from concept to completion.",
"id": "1025880",
"speakers": "Rob Davis",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Design",
"Rob Davis",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"title": "Level Design Workshop: The Level Design of 'God of War'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Bungie"
],
"description": "When someone wants to design games for different player types, they often think in terms of systems. Developers build player chat for social players, powerful weapons for action players or perma-death for players who want mastery. But do they think about different player types when building worlds?World designers can create better experiences if they understand player motivation. This talk will dig into practical ways to build worlds that your players will love, while also leveling up your world designers by learning how to focus on what matters most.",
"id": "1025881",
"speakers": "Raylene Deck",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Raylene Deck",
"member content",
"Design",
"Bungie"
],
"title": "Level Design Workshop: World Design for Different Player Types",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "This talk will delve into the various principles governing the placement of interactable and collectible objects in environments. With strategic placement, gatherables and collectibles can serve as both an incitement to leave the beaten path and a reward for doing so.",
"id": "1025882",
"speakers": "Leah Miller",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Independent",
"member content",
"Design",
"Leah Miller"
],
"title": "Level Design Workshop: Rewarding Exploration with Collectibles and Gatherables",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"12 East Games"
],
"description": "An overview of non-linear design techniques in single player sandbox levels, the distinct value and challenges of very non-linear levels, and how how level designers can adapt these techniques to otherwise linear levels.",
"id": "1025883",
"speakers": "Aubrey Serr",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Aubrey Serr",
"12 East Games",
"Design"
],
"title": "Level Design Workshop: Designing Radically Non-Linear Single Player Levels",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Miami University, Digital Extremes"
],
"description": "These two 10 minute sessions will rapid fire some lessons learned from applying video game level design techniques in unusual or unexpected ways.",
"id": "1025884",
"speakers": "Jerry Belich, Andrew Yoder",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Andrew Yoder",
"Jerry Belich",
"Miami University",
"Design",
"Digital Extremes"
],
"title": "Level Design Workshop: \"Real World Level Design\" & \"Playgrounds and Level Design\"",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"The Flop Collective, Wesay"
],
"description": "These two 10 minute sessions will rapid fire some lessons learned from applying video game level design techniques in unusual or unexpected ways.",
"id": "1025885",
"speakers": "Simon-Albert Boudreault, Cesar Dominguez Garza",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Simon-Albert Boudreault",
"GDC 2019",
"Cesar Dominguez Garza",
"The Flop Collective",
"Wesay",
"Design"
],
"title": "Level Design Workshop: \"Nothing is Original: Leveraging Existing Assets\" & \"Lessons from the Puzzle-a-Day Design Challenge\"",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "This session will discuss fundamental level design principles that governed the creation of New York City in 'Marvel's Spider-Man', and how they can apply at any scale. It will also discuss the unique challenges to laying out a large urban space and how to adapt basic level design for a larger scale.",
"id": "1025886",
"speakers": "Josue Benavidez",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Insomniac Games",
"member content",
"Design",
"Josue Benavidez"
],
"title": "Level Design Workshop: Building New York in 'Marvel's Spider-Man': It's Still Just Level Design",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Nexon Korea"
],
"description": "Albeit having compelling performance, deep learning requires an extensive database and massive computing power, and therefore considerable investment. In this session, Junsik will present how Nexon Korea has developed a real-time automated wallhack detection system using Convolutional Neural Networks with a small dataset and a single GPU. By using Class Activation Maps, the network finds suspicious areas within a screenshot that improves the credibility of the model's performance and makes debugging datasets much more efficient. Model Interpretability plays a crucial role in incorporating deep learning with the existing abuser control policies. As a result, the system now detects abusers in real-time and reduces manual inspection labor significantly.",
"id": "1025887",
"speakers": "Junsik Hwang",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Junsik Hwang",
"Programming",
"Nexon Korea"
],
"title": "ML Tutorial Day: Beating Wallhacks using Deep Learning with Limited Resources",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Activision"
],
"description": "Deep learning is a very popular topic today, and rightfully so, as it expanded the horizons of applicability of machine learning. But \"shallow\" models are often more interpretable and can lead to deeper insights and faster code. In general they are preferable over black box solutions for the problems that they can solve.This talk aims to introduce the topic of machine learning as a tool for \"everyday\" programming, as a methodology of data-oriented problem solving. The talk will cover techniques like multidimensional data visualization, dimensionality reduction, nonlinear regression and symbolic regression. The presentation will show some examples from concrete rendering problems, but this talk will not be aimed at rendering engineers. Lastly, the talk will show that this methodology of iterative data exploration and modeling is useful to gain insights on the problem domain that often can lead even to solutions that do not require a learned model.",
"id": "1025888",
"speakers": "Angelo Pesce",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Angelo Pesce",
"Activision",
"Programming"
],
"title": "ML Tutorial Day: Machine Learning for Everyday Programming",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Remedy Entertainment"
],
"description": "Antti Herva, Lead Character Technical Artist at Remedy Entertainment, will be presenting a simple machine learning project with the goal of helping animators liven up dialogue wheel interactions for an upcoming game project. Topics covered in this session include an introduction on performance capture, understanding and reasoning about image data, selecting image features and machine learning models, annotating data, training a neural network and finally evaluating the results.",
"id": "1025889",
"speakers": "Antti Herva",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Remedy Entertainment",
"Antti Herva",
"Programming"
],
"title": "ML Tutorial Day: Simple Head Pose Estimation for Dialogue Wheels",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Electronic Arts"
],
"description": "Motion matching started a revolution in the way developers create runtime animation controllers for video game characters, freeing developers from the burden of manually crafted motion trees. Games like 'For Honor', 'UFC' and 'Last of Us' are showing the great benefits in terms of realism and animation quality this technique can provide. Still, motion matching can only choose poses from an animation database, with no ability to generate new ones. Machine learning can help you go a step further, from motion matching to actual motion synthesis.This session will cover state-of-the-art techniques (Phase-Functioned Neural Networks, and Mode-Adaptive Neural Networks) that use neural networks to synthesize motion from examples, explicitly calling out important architecture and implementation details, and spark a discussion on how this technology can be used in a modern game development pipeline.",
"id": "1025890",
"speakers": "Fabio Zinno",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Fabio Zinno",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Electronic Arts"
],
"title": "ML Tutorial Day: From Motion Matching to Motion Synthesis, and All the Hurdles In Between",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft"
],
"description": "This talk provides an overview of various reinforcement learning algorithms and how they may help game studios create better games, more efficiently. Besides AI development, the ability to train bots to play games during production opens up promising opportunities for automated testing and design assistance. But applying reinforcement learning to modern games brings up many challenges, illustrated here through several examples, with a focus on recent experiments within Ubisoft games. Whether you want to directly learn from pixels to minimize the integration burden, or entirely rewrite your engine to make it more \"reinforcement learning-friendly\", this presentation is packed with practical tips to help you reach your goal without (too many) tears.",
"id": "1025891",
"speakers": "Olivier Delalleau",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Olivier Delalleau",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Ubisoft"
],
"title": "ML Tutorial Day: Smart Bots for Better Games: Reinforcement Learning in Production",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"EA SEED"
],
"description": "Deep learning is becoming ubiquitous in machine learning research, and it's also finding it's place in industry related applications. Specifically, deep generative models have proven incredibly useful at generating and remixing realistic content from scratch, making themselves a very appealing technology in the field of AI-enhanced content authoring. In this talk, the speaker will cover, in an accessible manner, the fundamentals of deep generative modelling and some common algorithms and architectures, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs), variational autoencoders (VAEs), or autoregressive methods. He will also discuss applications to game development and explore some recent advances in the field.",
"id": "1025892",
"speakers": "Jorge del Val",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"EA SEED",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Jorge del Val"
],
"title": "ML Tutorial Day: Towards Deep Generative Models in Game Development",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Volition"
],
"description": "So, your game is a huge success. Great! Now, do you want the same team who built that game to stick around for the next one? Great career direction is just as critical to a studio's success as great art direction. This talk will focus on the reasons why art directors need to invest energy in the team as well as common misconceptions about the artist's journey from entry-level to senior staff member.",
"id": "1025893",
"speakers": "Keith Self-Ballard",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"Keith Self-Ballard",
"member content",
"Volition"
],
"title": "Art Direction Bootcamp: Don't Forget the Team: Directing Careers",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "'Marvel's Spider-Man' was Insomniac Game's most ambitious project to date. It was clear that the Art and Animation team would have to grow to meet the demands of the project. Insomniac Games has always prided itself in a culture where good ideas can come from anyone. If the team grew too large, would it lose the characteristics that made it great to begin with? Find out what defines Insomniac culture and how they were able to preserve that culture on the Art and Animation team while doubling their team size from Art Director, Jacinda Chew.",
"id": "1025894",
"speakers": "Jacinda Chew",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Insomniac Games",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Jacinda Chew"
],
"title": "Art Direction Bootcamp: Team Growth and Preserving Team Culture on 'Marvel's Spider-Man'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "You've spent years learning how to channel your creative talents into a successful art career, and now you're ready to take the leap into a lead role! But what does it really mean to be an effective lead artist? Erica Pinto (lead narrative animator at Santa Monica Studio) will share her experience becoming a first-time lead on 'God of War', some of the challenges she faced, and lessons learned over the course of the project. You may be surprised at how much being a good lead is not just about being a great artist!",
"id": "1025895",
"speakers": "Erica Pinto",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Erica Pinto",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Art Direction Bootcamp: What They Don't Teach You in Art School: Lessons for First Time Leads",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Luma Pictures"
],
"description": "Video games are undoubtedly considered part of the artistic disciplines. In video games, the process that brings the viewer to beauty is the same as in painting and photography, but in games, there is an element that leads the viewer to interact with the artwork. In this talk, Alessandro Taini will use examples of known video game products to examine what leads the viewer to determine one video game is more beautiful than another, and discuss how beautiful is perceived from a cognitive, non-technical point of view.",
"id": "1025896",
"speakers": "Alessandro Taini",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Alessandro Taini",
"Luma Pictures"
],
"title": "Art Direction Bootcamp: Digital Beauty: Visual Emotions in Game Development",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Patrick Faulwetter Studio, LLC"
],
"description": "In order to inform the process of building imaginary worlds for video games and movies, this talk aims to examine the term \"culture\" as \"story\" which expresses itself in the physical world. The story of a culture is written in a myriad of particulars from architecture, customs, symbols, values to transportation systems. Starting from a philosophical perspective, Patrick will show the practical process of using 2D and 3D tools to build shape languages from abstract shapes as a foundation for designing different subject matters for world building including vehicles, costumes, architecture and environments.",
"id": "1025897",
"speakers": "Patrick Faulwetter",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Patrick Faulwetter",
"member content",
"Patrick Faulwetter Studio, LLC",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Art Direction Bootcamp: Building Worlds Through Shape Language",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Promethean AI, LLC"
],
"description": "This session will break down into 3 categories all full of fascinating examples and unconventional ideas on potential applications for AI in production: AI in Content Creation, AI at Runtime and AI as a Creative Partner. The first two topics for the most part extrapolate the trajectory current technology is taking the industry on, providing valuable insight into the creative process of tomorrow. The third, however, is a much needed exploration of the subject of collaboration between humans and AI, with focus on what developers' roles are and how they can make sure to always be aware of the value of their creations. If developers are to build an expressive and empowering future, everyone not only deserves, but needs to be part of this conversation today. Building a part that future first hand, Promethean AI CEO and Founder Andrew Maximov is excited to share the insights he and his team have found.",
"id": "1025898",
"speakers": "Andrew Maximov",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"Andrew Maximov",
"member content",
"Promethean AI, LLC"
],
"title": "Art Direction Bootcamp: Building a Creative Future with Artificial Intelligence",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft Massive, Ubisoft Massive"
],
"description": "This presentation explores the design and creation of the NPCs in 'Tom Clancy's The Division 2'. Following the success of 'Tom Clancy's The Division', Lead AI Designer Drew Rechner and Lead AI Programmer Philip Dunstan will provide a glimpse at their team's AI postmortem on the game and a detailed look at the action plan that resulted for improving the AI in the sequel, including carefully selected gameplay and technological innovations. Particular focus will be placed on iterating on game AI design and implementation for a sequel that feels refreshing, innovative, and fun while also mitigating excessive risk.",
"id": "1025899",
"speakers": "Drew Rechner, Philip Dunstan",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Ubisoft Massive",
"GDC 2019",
"Drew Rechner",
"AI",
"AI Summit",
"Philip Dunstan"
],
"title": "Fighting Sequelitis: Creating Combat NPCs for 'Tom Clancy's The Division 2'",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Unity Technologies, Zynga, Spirit AI, Independent, Magic Leap"
],
"description": "Artificial intelligence and machine learning has become quite the buzz words lately. In the excitement of all the many benefits AI promises, it can be easy to neglect the ethical issues any new technology brings with it. AI in games has been used for years to bring life to your game worlds, stories and characters. You now have the ability to use AI and big data to learn more about your players and the real world around you. Ethics of AI brings to light the gap between how AI can be used vs how AI should be used in games. This panel will discuss the opportunities, challenges and solutions around the ethics of using AI for games, and how you can imbue your AI with ethical thinking.",
"id": "1025900",
"speakers": "Timoni West, Luke Dicken, Emily Short, Celia Hodent, Aleissia Laidacker",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"member content",
"Spirit AI",
"Luke Dicken",
"Magic Leap",
"GDC 2019",
"Unity Technologies",
"AI",
"Celia Hodent",
"Zynga",
"Aleissia Laidacker",
"Timoni West",
"AI Summit",
"Emily Short"
],
"title": "Ethics in Artificial Intelligence",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Digipen Institute of Technology, Zynga, Independent"
],
"description": "Most of the time, when you talk about game AI, you think of large, complex systems with many interconnected parts and delicate algorithms. But sometimes, you return to your true \"smoke and mirrors\" roots and get away with implementing something that is truly simple and yet has profound effects on the end product. This can be something that is apparent to the player, something that is only visible to the other devs around you, or might be something that only lives under the hood -- known only to you. The common thread is that it's something that makes you ask, \"why doesn't everyone do this?\" This session is a rapid-fire series of presenters sharing something they have discovered and used over the years. They have to be simple... because each person will only have a few minutes each to make their case!",
"id": "1025901",
"speakers": "Steve Rabin, Luke Dicken, Rez Graham",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"member content",
"Luke Dicken",
"GDC 2019",
"Rez Graham",
"AI",
"Steve Rabin",
"Zynga",
"AI Summit",
"Digipen Institute of Technology"
],
"title": "The Simplest AI Trick in the Book",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Square Enix Co., Ltd., Square Enix Co., Ltd."
],
"description": "Some games have explored dynamically controlled gameplay-related systems and proposed interesting Meta AI designs. There is a lack of discrimination regarding user's possible mental states: feeling \"relaxed\" is different from \"bored\" and each case should be processed differently. Game AI can benefit from more generic architectures and emotion-based Meta AI.Yuta Mizuno and Daiki Satoi from Square Enix will discuss general Meta AI design and 2D Emotion Map based Meta AI. General Meta AI design will focus on the \"Rule-Interaction-Dilemma\" pattern, which helps you understand which element is important, or how to modify elements via Meta AI. Regarding the 2D Emotion Map, they will present how the Meta AI estimates players' emotions and which parameters to change to make more compelling game situations.",
"id": "1025902",
"speakers": "Daiki Satoi, Yuta Mizuno",
"tags": [
"Daiki Satoi",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Square Enix Co., Ltd.",
"AI",
"Yuta Mizuno",
"AI Summit"
],
"title": "Changing the Game: Measuring and Influencing Player Emotions Through Meta AI",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Havok"
],
"description": "Through the course of developing a game, AI systems often go from good ideas, to compelling implementations, to complicated frameworks, to monstrosities which are brittle and difficult to debug. This session will show you how to engineer AI systems which remain stable and robust even in the face of changing requirements, and how to use specifications and automated testing to maximize your flexibility throughout the development cycle.",
"id": "1025903",
"speakers": "Ben Sunshine-Hill",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Havok",
"GDC 2019",
"AI",
"Ben Sunshine-Hill",
"AI Summit"
],
"title": "A House Built on Sand: Engineering Stable and Reliable AI",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"NCSOFT, NCSOFT"
],
"description": "The NCSOFT team applied reinforcement learning to create an AI for the arena 1v1 battle in 'Blade & Soul', a global MMORPG. The AI agents participated in the 2018 'Blade & Soul' Tournament World Championship as blind matches and played against three top professional players from across the globe. The AI had 3 wins and 4 loses - an impressive showing against professional players. In this session, the NCSOFT team will will share their experiences on how they built pro-level AI agents.",
"id": "1025904",
"speakers": "Jinyun Chung, Seungeun Rho",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"AI",
"Jinyun Chung",
"Seungeun Rho",
"NCSOFT",
"AI Summit"
],
"title": "Reinforcement Learning in Action: Creating Arena Battle AI for 'Blade & Soul'",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Electronic Arts"
],
"description": "DICE's 'Battlefield' and 'Battlefront' games have grown tremendously in scope over the years. To meet DICE's testing requirements, extensive test automation systems were developed. The most recent addition to these has been the development of AutoPlayers, autonomous bots that are used for scenarios ranging from full 64 player soak tests to specific scripted test cases. Jonas will describe his experience so far developing the AutoPlayers technology. His talk will cover the architecture, outline user workflows and describe several use cases. Some of these were entirely unexpected but illustrate the power of a system where end users are in control.",
"id": "1025905",
"speakers": "Jonas Gillberg",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"AI",
"Jonas Gillberg",
"AI Summit",
"Electronic Arts"
],
"title": "AI for Testing: The Development of Bots that Play 'Battlefield V'",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent, UC Santa Cruz, Bossa Studios, Goldsmiths University, modl.ai, Lyrebird.ai"
],
"description": "This session offers six rapid-fire demos of new AI applications in games, with speakers from indie, academic, and industry backgrounds. It'll look at projects that use new technical solutions, offer new tools to developers, or use existing techniques in new ways. Topics include machine learning approaches to voice generation; supervised learning tools for working with sensor data; novel applications of speech to text and intent recognition; procedural narrative systems; games generated from online data sources; and fresh design thinking around AI-driven player experiences.",
"id": "1025906",
"speakers": "Nicole He, Max Kreminski, Imre Jele, Phoenix Perry, Gabriella Barros, David Dodero",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"Goldsmiths University",
"Lyrebird.ai",
"Imre Jele",
"Bossa Studios",
"GDC 2019",
"David Dodero",
"UC Santa Cruz",
"Max Kreminski",
"AI",
"member content",
"Gabriella Barros",
"modl.ai",
"Phoenix Perry",
"Nicole He",
"AI Summit"
],
"title": "Experimental AI for Games",
"track": "AI Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"SMU Guildhall"
],
"description": "Curves, splines, and other nonlinear functions afford a plethora of applications in game development, and have gained considerable popularity in recent years among AAA and indie developers alike. In this talk, Squirrel will present solid intuitions for the basis and manipulation of curves and splines including fitting, splicing, reparameterization, continuity, and control, and how they relate to both traditional and customizable easing/tweening functions.",
"id": "1025907",
"speakers": "Squirrel Eiserloh",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"SMU Guildhall",
"Squirrel Eiserloh",
"Programming",
"member content"
],
"title": "Math for Game Developers: Curves Revisited",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Havok"
],
"description": "Navigation meshes form the basis of nearly all modern games' navigation systems. This talk will provide a detailed overview of the process of automatically generating a navigation mesh, and then using it for pathfinding.",
"id": "1025908",
"speakers": "Ben Sunshine-Hill",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Havok",
"Ben Sunshine-Hill"
],
"title": "Math for Game Developers: Generating and using Navigation Meshes",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"description": "Bounding volume hierarchies are used to accelerate ray casts, overlap queries, and closest point queries for large game worlds. Dynamic hierarchies allow objects to be created, destroyed, and moved while maintaining fast queries. Careful construction techniques can be used to avoid performance pitfalls that are common in procedurally generated game worlds.",
"id": "1025909",
"speakers": "Erin Catto",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Erin Catto",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"title": "Math for Game Developers: Dynamic Bounding Volume Hierarchies",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Hidden Path Entertainment"
],
"description": "Traditional animation involves moving models based on a set of linear matrices. This session will demonstrate extremely efficient and useful ways of animating the curvature of space around the models instead, with applications in vegetation, soft body effects, model assembly and res-in effects, and more.",
"id": "1025910",
"speakers": "Michael Austin",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Michael Austin",
"Hidden Path Entertainment"
],
"title": "Math for Game Developers: Procedural Mesh Animation with Non-Linear Transforms",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Dtecta"
],
"description": "Computer number representations have limited precision. Results of arithmetic operations are rounded to the nearest representable number. The effect of rounding can be hard to estimate, however, it helps to think in terms of relative error rather than absolute error. This session will discuss how computations introduce large relative rounding errors and show how to determine the maximum relative error in a computed value. In C++ code, a tight upper bound for the rounding error can be determined automatically for every computed value by substituting float or double types with a proxy class. The presentation will show how to write C++ functions and expressions such that the ErrorTracer proxy class can be dropped in transparently and helps to validate the stability of your computations.",
"id": "1025911",
"speakers": "Gino van den Bergen",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Gino van den Bergen",
"Dtecta"
],
"title": "Math for Game Developers: Understanding and Tracing Numerical Errors in C++",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Unity Technologies"
],
"description": "Neural networks are gaining attention due to their ability to solve difficult problems. But they are still not very often used to solve problems in real-time scenarios. The majority of practical examples are focused on image processing and very few examples focus on neural network inference in high-performance applications. In this presentation, the speaker will show practical examples of how to use neural networks in performance-critical code. The presentation will take a deep dive and show neural network training and inference without using any frameworks or math libraries. Instead, the talk is going to focus on bare metal C++ using a data-oriented approach and optimized SSE implementations.",
"id": "1025912",
"speakers": "Michael Buttner",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Unity Technologies",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Michael Buttner"
],
"title": "Math for Game Developers: Inside Neural Networks",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Freehold Games"
],
"description": "While games have been procedurally generating tile-based dungeons for decades, new techniques are allowing developers to produce ever more interesting and immersive spaces. In this session, the speakers will walk through the novel, multi-pass approach used to generate ruins in 'Caves of Qud' based on the procedurally-generated cultures that once occupied them. Each pass applies increasingly fine levels of detail. The early passes formulate the coarse architectural structure. Middle passes fill in details by using Wave Function Collapse, a brand-new generative technique. Final passes provide level connectivity and intelligent dungeon population. In totality, the approach blends several techniques to map a set of cultural attributes to varied, playable game spaces optimized for emergent gameplay.",
"id": "1025913",
"speakers": "Brian Bucklew",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Brian Bucklew",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Freehold Games"
],
"title": "Math for Game Developers: Tile-Based Map Generation using Wave Function Collapse in 'Caves of Qud'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Freehold Games, Freehold Games"
],
"description": "So you've got a handle on procedural generation techniques. Maybe you've used noise to generate terrain, replacement grammars to generate text, or L-systems to generate plants. But how do you string everything together to produce complex output on the scale of a whole village? In this session, Brian Bucklew and Jason Grinblat (Freehold Games) will do an end-to-end walk-through of the systems used to generate villages in 'Caves of Qud', which include their own histories, cultures, architectural styles, storytelling traditions, NPCs, and quests. They'll discuss the challenges of multi-tiered design, how to link together systems at various levels of granularity, and what sort of multi-purpose tools you can write to help you architect your own large-scale generative systems.",
"id": "1025914",
"speakers": "Brian Bucklew, Jason Grinblat",
"tags": [
"Freehold Games",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Brian Bucklew",
"Programming",
"Jason Grinblat"
],
"title": "Math for Game Developers: End-to-End Procedural Generation in 'Caves of Qud'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Spry Fox"
],
"description": "In independent game development you'll often find yourself diving into roles you're not familiar with. This can include coordinating with an artist, or even being the artist, for your game without much prior art experience. You might look at your game's visuals and want something changed, but struggle to identify what, or why. After a primer on basic art principles and terms, this talk provides examples of common challenges in game art production, as well as their possible solutions, to give insight into how to analyze your own game's visuals.",
"id": "1025915",
"speakers": "Ally Overton",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Spry Fox",
"Ally Overton",
"Independent Games Summit",
"Independent Games"
],
"title": "Critiquing Game Visuals: Common Problems and How to Solve Them",
"track": "Independent Games Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Facebook Reality Labs"
],
"description": "A producer's job is to make sure the game gets done. But if shipping a great game was easy, everyone would do it. How do you, the producer, make sure the critical features get done, that the final game lives up to the design vision, and that your team does work they're proud of without burning out? The answer is process. But if you don't know what the heck process is, that answer doesn't help you. This talk will explain what process is, what it's for, and how you can use it to make sure your game gets done.",
"id": "1025916",
"speakers": "Ruth Tomandl",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Facebook Reality Labs",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Production",
"Ruth Tomandl"
],
"title": "Producer Bootcamp: What the Heck is Process?",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"AIAS Foundation"
],
"description": "The first month of production is the time when you can have the most impact on the odds of shipping a great game, not to mention shipping it on time and on budget. Hit projects and doomed titles all share that same, portentous first month when the seeds of success or failure are so often sown. Yet developers often treat each day in that first month of development with less respect than they treat the days later in the projectdays that arrive after so many options have been lost. Based on Don Daglow's work with AAA teams, indie developers and startups in Silicon Valley accelerators, this talk will review five key things producers need to do to make those first 30 days produce the right results.",
"id": "1025917",
"speakers": "Don Daglow",
"tags": [
"Don Daglow",
"member content",
"AIAS Foundation",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Production"
],
"title": "Producer Bootcamp: Starting Indie Game Production Right",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"ClutchPlay Games, LLC"
],
"description": "As a producer, your job revolves around expectations: setting them, managing them, and meeting them. It sounds straightforward, until you start to factor in how the individual members of your team may respond to those expectations. Some will be great at meeting deadlines on their own, while others may require more hand-holding and accountability. Some will be able to set effective boundaries, while others may take on too much, predisposing them to burnout. Some will happily carry out tasks as instructed, while others may need to understand the reasoning behind the task. And, of course, some need to do things their way, or not at all. In other words, there is no \"one-size-fits-all\" solution to ensure the individual members of your team are meeting deadlines, fulfilling expectations, doing great work and achieving their own goals as well as those of the project.",
"id": "1025918",
"speakers": "Amy Dallas",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Amy Dallas",
"Production",
"ClutchPlay Games, LLC"
],
"title": "Producer Bootcamp: Zen and the Art of Team Maintenance",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Volition"
],
"description": "Everybody hates meetings. These ubiquitous time-wasters often feel like a bane to effective development, and yet they persist through many different types of teams and studios. The need to communicate is vital, but there is something inherent to the structure (or lack thereof) to meetings in the games industry which makes the experience wildly undesirable. This fast-paced talk will focus on concrete, practical improvements that you can make with your team or at your studio. Bring time-effective communication back into focus!",
"id": "1025919",
"speakers": "Keith Self-Ballard",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Production",
"Keith Self-Ballard",
"Volition"
],
"title": "Producer Bootcamp: Fix Your Broken Meetings",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"System Era Softworks"
],
"description": "Producers often find themselves the nexus of information on their teams. From managing day to day tasks to developing multi-year roadmaps, production is called upon to provide context, input, and guidance to help make the best decision possible across a variety of development situations. Even at the junior level, producers begin to be exposed to product-wide goals and strategic plans, needing to understand the larger scope and context of the work in order to set their teams up for success. But this privilege of information, when managed poorly, can lead to tension between producers and their teams. By learning to determine what can be shared, when is the right time to share it, and how it could be communicated, producers can help manage information on their teams in a positive and productive way.",
"id": "1025920",
"speakers": "Veronica Peshterianu",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Veronica Peshterianu",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"System Era Softworks",
"Production"
],
"title": "Producer Bootcamp: What, When and How? Managing Information in a Positive and Productive Way",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Clever Endeavour Games"
],
"description": "This interactive session is designed to challenge you by presenting tough questions you haven't asked yourself about your leadership. The speaker will ask questions about cognitive diversity, active listening, ego, meeting dynamics, adaptability, and more. Between groups of questions, you will discuss with people around you to reflect on them and come up with other challenging ideas to share with the room. At the end of the talk, everyone should leave with completely different notes from one another and full of inspiration to examine their way of doing things in their team. Major themes will be roles / relationships, communication, information, and structure / planning / efficiency.",
"id": "1025921",
"speakers": "Richard Atlas",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Production",
"Richard Atlas",
"Clever Endeavour Games"
],
"title": "Producer Bootcamp: Tough Questions to Improve Your Leadership",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Netflix, ILMxLAB"
],
"description": "For the best outcomes, teams must be highly aligned on why they exist and for whom they are making a product. Lack of alignment can lead to tremendous wasted energy and churn. In this talk, the speakers will go over a method to identify and declare team cultural values, define a shared mission, and evangelize planning. They'll delve into examples of the opposing poles of command and control verses autonomy, and suggest specific methods to align teams to best support innovation. The speakers will draw upon specific learnings from the fast-paced development environment at Telltale Games (among others), and talk about the methods, metrics, and missions that have been most effective for them in their quest to increase productivity, team morale, and team innovation.",
"id": "1025922",
"speakers": "Anne Cunningham, Alyssa Finley",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Netflix",
"GDC 2019",
"ILMxLAB",
"Production & Team Management",
"Alyssa Finley",
"Anne Cunningham",
"Production"
],
"title": "Producer Bootcamp: A Producer's Guide to Enabling Intrinsically Motivated Teams",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Rochester Institute of Technology, Miami University, Concordia University, University of Utah"
],
"description": "This panel explores the difficult and often somewhat under-discussed topic of grading and assessing student work in games programs. Panelists will explore both the university and program outcomes of their respective universities, programs, centers, etc. and how these map to individual course outcomes, assignments, and rubrics, how these are implemented in practice with examples of both success and failure, and the similarities and differences between practices in games studies, communications, game design, game development, and production. Issues of evaluating individual and group work, short assignments vs. large scale projects, and work at various curricular levels and capabilities will also be explored.",
"id": "1025924",
"speakers": "Andrew Phelps, Lindsay Grace, Mia Consalvo, Roger Altizer",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Miami University",
"Educators Summit",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Andrew Phelps",
"Concordia University",
"University of Utah",
"Roger Altizer",
"Rochester Institute of Technology",
"Mia Consalvo",
"Lindsay Grace"
],
"title": "The Game of Grading: A Discussion of Grading and Assessment in Higher Ed Games Programs",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Game On The Rails"
],
"description": "Situational game design is a new design methodology that focuses on players' internal experiences rather than rules or mechanics. It's particularly useful for analyzing the moment-to-moment play of games that contain periods where the player interacts only minimally with the game's systems. This session provides a brief introduction to the fundamentals of situational design, with an eye toward instructors who might want to use it in a classroom setting.",
"id": "1025925",
"speakers": "Brian Upton",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Educators Summit",
"Brian Upton",
"Game On The Rails"
],
"title": "An Introduction to Situational Game Design",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Champlain College"
],
"description": "There has been a shift in graphics programming from the CPU to the GPU over the last two decades. Coding went from serial to parallel. For educators in the field, teaching has not been updated to reflect this massive change in landscape. Most syllabi still treat shaders as a \"latch-on\" to be taught as a more advanced topic. Having identified common conceptual roadblocks encountered with graphics programming, this talk presents \"a shader-first approach\" that puts shaders at the heart of teaching graphics from the ground-up. The talk proceeds to show how the methods can be applied to teaching in other domains as well.",
"id": "1025926",
"speakers": "Sajid Farooq",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Educators Summit",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Sajid Farooq",
"Champlain College"
],
"title": "Teaching Modern Graphics: A Shader-First Approach",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"UC Santa Cruz"
],
"description": "Game designers are adept at creating future worlds, but our collective imagination seems to be stuck on escapist fantasies, dystopias, or re-skinning the present. This session focuses on an undergraduate course entitled \"Speculative Futures: Games for a Different World\" taught at UC Santa Cruz in which students imagine what happens to our world when major societal challenges are overcome and design games that belong in their speculative futures. This talk will demonstrate how starting with a desired future can lead to novel design avenues, ignites students' political imagination, and results in a transformative classroom experience.",
"id": "1025927",
"speakers": "Marcelo Viana Neto",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Marcelo Viana Neto",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"UC Santa Cruz",
"Educators Summit"
],
"title": "Teaching Game Design for a Reimagined World",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Queensland University of Technology"
],
"description": "There are too many game developers! Each year, game development programs around the world enroll thousands of wide-eyed students. However, with the exception of a few cities in North America and Europe, jobs simply don't exist for most of these students. In this lecture, Brendan Keogh draws off extensive research and experience with teaching game education to argue the need to approach game development education like one approaches poetry or music education: not a path to a job, but a robust and flexible creative skillset. Attendees will gain concrete strategies to better prepare students for a wider range of opportunities.",
"id": "1025928",
"speakers": "Brendan Keogh",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Brendan Keogh",
"Queensland University of Technology",
"Educators Summit"
],
"title": "Are Games Art School? How to Teach Game Development When There Are No Jobs",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"University of Tampere"
],
"description": "Besides teaching technical game development skills, game educators have to prepare students for the fact that there will be humans on the other side of their games. These humans have lived experiences which can both inspire and innovate design tools. This session discusses Jocoi, a project course in which a group of engineering students worked with grievers to create a game about pregnancy loss. The presentation introduces methods, risks, and outcomes of the development process, highlighting why care is an essential game design skill to be taught in contemporary classrooms. The talk shows how care-based design skills can especially add to computer science and engineering education by grounding technology in real life cases.",
"id": "1025929",
"speakers": "Sabine Harrer",
"tags": [
"Sabine Harrer",
"University of Tampere",
"member content",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Educators Summit"
],
"title": "Games that Care: Lessons from Teaching Grief Based Game Design",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"University of Utah"
],
"description": "Learn about the different kinds of institutional support initiatives that video game development programs worldwide provide for their students to help them become better game developers, fund their studies, and/or find employment opportunities in industry. Examples that will be discussed include the different kinds of showcase events game programs organize for their students (juried shows, end-of-semester showcases, etc.), student game clubs, game jams, various mentoring programs, game-specific scholarships, participation in commercial game events, and more. All examples will come from a multi-month interview study conducted by the speaker.",
"id": "1025930",
"speakers": "Jose Zagal",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Educators Summit",
"Jose Zagal",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"University of Utah"
],
"title": "Jams, Clubs, Shows and More: An Overview of Institutional Support for Game Students",
"track": "Educators Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent, NYU Game Center, King, Playmatics, King"
],
"description": "There are many game design topics that don't require an hour to discuss, but can be useful as tips, or food for thought, for seasoned mobile game designers. Part microtalk, part design review, the MGDN is the session at the GDC Mobile Summit where experienced mobile game designers pick somebody else's game, or a trend in mobile game design, and dissect it. This year, this session will discuss procedurally generated content using books in the public domain, fashion as an element of gameplay in a role-playing game, and players' feelings when they make purchases in mobile games.",
"id": "1025931",
"speakers": "Alexander King, Eric Zimmerman, Kenny Dinkin, Nicholas Fortugno, Fawzi Mesmar",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"NYU Game Center",
"member content",
"Alexander King",
"King",
"GDC 2019",
"Nicholas Fortugno",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games",
"Mobile Summit",
"Playmatics",
"Kenny Dinkin",
"Fawzi Mesmar",
"Eric Zimmerman"
],
"title": "Mobile Game Designers Notebook 2019",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Runaway, Dream Primer, Spry Fox"
],
"description": "Postmortems do a disservice to the industry because a) they assume a game is done when released (when no game today ends after its first release), and b) they mostly talk about the same issues (\"we crunched a lot!\", \"it was much harder than we thought!\", etc). So this session asks 3 mobile game developers with great games to come talk about some specific aspects of the design or the production process that made their game unique. This year the speakers will discuss incremental updates to improve monetization in 'Furistas Cat Cafe', iteration design in 'Alphabear 2', and how the developers of 'Eternium' did not give up and after many releases over the course of many years they have become one of the most popular action rpg games on Android.",
"id": "1025932",
"speakers": "Jeff Laird, Serban Serafimescu, Graham Pentheny",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Spry Fox",
"Dream Primer",
"Mobile Summit",
"Graham Pentheny",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games",
"Jeff Laird",
"Serban Serafimescu",
"Runaway"
],
"title": "Mobile Indie Game Dev Stories",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Scopely"
],
"description": "The job of the game designer doesn't stop once players start playing the game, it's only just beginning. Whether a small beta test or a global launch, player actions can provide a wealth of information about how your game really works. This session will cover how to use data to make your game even better and how it was used for the launch of 'Looney Tunes: World of Mayhem'. Go beyond tracking product metrics and learn to use analytics to track exactly what players are doing and how you can use that to improve your design. Join veteran mobile designer Evan Losi and explore the deep world of data-driven design.",
"id": "1025933",
"speakers": "Evan Losi",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Scopely",
"Evan Losi",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games"
],
"title": "Design by the Numbers: Using Data for Good",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Rovio"
],
"description": "For every successful game, there are plenty of mistakes made along the way. Mans Wide, product lead of 'Angry Birds 2', made a lot of bad calls during the production of \"the biggest sequel ever made\". This session will share the biggest mistakes made and what the 'Angry Bird 2' team (hopefully) learned from them. In this session, you will hear 3 important lessons that took Mans over 4 years to learn. What were the mistakes, what were the actions they took to fix them, and what were the lessons learned? Mans will answer these questions.",
"id": "1025934",
"speakers": "Mans Wide",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Mans Wide",
"Mobile Summit",
"Rovio",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games"
],
"title": "Top 3 Mistakes of 'Angry Birds 2'",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Google Maps Platform"
],
"description": "Last year at GDC, the Google Maps Platform team launched a gaming solution that has begun transforming the mobile game industry. Game developers are now able to build immersive real-world games powered by Google Maps' understanding of the real-world's dynamism. This talk will share insights from their first wave of real-world game launches. Learn how Mixi, creator of the long-time successful puzzle game, 'Monster Strike', added real-world \"MonSpots\" to boost engagement and allow players to take the game with them anywhere. See how Next Games, creator of 'The Walking Dead: Our World,' used Google Maps Platform to design gameplay that strengthened through teaming up players from different parts of the world and leveraging their unique surroundings. Attend this talk for a preview of what Google Maps Platform is launching in 2019 to push the limits of this rapidly emerging genre and enable gamers to interact with the real world in ways never possible before.",
"id": "1025935",
"speakers": "Serena Chang",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"Serena Chang",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games",
"Google Maps Platform"
],
"title": "Push the Limits of Real-World Gaming",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Pixel Federation"
],
"description": "Having day 1 retention under 20% means, by the book, that you should kill your game as soon as possible. Creating tons of new content as your main tool for progression and monetization is the most ineffective idea you can have and it can make your company deplete all its resources soon. Is it really so? This talk will show you that not all generally considered best practices are a must if you have the will to commit to your cause, understand what you're doing right and work step by step on improvements. In this session, Alex will take you through the timeline of 'TrainStation', a project which has been successful for over 8 years (and still counting) and give you an interesting insight into how it all went right, even when it should have gone wrong.",
"id": "1025936",
"speakers": "Alexander Pavelek",
"tags": [
"Alexander Pavelek",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games",
"Pixel Federation"
],
"title": "Not Always by the Book: Successful Against the Odds",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Next Games, Next Games/Nightscout"
],
"description": "The 'Walking Dead: Our World' is a simple location-based game about shooting walkers in your real environment. As the player learns the ropes, however, seemingly small layers of decision-making depth are added on the simple core loop. As the map location provides players with opportunities, and resource limitations restrict their choices, the players need to balance opportunities and risks to optimize their gameplay. Several novel social mechanics create this smart depth, including player-created buildings persisting in location, complex 25-player challenges where players need to play their strengths, and flares that allow players limited movement on the map.",
"id": "1025937",
"speakers": "Markus Montola, Sulka Haro",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Next Games/Nightscout",
"Sulka Haro",
"GDC 2019",
"Mobile Summit",
"Next Games",
"Markus Montola",
"Smartphone / Tablet Games"
],
"title": "Social Depth of Location-Based Play in 'The Walking Dead: Our World'",
"track": "Mobile Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft Quebec"
],
"description": "For audio teams world-wide the complexity of game design, quest for quality, pace of iteration, and sometimes the massive scale means you need to build systems that are responsive and flexible. At Ubisoft Quebec, the audio team realized that their game designs were now in demand of a new approach to audio; one that is more systemic. They could not rely on a traditional manual, minute-by-minute approach to audio design, integration and mixing. This presentation will cover why this is important, how the Ubisoft audio team embraced systemic audio on 'Assassins Creed Odyssey', and how they created and used tools and pipelines to support their internal development with a central focus on the player experience. The session will also cover how the team approached the complexity of constructing, recording and integrating voice, how you can improve the approach to interactive music to support character, emotion and player choice, as well as how the team aimed to maintain consistency of player experience with Foley, sfx, and ambiences. Finally, this lecture will discuss how Ubisoft brought all these elements together through systems that were a friend, not enemy, to creativity.",
"id": "1025938",
"speakers": "Lydia Andrew",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Lydia Andrew",
"Audio",
"Ubisoft Quebec"
],
"title": "Audio Bootcamp XVIII: How a Systemic Approach to Game Audio Increased Creativity and Productivity for 'Assassin's Creed Odyssey'",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "This is a joint session consisting of two 30-minute lectures, \"Theatrical Interactivity in Video Game Music\" and \"Good, Fast Audio Implementation for 3D Games and VR\".Theatrical Interactivity in Video Game Music John Robert Matz (Composer, Independent)Modern video game scores have advanced far beyond simple loops. A skilled composer can write music for any scenario the player might encounter, and current technology allows for astounding levels of control and elegant, musical transitions and interactivity between game and score. In this talk, John will examine multiple techniques for crafting reactive scores, from strategic decisions on overall structure, to the use of middleware, to compositional choices that can increase flexibility while reducing player ear-fatigue and enhance emotional, dramatic impact.Good, Fast Audio Implementation for 3D Games and VREmily Ridgway (Composer, Valve Software)This session outlines techniques to achieve immersive audio coverage in your 3D game or VR project quickly and to a high level of quality. Emily will cover both basic and detailed implementation strategies that allow sound designers and non-sound designers to scale audio quality according to their constraints. Examples will be demonstrated in Unity.",
"id": "1025939",
"speakers": "John Robert Matz",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Independent",
"member content",
"Audio",
"John Robert Matz"
],
"title": "Audio Bootcamp XVIII: Theatrical Interactivity in Video Game Music",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Rovio"
],
"description": "This is a journey of self doubt and climbing the mountain without a peak that is 'Angry Birds 2'. Filip Conic will give you an in depth look at how to create audio systems that scale and continue to keep players engaged with audio. This is a story about managing your own, but also your audience's expectations. How do you make the birds louder, bigger and angrier than the last update?",
"id": "1025940",
"speakers": "Filip Conic",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Rovio",
"member content",
"Filip Conic",
"Audio"
],
"title": "Audio Bootcamp XVIII: 'Angry Birds 2': How Audio Changes Everything",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"DB Cooper VO, LLC"
],
"description": "Let's talk about auditioning, casting, and directing voices for game narration and dialogue. This lecture will discuss the casting process, how to talk to actors, and the value of a good director. The goal is excellent VO; the journey starts the moment you add dialogue to your game.",
"id": "1025941",
"speakers": "DB Cooper",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"DB Cooper",
"Audio",
"DB Cooper VO, LLC"
],
"title": "Audio Bootcamp XVIII: Developing Voices",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"G-Musique"
],
"description": "Composers and implementors of music and sound design for interactive media face an artistic and technical challenge that is unique among all other forms of screen music and sound: the seamless, non-annoying loop. The history of game sound has seen this challenge approached in many ways, (including ignoring it outright!) yet some of the precious-few books on game music fail to mention the most tried-and-true loop trick of all time! 14-year game music veteran Gerard Marino will blast through 7 field- tested looping techniques and strategies currently being used in AAA-console games, Indie-mobile games, and VR experiences alike. Steinberg's Nuendo (Cubase's big brother), arguably the most game sound friendly DAW, will be used to demonstrate these techniques live in real time.",
"id": "1025942",
"speakers": "Gerard Marino",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"G-Musique",
"member content",
"Audio",
"Gerard Marino"
],
"title": "Audio Bootcamp XVIII: Loop Clinic: Seamless and Fatigue-Free Music and Sound Design Looping Techniques for Interactive Entertainment",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sound Librarian"
],
"description": "Spatial audio for VR can be quite complex. If it's not approached in the right way it can also seriously reduce the impact of a VR project. However, help is at hand! With a little guidance, you can learn everything you need to know about VR audio using the example of the family car. Using this common everyday object will allow you to analyse commonly understood elements of audio and speak in terms everyone can all understand as a method for digging into an otherwise complex challenge. In this presentation, the speaker will investigate how to maximize the impact of virtual reality audio by understanding which aspects are the most critical and which can be leveraged to increase the impact for your audience.",
"id": "1025943",
"speakers": "Stephan Schutze",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Stephan Schutze",
"member content",
"Sound Librarian",
"Audio"
],
"title": "Audio Bootcamp XVIII: Everything You Need to Know About VR Audio Can Be Learned from Your Car",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Visager"
],
"description": "Maintaining a freelancing career can seem daunting, especially when it feels like you're surrounded by competition. How can you ditch this competitive feeling and instead prioritize forging open and collaborative relationships with your peers in audio? What's the best way to advocate for yourself and your art, meet new developers, negotiate rates, and more? In this talk, one audio designer will share the lessons she's learned that have helped her feel confident and supported as an indie freelance artist.",
"id": "1025944",
"speakers": "Josie Brechner",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Josie Brechner",
"Visager",
"Audio"
],
"title": "Audio Bootcamp XVIII: Indie Freelancing: Creating Community and Collaboration",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Epic Games"
],
"description": "Come learn powerful techniques for applying distance fields with shaders in UE4. This talk goes over various ways to source distance field data both from within UE4 and from external programs and demonstrates practical examples you can apply to any project. Examples range from simple material blending tricks to fully dynamic methods, such as artistically modeled fluid simulation. On the blending side, this session will go over how to achieve automated blending of objects such as rock meshes into terrain. On the simulation side, learn how to combine distance fields with flowmaps to make rivers flow around obstacles, creating white-water automatically, and learn how ocean waves can be made to crash against beach rocks while synchronizing related effects such as splashes.",
"id": "1025945",
"speakers": "Ryan Brucks",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Epic Games",
"Ryan Brucks"
],
"title": "Technical Artist Bootcamp: Distance Fields and Shader Simulation Tricks",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "One of the visual pillars of 'Marvel's Spider-Man' was to have believable cloth-solutions that helped to sell Insomniac's shared vision of the incredible cast and meet the high standards set in today's AAA market. Discussed here are the techniques and tools used to author, iterate and polish content. Also covered is what challenges real-time cloth brought, what cloth could and could not be used for, and how to develop and improve the internal pipeline to speed up workflows.",
"id": "1025946",
"speakers": "Sophie Brennan",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Insomniac Games",
"Sophie Brennan",
"member content",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Technical Artist Bootcamp: Real-Time Cloth Solutions on 'Marvel's Spider-Man'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Funomena"
],
"description": "In this session, Funomena's Garrett Stevens will provide a brief survey of graphics profiling and debugging techniques for the technical artist. Time will be spent using tools such as RenderDoc and Nvidia's Tegra Debugger to find low hanging fruit, and then making practical changes to example shaders and VFX.",
"id": "1025947",
"speakers": "Garrett Stevens",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Garrett Stevens",
"Funomena",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Technical Artist Bootcamp: Gotta Go Fast: Shader Optimization for Tech Artists",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"The Creative Assembly"
],
"description": "Sometimes, hacks are necessary to get things working and shipped; this is a reality of game development. But what do you do with them once production pressure eases? This talk will go into techniques and practices for how to deal with old hacks, and how to create new ones that can organically grow into full implementations, with practical examples from the most recent 'Total War' games. This session will go into how The Creative Assembly team increased their production flexibility, and how, by temporarily automating parts of their production using basic, quickly implemented tools, they were able to identify sustainable methods of automation.",
"id": "1025948",
"speakers": "Mattias Van Camp",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Mattias Van Camp",
"The Creative Assembly",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Technical Artist Bootcamp: Cementing Your Duct Tape: Turning Hacks into Tools",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"SideFX Software, Remedy Entertainment"
],
"description": "This is a joint session of two 30-minute lectures, \"Understanding Constraints: A Framework for Tech Art Decision Making\" and \"Tech Art at Scale: Supporting 2,000 Users\".Understanding Constraints: A Framework for Tech Art Decision MakingAlexander Zotikov, (Technical Artist, Remedy Entertainment)The first step to making any decision in a technical art pipeline is to identify constraints. Every game has varying requirements, employees of different backgrounds and cultures, and technical limitations that must be taken into consideration. To effectively make decisions, you must collaborate with stakeholders, communicate effectively, and validate your assumptions. Sometimes, it is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day problem solving without recognizing bad practices or patterns in the bigger picture. By highlighting practical examples, this talk will help you identify the constraints that affect your projects and steps you can take to make decisions that will expand technical opportunities in the futureTech Art at Scale: Supporting 2,000 UsersLuiz Kruel, (Senior Tech Artist, SideFX Software)A practical guide on how to develop tools at a large scale and support a growing number of users, most of which you might not have direct contact with. Plenty of examples on how to support your users in a chaotic live environment and some interesting insights on the industry trends from an outside perspective.",
"id": "1025949",
"speakers": "Luiz Kruel, Alexander Zotikov",
"tags": [
"Luiz Kruel",
"member content",
"Visual Arts",
"GDC 2019",
"Alexander Zotikov",
"SideFX Software",
"Remedy Entertainment"
],
"title": "Technical Artist Bootcamp: \"Understanding Constraints: A Framework for Tech Art Decision Making\" & \"Tech Art at Scale: Supporting 2,000 Users\"",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"ArenaNet"
],
"description": "How do you track and export the many types of assets and their associated data in your DCC pipeline? Magic naming conventions break so easily, and networked nodes can be hard to update. Come learn how to implement your own MetaNode system! This lecture will cover a Python class to track objects in your scene and offer a clear path to query, update and serialize your data. Join this session and start managing your assets like the large scale art teams.",
"id": "1025950",
"speakers": "Andrew Christophersen",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Andrew Christophersen",
"ArenaNet",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Technical Artist Bootcamp: The Dual Power of Metanodes in Maya",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Toyota Motor North America/SFTech4Good, Visionary Realms, ModSquad, Escapist Magazine, Enthusiast Gaming, Giant Space Monster, Multiplay/Unity"
],
"description": "Gamers cover a wonderful and diverse range of humanity, and their CMs need to reflect that diversity too. This will be a discussion featuring diverse community managers who all work or have previously worked in gaming. The speakers will talk about how they do their work and what they think are ways to improve the numbers. Topics covered by the speakers include: how they do their jobs as community managers, how to bring your full-self to work, how to get qualified candidates successfully through theinterview pipeline, and how to make sure diverse candidates want to stay once they've joined your team.",
"id": "1025951",
"speakers": "Regina Walton, Linda Carlson, Kyle Gaddo, Winter Mullenix, Deborah Oyeyinka",
"tags": [
"Community Management Summit",
"member content",
"Deborah Oyeyinka",
"GDC 2019",
"Giant Space Monster",
"Kyle Gaddo",
"Escapist Magazine, Enthusiast Gaming",
"Community Management",
"Toyota Motor North America/SFTech4Good",
"Regina Walton",
"Winter Mullenix",
"Multiplay/Unity",
"Visionary Realms, ModSquad",
"Linda Carlson"
],
"title": "From the Trenches: Moving the Diversity Needle in Community Management",
"track": "Community Management Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"5CA, Wooga, Viveport at HTC"
],
"description": "So you've accepted a role as a manager... now what? The skills you learned as an individual contributor got you where you are, but building and managing a team brings new (and often terrifying) challenges. This talk will cover building, growing, and managing your player experience team(s) from four different perspectives. This session's speakers will be covering hiring, growing your team, rebuilding teams after organizational changes, managing multiple disciplines, working with international teams, handling the hard discussions, and more. Come with your questions ready for the Q&A!",
"id": "1025952",
"speakers": "Tara Brannigan, Richard Kiernan, Stephen Reid",
"tags": [
"Community Management Summit",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Viveport at HTC",
"Stephen Reid",
"Community Management",
"Richard Kiernan",
"Tara Brannigan",
"5CA",
"Wooga"
],
"title": "The Care and Feeding of Your Player Experience Team(s)",
"track": "Community Management Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Big Huge Games"
],
"description": "An in-depth look at 5 ways community management is handled for the mobile strategy game 'DomiNations'. Speaker Greg Lane will discuss how leaning on external skills (theater performance, 3D modeling, QA testing, cross-country tours, and more) can improve your social campaigns and provide something unique and new for your audience.",
"id": "1025953",
"speakers": "Greg Lane",
"tags": [
"Community Management Summit",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Greg Lane",
"Big Huge Games",
"Community Management"
],
"title": "5 Cross-Class Skills to Better Community Management",
"track": "Community Management Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Funktronic Labs"
],
"description": "'Killer Queen Arcade' is a competitive indie arcade game that has managed to create an esports community around a 5 on 5 arcade game...in 2018! From community-led monthly regional tournaments to the annual National BumbleBash Tournament, Killer Queen has created a phenomenon through a lot of hard work, clever design, and ground level efforts to build local communities. Learn about how 'Killer Queen' managed to create a national esport without having to spend like a AAA gaming studio.",
"id": "1025954",
"speakers": "Alan Dang",
"tags": [
"Community Management Summit",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Funktronic Labs",
"Community Management",
"Alan Dang"
],
"title": "How 'Killer Queen' Built an Esports Scene on an Indie Budget",
"track": "Community Management Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Rarebyte"
],
"description": "When the Austrian studio Rarebyte started working on their action adventure rogue-like 'Seeds of Sol', they decided to livestream parts of its development. Getting visibility for an indie title is strongly tied to building up a community around the game. In this session, Rainer Angermann talks about how the company uses the gaming-broadcasting network Twitch as one of their primary methods for community-building for both their games and the company. He discusses issues, learnings, and pitfalls when developing live with and especially for a community.",
"id": "1025955",
"speakers": "Rainer Angermann",
"tags": [
"Community Management Summit",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Community Management",
"Rainer Angermann",
"Rarebyte"
],
"title": "Building a Community with Development and Playtesting Streams",
"track": "Community Management Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Uken Games"
],
"description": "In free-to-play mobile gaming, the needs of your players and the goals of your organization are often at odds with one another. Players want to play more often, earn more currency or even change the balance of the game to their benefit. For a product team, this can lead to lost revenue or decreased retention and engagement over long enough periods of time. This talk will review ways you can work with your community and internal teams to provide the best experience for both parties.",
"id": "1025956",
"speakers": "Nick van Vugt",
"tags": [
"Community Management Summit",
"member content",
"Uken Games",
"GDC 2019",
"Community Management",
"Nick van Vugt"
],
"title": "Balancing Community and Business: Walking the Tightrope of Needs",
"track": "Community Management Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Visionary Realms, ModSquad"
],
"description": "Data is king. Data analytics are the be-all and end-all... but cold hard numbers cannot tell the story of your player communities alone. In this short presentation, Linda Carlson will challenge the current worship of numbers and discuss why you must never forget the human factors and emotion emanating your player bases. She will outline why it matters, and how to carry the ameliorating message of thoughts and feelings forward to an oft disbelieving audience within the company.",
"id": "1025957",
"speakers": "Linda Carlson",
"tags": [
"Community Management Summit",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Community Management",
"Visionary Realms, ModSquad",
"Linda Carlson"
],
"title": "Humanity: Beyond Data in Communities",
"track": "Community Management Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Earplay"
],
"description": "As voice is increasingly recognized as a viable entertainment space, new creators can benefit from the techniques and experiences (and blunders) of those who have gone before. Earplay's recent adaptation of a physical escape room to a Jack Ryan-themed interactive story on Alexa provides the framework to discuss the ins and outs of story creation for voice platforms, adaptations between media, and how to direct an exploratory experience when the audience cannot see anything at all.",
"id": "1025958",
"speakers": "Dave Grossman",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Game Narrative",
"Dave Grossman",
"Earplay"
],
"title": "The Invisible Escape Room: Adapting Jack Ryan for Alexa",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Serious Games Australia & New Zealand, IGDA Serious Games SIG, MMOS, Eline Media"
],
"description": "For the last 30 years, the entertainment has been the core value of the game industry. Yet in an ever-expanding market, merely being entertaining is not enough to remain competitive. Authentic experiences, moments that resonate with players, and inspiring learning through play are what let games rise above merely being fun, though how to do this is rarely discussed. In this panel, practitioners working on transformational games will discuss their secret sauce: how they blend research, conversations with communities, and collaborations with academia into emergent and embedded narratives, creating authentic experiences for AAA, indies, and beyond.",
"id": "1025959",
"speakers": "Kathleen Yin, Matthew Lee, Attila Szantner, Michael Angst",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Kathleen Yin",
"Michael Angst",
"GDC 2019",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Eline Media",
"Game Narrative",
"Attila Szantner",
"Serious Games Australia & New Zealand",
"MMOS",
"Matthew Lee",
"IGDA Serious Games SIG"
],
"title": "Keeping It Real: Authenticity, Anthropology and Artistry in Interactive Narrative",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Schnoodle Media, LLC, E-Line Media, ArenaNet, Independent, Earplay, Obsidian Entertainment"
],
"description": "How do newer writers fit into game design and narrative design teams? Do writers coming from the worlds of film and comics have advantages getting work over prose writers? Is it easier to be a freelancer or employee? Especially for individuals with little experience and those looking to break in, this session encourages participants to ask veteran writers and narrative designers questions without definitive answers. Anyone working with writers is also encouraged to attend. Whether it's finding the right job, leading writers and improving team dynamics, or establishing rates, no question about the business of game writing is off limits.",
"id": "1025960",
"speakers": "Toiya Kristen Finley, Whitney \"Strix\" Beltran, Bobby Stein, Evan Skolnick, Dave Grossman, Carrie Patel",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"Obsidian Entertainment",
"GDC 2019",
"Dave Grossman",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Carrie Patel",
"ArenaNet",
"Game Narrative",
"Schnoodle Media, LLC",
"member content",
"E-Line Media",
"Whitney \"Strix\" Beltran",
"Evan Skolnick",
"Earplay",
"Toiya Kristen Finley",
"Bobby Stein"
],
"title": "It's Not in the Writer's Manual: A Q&A Session for New Writers",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Splash Damage, Ltd."
],
"description": "How does one actually get into the fabulous, mysterious, and glamorous* field of Narrative Design? This is the lecture that Khan, a twelve-year industry veteran ('Lord of the Rings Online', 'Gears: Tactics'), wishes she'd heard at the start of her career. She will give concrete tips for tailoring applications, portfolios, and interviews for narrative design rather than for game writing or game design roles; acing interviews by understanding teams' narrative needs; navigating the choices of home or abroad, indie or corporate, AAA or free-to-play; and, once feet are in doors, tips and best practices for succeeding as a rookie narrative designer.*Spoiler alert: as is the case for most design jobs, ND sounds more glamorous than it is. We, too, do a lot of our work in Excel.",
"id": "1025961",
"speakers": "Ayesha Khan",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Ayesha Khan",
"GDC 2019",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Splash Damage, Ltd.",
"Game Narrative"
],
"title": "Plunge into Storytelling: Transitioning into Narrative Design from Other Disciplines",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Obsidian Entertainment, Obsidian Entertainment"
],
"description": "Strong dialogue tools are crucial to developing games with branching narrative. A good conversation editor should allow designers to shape and view the structure of dialogue files, seamlessly write and edit text, and easily integrate dialogue with game scripting.This talk will address how narrative designers and game writers can get the most use out of conversation editors and how tools programmers can design software that allows for robust conversation design. The presenters will refer to OEI Tools, a proprietary dialogue editor that Obsidian Entertainment's writers have used for eight years to develop conversations for several acclaimed RPG titles.",
"id": "1025962",
"speakers": "Carrie Patel, David Szymczyk",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Obsidian Entertainment",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Game Narrative",
"Carrie Patel",
"David Szymczyk"
],
"title": "Technical Tools for Authoring Branching Dialogue",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Thorny Games"
],
"description": "Story games (or Indie RPGs) are currently doing some of the most dangerous and innovative explorations into narrative design across all of gaming. While classics like 'Fiasco' and 'Microscope' are increasingly gathering more attention, there are many more recent games that have largely gone unnoticed to the broader design community.Let's fix that. What's a story game, and what's their history? What design patterns have they gone through and where are they now? Most importantly, what can narrative designers across all mediums learn from them in order to tell deeper more resonating stories?",
"id": "1025963",
"speakers": "Kathryn Hymes",
"tags": [
"Thorny Games",
"member content",
"Kathryn Hymes",
"GDC 2019",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Game Narrative"
],
"title": "Lessons for Narrative Design from Modern Tabletop RPG",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"King"
],
"description": "Does a mobile game need narrative design if it doesn't have a deep story, or even if it's \"just\" a puzzle game? Although most mobile players don't read, there is research that shows the same players also want to know more about the story and characters for a sense of purpose, motivation, and gratification. So how do players get a satisfying context without being bombarded with tap-heavy dialogues or drawn-out cutscenes? This session will look at how to design narratives that contextualize gameplay in mobile games, and the best practices for optimizing narrative opportunities.",
"id": "1025964",
"speakers": "Tracey John",
"tags": [
"King",
"member content",
"Tracey John",
"GDC 2019",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Game Narrative"
],
"title": "Storytelling in Small Spaces: Practical Narrative Design for Mobile Games",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "As the industry moves towards a more inclusive and diverse future, disability representation still has a long way to go. With a passion for diversity and experience in accessibility and inclusion, Cherry explores why representation is so powerful, why the industry keeps getting it so wrong and how game designers might be able to do better in the future. Exclusion is never intentional, but when mistakes are made it can alienate people. Be prepared for some moving personal anecdotes reinforced by the community as this session presents a frank look at how to better include the 30% of players that are disabled.",
"id": "1025965",
"speakers": "Cherry Thompson",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Game Narrative Summit",
"Game Narrative",
"Cherry Thompson"
],
"title": "You Can Take an Arrow to the Knee and Still Be an Adventurer",
"track": "Game Narrative Summit"
},
{
"companies": [
"Execution Labs, Makers Fund, Signia Venture Partners, Play Ventures"
],
"description": "Five GDC Play studios have been selected to pitch their games to an opinionated panel of investors and publishers, in front of a live audience (no pressure!) followed by questions, advice, and feedback before the judges declare the day's \"Best Pitch\" and award a free GDC 2020 All Access pass. Each year, the theater fills to capacity, as the developers compete for the judges' praise.Day 1 Judges:Jay Chi (Makers Fund)Sunny Dhillon (Signia Venture Partners)Harri Manninen (Play Ventures)",
"id": "1025966",
"speakers": "Jason Della Rocca, Jay Chi, Sunny Dhillon, Harri Manninen",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Signia Venture Partners",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Harri Manninen",
"Execution Labs",
"Jason Della Rocca",
"Play Ventures",
"Jay Chi",
"Sunny Dhillon",
"Career Development",
"Makers Fund"
],
"title": "GDC Pitch: Day 1",
"track": "Career Development"
},
{
"companies": [
"SocialPoint"
],
"description": "Everyone agrees data has value, but the unspoken truth is that data and game development often compete over the same resources. Deciding to log user actions can mean having less features in the version. Deciding to A/B test can mean delaying the next version until you have a conclusion. So, how can you use data in a way that maximizes business value but minimizes the cost to game teams? Can you build your analytics to power game decision without slowing them down? You can.Sharing take aways from his experience at Plarium and SocialPoint, Social Point CDO, Aviv Stern, will demonstrate how theyused data to help studios understand their users without breaking their pace, adhering to a 'lean startup' strategy. In this session, you'll specifically learn how they: Created self service analytics systems that let game teams track and analyze user behavior autonomously. Changed the A/B testing methodologies to be able to quickly run an A/B test in a new game with very few users. And how they created data systems that let games use \"plug and play\" analytics across studios and geos.",
"id": "1025967",
"speakers": "Aviv Stern",
"tags": [
"SocialPoint",
"member content",
"Aviv Stern",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Production"
],
"title": "Using Lean Analytics to Make Better Games",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Activision"
],
"description": "Low input latency is key to a satisfying experience in competitive games, but reasoning about latency can be non-intuitive in modern engines with multiple parallel timelines running at once. This talk will tackle latency by analyzing the path that data flows through a game engine from the input sample all the way to the video scan-out hardware. By identifying and measuring segments on this path, a dynamic throttle can be implemented to squeeze the input sample as close to the end of the frame as possible without dropping frames. Special attention will be placed on how latency is introduced in the interaction between the GPU and display scan-out timelines when Vsync is enabled.",
"id": "1025968",
"speakers": "Akimitsu Hogge",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Akimitsu Hogge",
"Activision",
"Programming",
"member content"
],
"title": "Controller to Display Latency in 'Call of Duty'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "'God of War' is developed on a proprietary engine at Santa Monica Studio. During the course of development it became clear that a more rigorous and scalable technology solution was needed for designing, authoring, and transforming the vast amount of disparate data being introduced into the game and content pipeline. This lecture will focus on the design, implementation, and architecture decisions that were made in creating a data description system to satisfy the requirements for a game the size and scale of 'God of War.'",
"id": "1025969",
"speakers": "Koray Hagen",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"member content",
"Koray Hagen",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"title": "The Future of Scene Description on 'God of War'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Bungie"
],
"description": "Do you want to reduce randomization of your studio's content creators, tech artists, and engineers so they can focus on their actual jobs? What if there was a person they could go to with any random question about your studio's tools, game engine, and content setup? What if there was an entire team of people whose time was dedicated to unblocking your studio's game creators, regardless of discipline? And not just unblocking, but also seeking out the root of what's getting in their way?At Bungie, these people are production engineers. They are a team committed to improving studio wide tools efficiency and workflow quality of life. Come learn about Bungie's production engineers and how your studio could benefit from the role!",
"id": "1025970",
"speakers": "Jo King-Yost",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Bungie",
"Production",
"Jo King-Yost"
],
"title": "Bungie's Force Multipliers: Production Engineers",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "Animation Director Robert Coddington of Insomniac Games will present his teams development of traversal and combat for 'Spiderman PS4'.",
"id": "1025971",
"speakers": "Robert Coddington",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Robert Coddington",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Insomniac Games"
],
"title": "The Animation of 'Marvel's Spider-Man'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "Let the wind simulation in 'God of War' blow you away! In this session, Sony Santa Monica Studio's Senior Programmer Rupert Renard will discuss the full 3D GPU fluid simulation and reasons why it's useful, share the secret sauce for speed and utility, and also what did and didn't work.",
"id": "1025972",
"speakers": "Rupert Renard",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio",
"Rupert Renard"
],
"title": "Wind Simulation in 'God of War'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "'God of War' disintegrates meshes just like Kratos' disintegrates his enemies. The Sony Santa Monica Studio created this new particle emission technique to remove corpses from the screen, but uses its versatility for so much more!",
"id": "1025973",
"speakers": "Rupert Renard",
"tags": [
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio",
"Rupert Renard"
],
"title": "Disintegrating Meshes with Particles in 'God of War'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Seriously"
],
"description": "The relationship between brands and audiences has changed. As a result, there's an opportunity to build a deep, two-way relationship with your fan base. The Seriously team set out to challenge the conventional way entertainment brands are created and distributed by building an entertainment franchise that starts with a mobile game, 'Best Fiends'. Throughout that process, the team prioritized community engagement and enabled the fan base to go deeper into the world. As a result, Seriously has built the foundation of a franchise that its audience feels a special connection with. In this session, Andrew Stalbow, CEO and Co-founder at Seriously, will share the company's marketing learnings designed to help you think about the different ways to approach community building for your brand.",
"id": "1025976",
"speakers": "Andrew Stalbow",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Seriously",
"Andrew Stalbow",
"Business & Marketing"
],
"title": "Fostering an Online Community: A Beginner's Guide to Success",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"ALICE Studios, Ubisoft"
],
"description": "Traditional motion capture and post-processing has evolved over the years with improved software and practices, but the steps involved to produce clean animation are still accomplished through a hybrid of automated tasks and manual intervention. This talk will explore some of the latest advancements in performance capture at Ubisoft's ALICE studios and focus on improvements to their shoot floor and process time. With the research coming from Ubisoft La Forge into developing neural networks to automatically clean up captured data, they are close to providing a fully automated solution to deliver animation to the client. The presentation will look at the implementation and challenges involved in transforming the traditional performance capture pipeline into one that encapsulates these new research endeavors and the speaker will provide practical advice on how to use machine learning research in a data pipeline through relating the studio's experiences with the process. The talk will also explore some new technologies and approaches that are improving their capture studio that all contribute to a fully automated motion capture processing solution.",
"id": "1025977",
"speakers": "Stephen Shaw",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"ALICE Studios, Ubisoft",
"Stephen Shaw",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Rethinking Your Performance Capture Pipeline with Machine Learning",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "Join Ed Dearien as he discusses how playtesting impacted the development of 'God of War' (2018)! You'll get a look into how Sony's Santa Monica Studio approached playtesting, and hear about the the key takeaways and insights the team had along the way. At the end of the session, Kevin Keeker and Jeet Shroff of Santa Monica Studio and PlayStation's User Research Team will join him for Q&A.",
"id": "1025978",
"speakers": "Ed Dearien, Kevin Keeker, Jeet Shroff",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Sony Interactive Entertainment",
"Jeet Shroff",
"Design",
"Ed Dearien",
"Kevin Keeker",
"Production",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"title": "Playtesting 'God of War'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"description": "Creating a very simplistic visual aesthetic can seem like the most cost effective choice for games but what is the cost visually and how can you take what's simple and make it more compelling regardless of its visual complexity?This talk will cover the fundamentals of visual design, what makes simple images compelling, and how to apply these concepts in 3D where the control of the camera's focus can often go anywhere.",
"id": "1025979",
"speakers": "Dan Cox",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Dan Cox",
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"title": "Creating Captivating and Simple Visuals: The Power of Intentional Design",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft Quebec"
],
"description": "'Assassin's Creed Odyssey' introduces interactive cinematic dialogues to the franchise for the first time, offering about 30 hours of cinematic content. Around 15% of these scenes are fully procedural and all the scenes still contain some procedural elements in some form. In this talk, Francois Paradis, Programming Team Lead, presents his team's approach to generating all aspects of a cinematic scene, including staging, acting, editing, framing and lighting. He also explains how procedural content generation can complement the work of cinematic designers who can use such a system to speed up their work. Finally, some challenges encountered during the production of 'Assassin's Creed Odyssey' will be examined.",
"id": "1025980",
"speakers": "Francois Paradis",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Francois Paradis",
"Ubisoft Quebec"
],
"title": "Procedural Generation of Cinematic Dialogues in 'Assassin's Creed Odyssey'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Secret Lab"
],
"description": "Programmers are used to their compilers catching tiny logic problems in their code. When you're a writer, it's harder to catch these problems. Wouldn't it be nice if you could run an error-checker on your dialogue?In this talk, Jon Manning (Secret Lab) will discuss how techniques from compiler design, like symbolic execution and control flow graph analysis, can be used to spot problems in your dialogue. For example, it's possible to prove that a certain branch of dialogue can never be reached because earlier decisions made by the player will always render that choice unavailable.Come and learn how to get started with these techniques, and how to use them in your own games to check for problems and to make life easier for testers!",
"id": "1025981",
"speakers": "Jon Manning",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Secret Lab",
"Design",
"Jon Manning"
],
"title": "Compiling Your Story: Using Techniques from Compiler Design to Check Your Narrative",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Rovio"
],
"description": "\"Would you be comfortable working on a sequel?\" With 4 billion downloads, 'Angry Birds' is without doubt one of the biggest game ever made. In this session, Mans will take the audience on a journey. It's a journey that started 5 years ago with being given the incredibly scary task of figuring out how to make a sequel to the (possibly) most popular premium game of all time. A sequel that had to be free-to-play. This is the story about how 'Angry Birds 2' came to life.",
"id": "1025982",
"speakers": "Mans Wide",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Mans Wide",
"Rovio",
"Production",
"Design"
],
"title": "The Guy Who Ruined 'Angry Birds'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Square Enix Co., Ltd."
],
"description": "Game designers tend to focus too much on good game mechanics (How to provide the challenges? How to provide meaningfulchoices? etc.). Historically, this is absolutely correct, when the \"value\" that a game provides to users was limited to fun gameplay achieved only through good mechanics. But things have changed. Now there are good games without meaningful choices or strategic approaches, and whether you call them games or not, it's a game designer's job to design them anyway! That's why you should learn about them.This session is not about making good narrative/graphics. It's about the fact that there are verbs other than \"play\" that users can do with a game. To maximize those experiences, a good design with a broader vision than just \"good game mechanics\" is necessary. Drawing from examples from 'FINAL FANTASY XV', speaker Prasert \"Sun\" Prasertvithyakarn will share his vision and techniques.",
"id": "1025983",
"speakers": "Prasert \"Sun\" Prasertvithyakarn",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"member content",
"Prasert \"Sun\" Prasertvithyakarn",
"Square Enix Co., Ltd."
],
"title": "Can You Make a Good Game Without Good Play Mechanics?",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sledgehammer Games"
],
"description": "'Call of Duty: WWII' introduced a brand new feature called Headquarters, a 48-player social hub where players interact with character-driven storefronts, play minigames, show off their accomplishments, and engage with the community in new ways. This talk is a design and development retrospective: what the experience goals of the feature were, what design philosophies were held during development, what challenges were faced, and ultimately, what worked and what didn't. The presentation covers a variety of successes, pain points, and lessons learned while creating a 3rd person, largely non-combative and non-competitive feature within the Call of Duty universe.",
"id": "1025984",
"speakers": "Riley Pietsch",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Riley Pietsch",
"Sledgehammer Games",
"Production",
"Design"
],
"title": "Building Headquarters: The Social Hub in 'Call of Duty WWII'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Activision"
],
"description": "Games are meant to be fun right? But how do you measure fun? How do you quantify emotion? Well you can start by simply asking people. In this talk, Activision's Lead Data Scientist, Dylan Rogerson, will share how the 'Call of Duty' Analytics Team turned in-game fun surveys into actionable insights, predicting what factors (such as disconnecting from the game, playing with certain maps, individual and team performance) would lead to players having a fun game. Through this lens you can also begin to turn insights like these into game design focused experiments with fun as the key measurement.Dylan will also go over proper survey design, analytic techniques that account for debiasing, identifying a good experiment and of course, what leads to a fun game of 'Call of Duty'.",
"id": "1025985",
"speakers": "Dylan Rogerson",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Dylan Rogerson",
"Activision",
"Design"
],
"title": "Did You Have Fun? Analytics in 'Call of Duty'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "This session is for all the lovers of cinematics. It will cover the lessons and techniques learned during the development of 'God of War' that allowed the Santa Monica Studio team to achieve deeper emotional tones within the game experience, including the no-cut camera design. This session will cover thought approaches, technical applications and tools that aided in this process. It will discuss film-making approaches vs. cinematic creation and how 'God of War' leveraged the strength of both to execute on a consistent and clear visual game experience, from pre-pro to shooting on set. Doing so even with a limited \"no-cuts\" vocabulary.",
"id": "1025986",
"speakers": "Dori Arazi",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio",
"Dori Arazi"
],
"title": "Creating a Deeper Emotional Connection: The Cinematography of 'God of War'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "With more and more AAA projects relying on subcontracting outside companies to create high-end facial rigs, this talk will go over how Insomniac Games' rigging team created a (mostly) drama-free pipeline for integration, feedback, rig enhancement, and change tracking for approximately 150 facial rigs from a 3rd party vendor without tying up the whole team. This talk goes over the way this was all achieved and overseen with very little overhead tied to getting new deliveries for characters, the way they managed and tracked their own changes to the rigs, the edge-case issues they ran into for certain characters, and the tools and methods they developed to solve them.",
"id": "1025987",
"speakers": "Noah Alzayer",
"tags": [
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Noah Alzayer",
"Insomniac Games",
"Production"
],
"title": "(Super)Humans of New York: Managing the Many Faces in 'Marvel's Spider-Man'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"BoomBit"
],
"description": "Soft launch is a vital step towards global launch, allowing developers to fine tune their marketing and UA strategy before large amounts of spending. Using real case studies, this talk will show you how to fine tune your user acquisition strategies, lower CPI's through creative testing, app store optimization methods, and more. Learn how to make the most of your soft launch time and money!",
"id": "1025988",
"speakers": "Matej Lancaric",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Production",
"Matej Lancaric",
"BoomBit"
],
"title": "The Art of Global Launching",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Gearbox Software"
],
"description": "In this lecture, Ashley will discuss how cartoonish and 2D visual effects were integrated into the 3D environment of 'Battleborn'. The talk will explain the creative process from concept to implementation, how each effect complimented the personality of its character, and the process behind it all.",
"id": "1025989",
"speakers": "Ashley Lyons",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Ashley Lyons",
"Gearbox Software",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "The VFX Process Behind 'Battleborn'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"11 bit studios"
],
"description": "Data driven architecture is a very common concept in video games as new features needs to be easily added by non-programming parts of the team. This paradigm is implemented in every popular game engine and it's a critical technique for empowering content creators and unlocking their creativity. This session will present the data driven gameplay architecture of 11 bit studios' in-house technology, how it affected the gameplay code of 'Frostpunk' and the game's overall production process.",
"id": "1025990",
"speakers": "Aleksander Kauch",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Aleksander Kauch",
"11 bit studios",
"member content",
"Programming"
],
"title": "Content Fueled Gameplay Programming in 'Frostpunk'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Rovio"
],
"description": "Why don't superstars always make a winning team? On the other hand, will one superstar elevate team's performance to new heights? Can you build a winning team out of enthusiastic juniors with little previous experience, but hunger to conquer the world? Should you keep the team intact from one project to another? How do you spot a dysfunctional team?Casting and building creative teams are the most crucial and difficult activities in the modern game making, where competition for talent is fiercer than ever, and teams need to excel in all areas of game production. In this talk, Heini (Head of Studio at Rovio) will discuss team casting and leadership principles, sharing concrete best practices and recommendations for assembling and leading teams to success, while also covering the most common pitfalls to avoid. Heini will talk about relevant approaches from the other creative fields, and also tell how the lessons from Google's study on high-performing teams can be applied to game development teams.",
"id": "1025991",
"speakers": "Heini Kaihu",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Heini Kaihu",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Rovio",
"Production"
],
"title": "Creating High Performing Teams: Cast an Ensemble",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Bungie"
],
"description": "Rather than working within a single monolithic development branch for the entire product team, you are now able to support small team collaboration within feature branches. This talk will cover the improvements the Bungie team made to their build and data caching infrastructure to support the scale of this development paradigm. Additionally, the talk will go over the technology that they built to support semantic content merging and interactively address content related conflicts. Lastly, the talk will dive into the pipeline that they built to automatically merge the changes around their branch ecosystem and provide developers a means for dealing with conflicts and functional failures on an automatically pre-staged machine.",
"id": "1025992",
"speakers": "Pete Kugler",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Pete Kugler",
"Programming",
"Bungie"
],
"title": "Pipeline Support for Feature Branches in 'Destiny'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Vicarious Visions"
],
"description": "In this session, Vicarious Visions' Kevin Todisco presents the approach taken to support HDR displays for 'Destiny 2'. After a brief introduction to HDR display technology, he dives into how the 'Destiny' render pipeline had to be changed to support this new technology, including the challenges faced in bringing content created in SDR to the HDR world. HDR has become a hot topic in games as over 100 titles have shipped with HDR support since the technology started reaching consumers, and challenges game developers to rethink how they render and tonemap their game's content. This session covers the techniques used to achieve high quality HDR output in 'Destiny 2' that preserves Destiny's unique look, and reflects on the lessons learned from the work. It concludes with new advancements introduced since ship and looks forward to how we can better support this technology in the future.",
"id": "1025993",
"speakers": "Kevin Todisco",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Kevin Todisco",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Vicarious Visions"
],
"title": "Not-So-Little Light: Bringing 'Destiny 2' to HDR Displays",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Playground Games"
],
"description": "With 'Forza Horizon 4', Playground Games has developed a novel Physically-Based Calibration (PBC) pipeline based on spectrophotometry to match game appearances of nearly 900 real-world automotive paint materials with unprecedented accuracy. Overcoming a major challenge in computer graphics, the new method is inspired by the color management technologies in the automotive industry and can be easily adopted to a wide range of material representations in a variety of rendering systems.Rooted in previous studies in spectrophotometry and colorimetry, the new calibration method scientifically eliminates most systematic errors in material reproduction and can reliably find the most optimal shading model inputs accurately reproducing the real-world 'ground truth' material appearances. The new Physically-Based Calibration technology is believed to be a significant breakthrough. It carries important implications for the future of accurate material reproduction in virtual environments.",
"id": "1025994",
"speakers": "Yibo Liu",
"tags": [
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Yibo Liu",
"Playground Games"
],
"title": "Physically-Based Calibration: Accurate Material Production in 'Forza Horizon 4'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"One More Game"
],
"description": "User story mapping is a visual exercise that helps product managers and development teams define and prioritize work by collaboratively determining a user's journey when interacting with your product. Participants of a user story mapping session will develop a shared understanding with their peers of the product they intend to deliver. Developers will understand what is the most important pieces to build and in what order, reducing the amount of output required to create the best outcome with the biggest impact for your players.In this session you will learn how user story mapping is used to cut development waste and align team members behind a single, well-defined goal. The talk will cover the problems this exercise aims to fix and walk through a mock session for building the minimum viable solution for a person's morning routine.",
"id": "1025995",
"speakers": "Jamie Winsor",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Jamie Winsor",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"One More Game",
"Production"
],
"title": "User Story Mapping: Developing a Shared Understanding",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"App Annie"
],
"description": "In this session Danielle Levitas, App Annie's head of Market Insights, will share a holistic perspective of the mobile games market in 2019 and beyond. Drawing from the company's wealth of market data and learnings from working with publishers for nearly a decade, the information presented during this talk will be imperative to help developers have a broader, more accurate market view in order to remain competitive and get ahead of the curve. Danielle will discuss a range of topics including a global view of maturity and growth, genres that are outperforming the market, demographic learnings, the company's forecast, and more. Audience questions on other emerging mobile gaming trends will also be addressed.",
"id": "1025996",
"speakers": "Danielle Levitas",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Business & Marketing",
"App Annie",
"Danielle Levitas"
],
"title": "The State of Mobile Games: Robust Growth in 2019 and Beyond",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "This session demonstrates the design process of creating costumes for the characters in Remedy Entertainment's 'Control'. The case presents ways to integrate a professional costume designer into the character art pipeline in games that aim for a realistic art style.",
"id": "1025997",
"speakers": "Heli Salomaa",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Independent",
"Heli Salomaa",
"member content",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Costume in Games: Integrating a Costume Designer into the Character Pipeline",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Electronic Arts"
],
"description": "'The Sims FreePlay' is a F2P mobile simulation sandbox game that continues to defy expectations in its 7th year. From the last minute pivot to move from premium to F2P, to the ever-changing trends in mobile F2P, TSFP has weathered multiple landscape changes. Defying prevailing F2P design wisdom and trends, TSFP manages to offer a unique sandbox environment for players to tell their own stories. This talk condenses TSFP's 7 years into 7 key lessons that have shaped EA's thinking and led to their resilient success. Through multiple examples, Mavis will illustrate the failures and difficulties that TSFP faced and how they eventually resulted in insightful lessons that now heavily influence TSFP in live service.",
"id": "1025998",
"speakers": "Mavis Chan",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Design",
"Mavis Chan",
"Electronic Arts"
],
"title": "Defying Expectations: 7 Lessons from 'The Sims FreePlay'",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Avalanche Studios"
],
"description": "How do you mix an open world game? How do you let game design influence mix decisions? A mix can provide vital information to the player, but that strict adage doesn't always yield the most creative results. This talk is an in depth look at the technical mix behind 'Just Cause 4', how Avalanche Studios re-thought what mixing for games was, and how the team drew on the work of their game designers to make a creative, simple, and adaptive mix.",
"id": "1025999",
"speakers": "Dominic Vega",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Avalanche Studios",
"Dominic Vega",
"Audio"
],
"title": "Building a Mixing Sandbox for 'Just Cause 4'",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Avalanche Studios"
],
"description": "The chaotic sandbox gameplay in 'Just Cause 4' allows for incredibly modular gameplay scenarios where the player couldbe doing everything or nothing at any given moment. Such variety in gameplay requires a musical score that can subconsciously communicate non-binary game-states, drive the emotional palette of the experience, and underscore player actions all while giving the feeling of a cinematic action score. This presentation will demonstrate both the technical and creative design aspects of the dynamic music system used in 'Just Cause 4'. It will also provide a postmortem of the advantages and disadvantages of the system as well as how the techniques discussed apply to the broader discipline of game music design.",
"id": "1026000",
"speakers": "Ronny Mraz",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Avalanche Studios",
"Ronny Mraz",
"Audio"
],
"title": "Music in a Sandbox: The Dynamic Music of 'Just Cause 4'",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "Composer Jason Graves will discuss his musical approach to scoring the VR title 'Moss', which forms a unique relationship between the player and Quill, the game's tiny, adorable mouse protagonist. Topics will include emotionally connecting with the listener through live solo performances vs. samples (including real world examples), harmonic choices and how they dramatically influence gameplay and drawing musical inspiration from the world of 'Moss'. Practical examples from the score and its in-game implementation will demonstrate how these ideas plus \"thematic suites\" and 3D spatial audio came together to create a signature sound that emotionally resonates with the listener.",
"id": "1026001",
"speakers": "Jason Graves",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Jason Graves",
"member content",
"Audio",
"Independent"
],
"title": "Emotional Storytelling Through Music in 'Moss'",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Dontnod Entertainment / Capsule Animation Studio, Dontnod Entertainment"
],
"description": "Join the Creative Director and Audio Director of the 'Life is Strange' games at Dontnod Entertainment as they explain how they approach the use of music in narrative driven games and how the music can be helpful on a cinematographic, narrative and design point of view. From prototypes to the final game release, navigating between existing licensed tracks and original score, they will explain how they wanted the soundtrack to be used differently and share the difficulties they faced during the production of those episodic games. From 'Life is Strange' 1&2 to 'Captain Spirit', Raoul will explain his creative intentions and Sebastien will show how he technically managed to make them fit into the game using Nuendo, Wwise and Unreal Engine.",
"id": "1026002",
"speakers": "Raoul Barbet, Sebastien Gaillard",
"tags": [
"Dontnod Entertainment / Capsule Animation Studio",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Dontnod Entertainment",
"Audio",
"Sebastien Gaillard",
"Raoul Barbet"
],
"title": "'Life is Strange': Music in a Narrative Driven Game",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Foxface Rabbitfish, LLC"
],
"description": "Imagine being part of a freelance game music team that covers every inch of the production pipeline, from music direction, music design, composition and orchestration, to recording, editing, music integration, and scripting. A seamless coordinated effort with clear communication across disciplines and specialties. One that is prepared to adapt to tight schedules and the zigs and zags of the typical development process, yet one that doesn't shy away from rich adaptive music concepts and designs. In fact, the overarching goal of such a team would be to bring well designed, tightly integrated music scores to games in an efficient manner. This is the prescient dream of this lecture.nnThis lecture will take on 3 aspects of the pipeline that are not often outsourced; music design, music integration, and music scripting, describing how each can be successfully offered by freelance music teams. Wwise-Unity adaptive music compositions will illustrate specific concepts and techniques.",
"id": "1026003",
"speakers": "Guy Whitmore",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Audio",
"Foxface Rabbitfish, LLC",
"Guy Whitmore"
],
"title": "Freelance Music Design and Beyond",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Geeiz"
],
"description": "This session will be an introduction to color grading analysis and techniques in games. Color grading is incredibly important in film and photography but often not as utilized in games! Examples will be shown from cinema and photography and how they can be applied to games. There will be discussion on color analysis and why certain choices have been made, and then the talk will cover how to achieve those certain looks. Finally there will be a discussion on critiquing your own color, identifying how to create consistent looks between levels and even messing up look up tables. There'll be a lot of quick color tips sprinkled throughout!",
"id": "1026004",
"speakers": "Izzy Gramp",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Geeiz",
"Izzy Gramp"
],
"title": "LUTious Color: Grading for Games",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Amazon Games"
],
"description": "Ilja Rotelli has spent the last 25+ years in competitive gaming, originally as a pro player and soon after as esport and community head at Wizards of the Coast, Blizzard Entertainment and Riot Games. In the past 10 years he focused on changing the role of game publishers in esports from defensive IP holders to active promoters, creating the World Championship Series for 'StarCraft II', and developing college and grass-roots play for 'League of Legends'. This talk is an anthology of the lessons learned in competitive experience design, from the early days of tabletop card tournaments to the modern video game stages, to inspire the next generation of esport titles.",
"id": "1026005",
"speakers": "Ilja Rotelli",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Ilja Rotelli",
"member content",
"Business & Marketing",
"Amazon Games"
],
"title": "10 Rules to Build the Next Great Esport Game",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Execution Labs"
],
"description": "Hope is not a valid business model. To increase your chance of success, you need to be putting as much effort into \"designing\" your business as you do designing your game. Countless studios are built as a necessary byproduct of shipping a game, with no deliberate thought into the factors that will actually enable your game to succeed and your studio to thrive. The choices made around product roadmap, business model, marketing strategy, community development, corporate structure, compensation, funding, etc, help set a critical foundation for building a viable business. From countless mentoring and coaching engagements from across the globe, the same patterns around the lack of intentional business design keep emerging. This eat-your-vegetables session will explore the fundamentals of business design so you can go forward with more confidence.",
"id": "1026006",
"speakers": "Jason Della Rocca",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"member content",
"Execution Labs",
"Jason Della Rocca"
],
"title": "Studio Design: Building a Foundation for Success and Avoiding Business Disaster",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"EA DICE, EA DICE"
],
"description": "This talk will cover the ideas, challenges and results of the 'Battlefield V' AI dialogue design. The creative design part of the talk will cover the ideas and philosophies behind creating believable AI dialogue in a WW2 Battlefield setting, as well as the process from recording to mastered content in Frostbite. The technical section will cover the implementation process starting from the results of 'Battlefield 1' to a more evolved, flexible and easier system. This session will share a creative approach that combines both audio and programming skills, stretching the boundaries of Frostbite to support the creative design for the dialogue.",
"id": "1026007",
"speakers": "Simon Lindskog, Justin Langley",
"tags": [
"EA DICE",
"member content",
"Simon Lindskog",
"GDC 2019",
"Justin Langley",
"Audio"
],
"title": "'Battlefield V' AI Dialogue",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "The virtual reality game 'Torn' is a beautiful dark mysterious virtual movie which required a new and unique approach to designing and composing its score. In this 30 minute talk the composer, Garry Schyman ('Bioshock', 'Shadow of War') will explore his hybrid (game score/film score) soundtrack and how it functioned in the game. In addition, the composer, having found it nearly impossible to record his scores in recent years with the AFM (Musicians Union) players in Los Angeles, will review details of his successful negotiation making it possible to record the 'Torn' soundtrack with an orchestra in LA after a multi-year absence.",
"id": "1026008",
"speakers": "Garry Schyman",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Independent",
"member content",
"Garry Schyman",
"Audio"
],
"title": "'Torn': Music Inside a Virtual Movie",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"ArenaNet, ArenaNet"
],
"description": "Voiceover is everywhere in games. It fleshes out virtual worlds and makes them feel alive. It's the heart of cutscenes and your narrative, pushing players on and drawing them in. From those big important moments to the small environmental conversations (and even tutorial messages) players will hear tens to hundreds of thousands of lines of voice in the average AAA title. This session will look at ways to improve your VO process, from audition through studio recording, focusing on the importance of communicating and collaborating with your actors to get their best possible performance... and still keeping your sensitive information classified.",
"id": "1026009",
"speakers": "Eve Eschenbacher, Julie Nathanson",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Julie Nathanson",
"GDC 2019",
"Eve Eschenbacher",
"ArenaNet",
"Audio"
],
"title": "Collaborative Approaches to Getting Great VO Performances",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Supermassive Games, Ltd."
],
"description": "Offering an insight into techniques brought from film and adapted into the interactive genre on numerous titles, Barney Pratt, Audio Director for Supermassive Games will demonstrate how the audio team at Supermassive has developed various hybrid techniques to fuse film nuanced emotional experiences and improve the sense of voyeurism (crucial to player engagement) into their games.This lecture will cover enhancing characterization with a combination of procedural Foley systems and film-style linear Foley elements, rewriting the panning rules and overall mix techniques in order to place the player in the scene, how the game design created these opportunities in the first place, and of course, editing and integrating music and sound design interactively to fit every key narrative moment precisely.",
"id": "1026010",
"speakers": "Barney Pratt",
"tags": [
"Barney Pratt",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"Audio",
"Supermassive Games, Ltd."
],
"title": "Adapting Linear Audio Techniques to Improve Voyeurism and Emotional Engagement in Horror Games",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Freelance, Keywords, Formosa, Microsoft"
],
"description": "The G.A.N.G. Demo Derby is a longstanding tradition at GDC, and has been a cornerstone event for new and emerging audio professionals. Attendees can submit 120 seconds of their best work for a detailed critique and feedback from a team of leading audio directors and professionals. They can also participate in an active discussion with fellow panelists and audience members. The Derby is open to GDC attendees across all disciplines.",
"id": "1026011",
"speakers": "Brian DiDomenico, Scott Gershin, Shannon Potter, Jaclyn Shumate",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Freelance",
"Jaclyn Shumate",
"Formosa",
"Brian DiDomenico",
"Shannon Potter",
"Keywords",
"Audio",
"Microsoft",
"Scott Gershin"
],
"title": "Demo Derby: Sound Design",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Disney Games and Interactive Experiences"
],
"description": "Markers can add a new layer of detail to your game. This talk will go over how to add markers to a .wav file and how to read those markers in the Unity engine. Why add markers to your music files? Markers can be read in game engines and that data can be used. During this talk, Technical Sound Designer Max McCoy will go over potential uses such as modulating sound effects to represent the key of the music, music transitions, and how markers can inform game design such as triggering particles or animations.",
"id": "1026012",
"speakers": "Max McCoy",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Max McCoy",
"GDC 2019",
"Disney Games and Interactive Experiences",
"Design",
"Audio"
],
"title": "Magic Markers",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft"
],
"description": "The 'Trials' game series has always featured UGC, fully dynamic world, and constant 60 FPS as a core pillars of the brand. 'Trials Rising' is no exception pushing levels of complexity and fidelity higher than its predecessor does.This session covers the 'Trials' team's journey to reach constant 60 FPS performance on all target platforms (PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC) with massively increased world complexity. It shares details of GPU driven rendering implementation and its integration with virtual texturing, main innovations, optimization, and performance results. A significant part of the session will be dedicated to present improvements in GPU driven rendering scalability and technique efficiency on the Nintendo Switch platform.",
"id": "1026013",
"speakers": "Oleksandr Drazhevskyi",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Oleksandr Drazhevskyi",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Ubisoft"
],
"title": "GPU Driven Rendering and Virtual Texturing in 'Trials Rising'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Undead Labs"
],
"description": "This session is a crash course in low budget, high quality photogrammetry for scanning faces. It will share lessons learned from 2 years and over 200 faces scanned, and a close up look at the photogrammetry rig used by Undead Labs for 'State of Decay 2'.",
"id": "1026014",
"speakers": "Matt Heiniger",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Undead Labs",
"Matt Heiniger"
],
"title": "Low Cost Facial Scanning Using Photogrammetry in 'State of Decay 2'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"description": "The goal of this session is to provide a technical framework for building an abusive chat detection system with deep learning. Any system for moderating the communication of an in-game, global community of players will face a number of challenges including how to handle the unique and ever-changing lingo of players, accommodate multiple languages and cultural values simultaneously, and being robust against players trying to circumvent the detection methods. This talk will describe in detail the deep learning architecture and systems level solutions Blizzard chose to tackle these problems.",
"id": "1026015",
"speakers": "Ryan Brackney",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Ryan Brackney",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"title": "Building Abusive Chat Detection Systems with Deep Learning",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"EA Dice AB, EA DICE"
],
"description": "In this one hour technical presentation Yasin Uludag and Johannes Deligiannis will share all the nitty-gritty details of DICE's 'Battlefield V' ray-traced reflection implementation. There is a brief primer to DXR, so previous experience with the API is not required to enjoy the majority of the talk. The presentation covers everything from shader generation to denoising that is necessary to ship a high quality title with ray-traced reflections. Finally, the presentation will show plenty of eye-candy to demonstrate that if you do everything just right and are willing to invest a lot of blood, sweat and tears, it does indeed \"just work\", eventually.",
"id": "1026016",
"speakers": "Jan Schmid, Johannes Deligiannis",
"tags": [
"EA DICE",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Johannes Deligiannis",
"Programming",
"Jan Schmid",
"EA Dice AB"
],
"title": "It Just Works: Ray-Traced Reflections in 'Battlefield V'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Execution Labs, Devolver Digital, Finji, 11 bit studios"
],
"description": "Five GDC Play studios have been selected to pitch their games to an opinionated panel of investors and publishers, in front of a live audience (no pressure!) followed by questions, advice, and feedback before the judges declare the day's \"Best Pitch\" and award a free GDC 2020 All Access pass. Each year, the theater fills to capacity, as the developers compete for the judges' praise.Day 2 Judges:Mark Hickey (Devolver Digital)Rebekah Saltsman (Finji) Marek Ziemak (11 bit Studios)",
"id": "1026017",
"speakers": "Jason Della Rocca, Mark Hickey, Rebekah Saltsman, Marek Ziemak",
"tags": [
"11 bit studios",
"member content",
"Devolver Digital",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Finji",
"Mark Hickey",
"Execution Labs",
"Jason Della Rocca",
"Marek Ziemak",
"Rebekah Saltsman",
"Career Development"
],
"title": "GDC Pitch: Day 2",
"track": "Career Development"
},
{
"companies": [
"XLIVE"
],
"description": "The esports industry is poised to continue becoming the fastest growing entertainment sector globally. With an added interest from investors and non-endemic organizations there also comes a growing opportunity of jobs in the esports market. With jobs ranging from entry to senior level management across a wide array of departments from marketing, to full-stack developers, to shout casting and community managers we will explore the avenues into finding a job and breakdown the necessary skills to excel in such positions.",
"id": "1026018",
"speakers": "Kye Browning",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"XLIVE",
"Kye Browning",
"Career Development"
],
"title": "Esports Rising: Understanding the Landscape to Start Your Career in Esports",
"track": "Career Development"
},
{
"companies": [
"Electronic Arts"
],
"description": "This presentation will provide examples and recommendations on how to report development issues and debug continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) system issues efficiently and at scale. The speaker will discuss different Jenkins plugins, tools and techniques used at EA to report on thousands of build nodes capable of churning out tens of terabytes of build artifacts daily in a dynamic distributed development environment.EA ships a variety of titles on different platforms every year in regions across the globe. The central Development and Release Engineering (DRE) team within EA increases the productivity of development teams via CI and CD services.",
"id": "1026019",
"speakers": "Adrian Yu",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Production",
"Adrian Yu",
"Electronic Arts"
],
"title": "Level Up Your Jenkins Reporting",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Too Indie To Fail"
],
"description": "What is the worst thing in terms of marketing you could do for you game? Exactly - none. But how much are all your marketing/PR efforts worth? This session will take a deep dive into the numbers of how much traffic you can get on Steam in the \"era of direct\" and how you can influence it. The subject in question has been kept secret until the very day to prevent any watering down of the numbers from outside influence.",
"id": "1026020",
"speakers": "Patrick Seibert",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Too Indie To Fail",
"Business & Marketing",
"Patrick Seibert"
],
"title": "The ZERO Marketing Experiment on Steam: Launching a Game Without Telling Anyone",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Polyarc"
],
"description": "Players all over the world have fallen in love with Quill and they can't wait to return to the story of Moss. But how did a new indie studio of only 15 employees captivate so many players?In this talk Corinne will go over the production philosophies and processes that Polyarc used to create a narrative that takes advantages of VR. She will go over the lessons the team learned from development, as well as how constraints led to more creativity.",
"id": "1026021",
"speakers": "Corinne Scrivens",
"tags": [
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Polyarc",
"Design",
"Corinne Scrivens"
],
"title": "Engaging VR Storytelling: A 'Moss' Postmortem",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"description": "This session will share why Blizzard chose to prioritize social systems in 'Overwatch' (Endorsements and LFG), some of the design decisions that went into the social systems, and the impact these systems had on the 'Overwatch' community, particularly in regard to mitigating disruptive behaviors.",
"id": "1026022",
"speakers": "Natasha Miller",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Natasha Miller",
"member content",
"Design",
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"title": "Social Systems Design, Implementation, and Impacts in 'Overwatch'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "The new 'God of War' has a bold new vision that changed everything about it. A major challenge was determining how gameplay would fit into this vision. Everything from the controls, camera perspective, core weapon, enemy cast and ability set were changing drastically. How can do you change the gameplay system while still maintaining a core feel that resembles the past games? What were the key combat pillars that needed to exist in the new title? Join Jason McDonald as he shares the details in leading the gameplay design for the new 'God of War'. Design philosophies and experiences will be explained as he discusses specific points of the development process, from concept to ship.",
"id": "1026023",
"speakers": "Jason McDonald",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Jason McDonald",
"member content",
"Design",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"title": "Taking an Axe to 'God of War' Gameplay",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Capy Games"
],
"description": "This talk presents the AI systems built for 'BELOW' to create \"The Dark\": a multi-limb, kinematic tentacle monster, and the unique design problems the Capy Games team faced creating such a thing.First up, Robin will provide some background on the blended kinematic and animation systems his team created, followed by the development journey from a single \"sneaky\" tentacle, to a 24-arm killing machine. This journey starts with the necessary movement systems of giant kinematic limbs in a procedural space, leads into scaling up number of tentacles, multi-tentacle coordination, and high-level decision making, then ends off with the complexities of creating readable, consistent, and behaviorally cohesive combat encounters.This talk is focused on process, not just solutions. So, it will discuss some tried-and-failed attempts along the way to highlight the problems that eventually lead the team to the final systems.",
"id": "1026024",
"speakers": "Robin Vierich",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Capy Games",
"Robin Vierich",
"Programming"
],
"title": "A Dark Mind: The AI of \"The Dark\" in 'BELOW'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "How do you get from cardboard props and foam rubber swords to a fully fleshed out and immersive cutscene? 'God of War' Lead Narrative Animator Erica Pinto will discuss the Sony Santa Monica Studio cinematic pipeline from start to finish. She will detail the specific and somewhat unconventional techniques used by the team, including the steps taken to develop the documentary style no-cut camera, the usefulness of live-action pre-visualization, and the importance of communication in a multi-discipline effort to pull together God of War's superb cinematic sequences.",
"id": "1026025",
"speakers": "Erica Pinto",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Erica Pinto",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Keyframes and Cardboard Props: The Cinematic Process Behind 'God of War'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Facebook"
],
"description": "Mobile gaming is a data-driven business, fueled by performance metrics and ongoing A/B tests. But while metrics are a valuable input for decision making, you can't forget that your daily active users are just people after all, making decisions based on personal tastes and preferences. In this session, Ben Webley (Director of Gaming, Global Marketing Solutions, Facebook) will dive into the decisions of a \"daily active human\" based on insights from a recent independently conducted study. Why have you settled for losing half of your new players after their first day? Why haven't you unlocked a much higher % of payers? How common is post-purchase regret, and what causes it? Come and learn why understanding your players as humans, driven by emotions can be the key to disruption.",
"id": "1026026",
"speakers": "Ben Webley",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"member content",
"Facebook",
"Ben Webley"
],
"title": "Daily Active Humans: Finding the Balance Between Data and Human Nature",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Unity Technologies"
],
"description": "Many people know that machine learning can be used to classify text or images, recommend products, understand your voice or translate documents. Fewer know that it can also be used to generate high-quality content. In this talk, the speaker explains generative models and shows why they've become popular in the last 4 years. The speaker will present multiple demos and applications of how these models can give superpowers to technical artists to assist them in creating delightful experiences, generating variations of textures, enabling super-resolution, transferring style across objects, powering procedural level creation, and sketching or even reproducing a scene starting from just a photograph!",
"id": "1026027",
"speakers": "Cesar Romero",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Cesar Romero",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Unity Technologies"
],
"title": "Super Powering Technical Artists Using Deep Learning",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Unity Technologies"
],
"description": "Ray tracing has long been regarded as a great set of algorithms to achieve high quality visual fidelity. Offline rendering pipelines have largely converted to some flavor of ray tracing in the last decade, craving the expected consistent quality, ease of uniform content setup and extensibility of algorithms. Yet despite real-time ray tracing being a frequent buzzword over the same decade, real-time pipelines have not been able to take advantage of this functionality in a full-fledged manner, yet. With the recent advances in hardware architecture we are starting to see initial adoption of real-time ray tracing functionality into modern game engines, yet the domain is just starting to be explored. This presentation aims to share the lessons, tips and tricks from the integration of real-time ray tracing into a modern unified PBR rendering pipeline for real-time content creation focused on games and other high-end real-time experiences. The author will build on the insights learned by extending the engine architecture to support real-time ray tracing APIs and incorporating the power of real-time ray tracing to increase realism for resulting renders at interactive 30 fps rendering on high-end consumer hardware. Topics of how ray tracing can be incorporated into the artist pipeline for ease of scalable content creation for both RT ray tracing and rasterization-based pipelines will be covered. The author will also share several state-of-the art techniques developed for achieving high-visual quality in real-time rendering with usage of primary ray visibility for higher-fidelity materials including multi-layer smooth transparency, advanced approaches for shadowed textured area lights, support of dynamic indirect diffuse and specular lighting as well as other global effects, such as ambient occlusion and others, taking advantage of ray tracing algorithms. Details of approaches for merging TAA and stochastic techniques along with denoising approaches will be covered when focusing on how to achieve fast frame rates for complex scenes on GPU and CPU. Lastly, the author will discuss the insights gained through this integration and explore some of the limitations and challenges of current ray tracing APIs for modern games and game engine architectures, with several calls to action for evolving the API and hardware approaches for future generations to support the trends from gaming communities.",
"id": "1026028",
"speakers": "Natasha Tatarchuk",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Unity Technologies",
"Natasha Tatarchuk",
"member content",
"Programming"
],
"title": "Towards Filmic Quality at 30 FPS: Real-Time Ray Tracing for Practical Game Engine Pipelines",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Kongregate"
],
"description": "Mobile games have become increasingly high-stakes over the last few years. Successful games make billions, but most games launch to failure, and few get a second chance from either platforms or players. Most developers test their games in various ways, from individual playtest sessions to geo-locked launches in Canada and Australia. But many games still launch with poor retention, monetization, tech problems, or some combination of the three. What's going wrong? Kongregate has published more than 40 games, learning valuable lessons along the way. This talk will be a pragmatic guide to game development strategy, taking into account the production timeline and the different constraints it brings and how it translates into production challenges. The talk will be illustrated by case studies and metrics from Kongregate's portfolio including 'Animation Throwdown', 'AdVenture Capitalist', 'Bit Heroes' and more.",
"id": "1026029",
"speakers": "Mael Novat",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Kongregate",
"Business & Marketing",
"Mael Novat"
],
"title": "Common Pitfalls of F2P Development and How to Avoid Them",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Certain Affinity"
],
"description": "This session presents a perfect storm of postmortems. VP of Technology and Online Services at Certain Affinity, Richard Vogel, will discuss his journey as a Studio Director building 'Fallout 76', 'Battlecry', 'Star Wars the Old Republic', and 'Star Wars Galaxies'. He will weave a narrative that talks about how each one of these titles changed the way he approaches development as well as running a game-as-a-service. He will discuss the lessons he learned working on each title and provide great examples from the trenches that helped shape what he did on his next game in terms of project management, leadership, recruiting, and running a live service.",
"id": "1026030",
"speakers": "Richard Vogel",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Business & Marketing",
"Richard Vogel",
"Certain Affinity",
"Production"
],
"title": "Lessons Learned in the Trenches Developing Games as a Service",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft Toronto"
],
"description": "As the industry moves forward into AAAA games, designers must step up to meet even greater challenges. But the greatest challenge revolves around leading these gigantic teams. The larger the team, the more minds there are to keep focused on a single vision. Even the best designers will fail without the soft skills necessary to lead.Your designs will be challenged all throughout development. Developers will lose faith, ideas will stray. How will you keep the team aligned to a common experience? How will you keep the team's trust? In a truly subjective industry where millions of ideas could work, why should they believe in yours?",
"id": "1026031",
"speakers": "Richard Carrillo",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Ubisoft Toronto",
"Richard Carrillo",
"Design"
],
"title": "Beyond Game Design",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"BioWare"
],
"description": "'Anthem' is Bioware's new multiplayer adventure. The world of 'Anthem' features a variety of biomes, and is alive with day-night cycles, seasons, weather, and large-scale events. These dynamic features presented many challenges for artists and tech artists at Bioware. This talk focuses specifically on the shaders created for Anthem and demonstrates how shaders enabled the art team to create a wide variety of environments, weather conditions, and materials and solve many of the challenges faced when creating a large, dynamic world. Specific examples of shader techniques will be shared so that attendees can implement them in their own projects.",
"id": "1026032",
"speakers": "Ben Cloward",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Visual Arts",
"Ben Cloward",
"member content",
"BioWare"
],
"title": "Shading the World of 'Anthem'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Square Enix Co., Ltd."
],
"description": "This session will share the Square Enix team's experience with the application of artificial intelligence to help improve their game balancing process for the game title, 'Grimms Notes Repage'. Specifically, speaker Kazuko Manabe will discuss a method that allowed them to balance a game with more than 10^100 choices of equipment items for battles. Kazuko is going to talk in detail about a genetic algorithm (GA) with a specific gene design that helped her team detect combinations that break game balance. In addition, she will present a data visualization method to find significant data from a large amount of log data that GA outputs. She will also explain a method to solve a problem that only appears in \"player versus player\", making comparisons to previous research about \"player versus environment\".",
"id": "1026033",
"speakers": "Kazuko Manabe",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Kazuko Manabe",
"Programming",
"Square Enix Co., Ltd.",
"Production"
],
"title": "Balancing Nightmares: An AI Approach to Balance Games with Overwhelming Amounts of Data",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "In this session, Xray Halperin presents how procedural systems assisted the lighting team on 'Marvel's Spider-Man' to place environment probes and light grids into the open world of Manhattan.",
"id": "1026034",
"speakers": "Xray Halperin",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Xray Halperin",
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"Insomniac Games"
],
"title": "'Marvel's Spider-Man': Procedural Lighting Tools",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Avalanche Studios"
],
"description": "Learn how Just Cause 4' copes with a wide range of vehicles and player styles though thoughtful design of its tire dynamics and how these relate to the overall vehicle gameplay experience. This talk is intended to take physics programmers and technical vehicle designers through the decision making and thought process so that they have a deeper understanding of the trade-offs they can make in their own games to achieve a balance of believability and fun. The talk will take attendees through the magic formula tire model, why it may not be optimal for arcade and 'simcade' handling, and proposes a more designer friendly approach which is not semi-empirical, has considerably fewer parameters and produces more player friendly results.",
"id": "1026035",
"speakers": "Hamish Young",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Design",
"Hamish Young",
"Avalanche Studios"
],
"title": "Vehicle Physics and Tire Dynamics in 'Just Cause 4'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "The new 'God of War' has a robust, interactive wind and vegetation system to support the players' feeling of controlling a powerful character. In this session, Sony Santa Monica Studio will share how they developed its features: dynamic and spatially-varying 3D wind simulation, interactive, boneless tree and leaf sway, ground vegetation character interaction with swaying settle (kickin' grass!), and card cluster LOD and shadows proxies (billboard clouds). To support this tech, this lecture will cover various developments such as fast, accurate, texture flood-filling using mip chains (for uv seams and matting issues), procedural and sparse 3D flow that supports spatially-varying flow rates, and fractal noise that doesn't shift when scaled.Senior Staff Technical Artist Sean Feeley will take a deep dive into the process of creating these systems, and how they operate under the hood. He will examine and share the team's wind content authoring workflow, which was designed to minimize cross-departmental impact. Lastly, he will review failed features and approaches, and describe potential next steps for future iterations.",
"id": "1026036",
"speakers": "Sean Feeley",
"tags": [
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio",
"Sean Feeley"
],
"title": "Interactive Wind and Vegetation in 'God of War'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Blizzard Entertainment"
],
"description": "Learn how the Player Behavior Insights team at Blizzard generates behavioral insights and uses applied machine learning solutions to quantify and fight disruptive behaviors. This session will share high-level findings and how to take a \"crawl, walk, run\" approach for building a player behavior analytics discipline. It will also provide analysis of the business case and opportunity cost associated with not addressing disruptive and abusive player behaviors in community-driven games.",
"id": "1026037",
"speakers": "Jarrod Doherty",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Blizzard Entertainment",
"Production",
"Design",
"Jarrod Doherty"
],
"title": "Play Nice, Play Fair: The Business Case for Fighting Disruptive Behaviors",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft Montreal"
],
"description": "The field of performance capture is quickly changing, with machine learning and large amounts of data making it possible to build performance capture technology that is more powerful and accessible than ever before. Yet, these advancements have also brought their own new and unique challenges. In this talk, Daniel Holden will dig into the details of several new performance capture technologies developed at Ubisoft La Forge, including a neural network used to automatically clean motion capture data, an end-to-end solution for capture of facial animation from video, and a machine learning solution which can generate facial animation from raw audio.",
"id": "1026038",
"speakers": "Daniel Holden",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Ubisoft Montreal",
"Programming",
"member content",
"Daniel Holden"
],
"title": "A New Era of Performance Capture with Machine Learning",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent"
],
"description": "Product Manager (PM) is a role that some years ago didn't exist in the game industry. Today, it is one of the most influential positions, specially if when talking about the F2P mobile market. Still, for most game designers and professionals not in this market, the responsibilities and purpose of this role are unknown. At the same time, PMs without a game design background usually don't really understand the game designers' area of expertise. This brings a lot of misunderstandings and unnecessary friction.Lucas Gonzalez, game designer for over 10 years, and former PM at Zeptolab, will describe his experience (and those of other PMs) becoming a Product Manager, sharing the difficulties found, and detailing what each role can learn from each other in order to do their work best, while everyone is pursuing a common goal: creating a successful game.",
"id": "1026039",
"speakers": "Lucas Gonzalez",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"member content",
"Lucas Gonzalez",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Production",
"Design"
],
"title": "Balance of Power: F2P Game Design vs. Product Management",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Hi-Rez Studios"
],
"description": "Hi-Rez Studios is a free-to-play, competitive-multiplayer games publisher. As their head of the global marketing, Veronique's role is to increase and retain players. To monetize both audiences in an effective, fair way, through analysis of game data and listening to player feedback. Live operations is a key tool in achieving player acquisition and retention and refers to the in-game content delivered to consumers to enhance their play experience. By looking at concrete examples of content implemented in Hi-Rez games, Veronique will share both the process behind these mechanics and the accumulated learnings, while clearly Illustrating what has and hasn't been effective with the audience along with recommendations for live-ops strategies and tactics.",
"id": "1026040",
"speakers": "Veronique Lallier",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Veronique Lallier",
"member content",
"Business & Marketing",
"Hi-Rez Studios"
],
"title": "Keeping Your Free-to-Play Game Fresh Through Live Operations",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"ZeniMax Online Studios"
],
"description": "'The Elder Scrolls Online' releases four content updates per year. Each update is accompanied by a highly-detailed key art illustration, produced in-house and used as a focal point of the corresponding marketing campaign. In this session, Lucas Slominski discusses compositional strategies for crafting a compelling narrative within a single image, and details the character-centric visual storytelling techniques he employs to enhance dramatic tension and expand the emotional resonance of key art. Using a recent illustration as a case study, the artist summarizes his meticulous approach for creating these images within the various constraints imposed by competing stakeholders. He also outlines parameters used to select approved compositions, and shows how forces external to the artist often influence the final result of key art.",
"id": "1026041",
"speakers": "Lucas Slominski",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"ZeniMax Online Studios",
"member content",
"Lucas Slominski",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Illustrating Tamriel: Creating Key Art for 'The Elder Scrolls Online'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Rare, Ltd."
],
"description": "Automated testing of gameplay features has traditionally not been embraced by the industry, due to the perceived time required and difficulty in creating reliable tests. Sea of Thieves however was created with automated testing for gameplay from the start. This session explains why automated testing was the right choice for Sea of Thieves and how it could benefit your game. It shows the framework that was built by Rare to let team members create automated tests quickly and easily, the different test types we built, and what level of test coverage was found to be appropriate. The session also contains best practices for making tests work reliably and efficiently, using clear worked through examples.",
"id": "1026042",
"speakers": "Robert Masella",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Robert Masella",
"Programming",
"member content",
"Rare, Ltd."
],
"title": "Automated Testing of Gameplay Features in 'Sea of Thieves'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Bluepoint Games"
],
"description": "Bluepoint Games is a studio known for excellent results in the realm of remastering, refurbishing and remaking classic games. From the original 'God of War Collection' to the latest release of 'Shadow of the Colossus', the studio has consistently pushed the technical bounds of each title. Whether it is bringing 'Uncharted: Drake's Fortune' in line with the expectations of 'Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception' for 'Uncharted The Nathan Drake Collection', bringing 'Flower' to the PS4 or down porting 'Titanfall' to the Xbox 360, there are key processes and pieces of technology that have proved instrumental to Bluepoint's success.During this presentation, the curtain will be pulled back and the remake process will be examined. This is not a postmortem but rather insight into key technology, how it has evolved and how it affects Bluepoint's workflow.",
"id": "1026043",
"speakers": "Peter Dalton",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Bluepoint Games",
"Programming",
"member content",
"Peter Dalton"
],
"title": "Beyond the Remake of 'Shadow of the Colossus': A Technical Perspective",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"NaturalMotion"
],
"description": "Launched in 2016 NaturalMotion's 'CSR Racing 2' is the leading racing game on mobile. In this session, Julian Widdows, Vice President of NaturalMotion, will explain how the team's results are a product of a systematic approach to culture and talent engagement. Covering their unique approach to culture, engagement, ownership, inclusivity, and talent health, the session will look at how putting people-first has delivered benchmark results for NaturalMotion. This talk will cover themes including organizational health, neuroscience, psychometric models, \"The Thinking Environment\", and how the underlying theory is put into practice every week in the studio. This organizational model, replicated in whole or in part, can significantly improve talent engagement, health, and performance in any team or business.",
"id": "1026044",
"speakers": "Julian Widdows",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"NaturalMotion",
"member content",
"Julian Widdows",
"Advocacy"
],
"title": "A Thinking Culture: The Foundations of Success for 'CSR Racing 2'",
"track": "Advocacy"
},
{
"companies": [
"Airdorf Games"
],
"description": "'FAITH' is a 2017 pixel horror game by Airdorf Games that began with a simple question: Can you create a compelling horrorgame experience using only basic graphics? Could a game that looks like 'Number Munchers' (1988) feel like 'P.T'. (2014)? A \"retrograde\" aesthetic was chosen for 'FAITH', inspired by the classic era of MS-DOS, Atari 2600, Apple II, and ZX Spectrum games. In this talk, indie game developer Mason Smith of Airdorf Games explains the decisions and principles that contributed to the art style of 'FAITH'. He also explains why its rudimentary art style helped create a unique horror experience that was featured in IGN's list of \"Best Horror Games of 2017\".",
"id": "1026045",
"speakers": "Mason Smith",
"tags": [
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"Mason Smith",
"Airdorf Games"
],
"title": "The Art of 'FAITH': Horror at 192x160 Pixels",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "This talk covers the end-to-end indirect lighting pipeline and techniques used in 'God of War'. Gain insight into the motivation behind moving to a unified volume-texture based solution for indirect lighting of environments, characters and volumetric effects. Learn how moving to an in-game GPU based baker allowed rapid iteration for lighting artists by providing progressive results in real-time. This talk includes technical deep-dives into how indirect lighting is described and applied as well as how the light baking process is implemented on the GPU and how it integrates into Santa Monica Studio's proprietary engine.",
"id": "1026046",
"speakers": "Josh Hobson",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Josh Hobson",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"title": "The Indirect Lighting Pipeline of 'God of War'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Shonkventures, Big Huge Games, EA Motive, Oculus"
],
"description": "Project management methodologies and processes in the video game industry have been analyzed ad nauseam, often sold as production cure-alls. While these mechanics of game production are indeed important, there's another critical facet that has been explored far less: the emotional and elusive feel of being a great leader/producer/project manager. Once processes are in place, in order to maintain the health of a project the leader must have their finger firmly on the pulse of the team and be able to diagnose situations that often call for drastically different solutions. In this session, the speakers will investigate facets of soft skills and share specific situations that they have encountered throughout their careers and how soft skills have saved the team and shipped awesome games. Topics include creating a new IP, leading a team through creative challenges, strong but flexible leadership, leading leads, setting clear goals, managing creative differences, how to convince people, how to ask the right questions and building a new software team.",
"id": "1026047",
"speakers": "Grant Shonkwiler, Steve Superville, Kim Swift, Brian Sharp",
"tags": [
"Shonkventures",
"Big Huge Games",
"Brian Sharp",
"Oculus",
"GDC 2019",
"Kim Swift",
"Steve Superville",
"Grant Shonkwiler",
"member content",
"EA Motive",
"Production",
"Production & Team Management"
],
"title": "Leadership: Working at the Heart of the Team 2019",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Riot Games"
],
"description": "This talk cuts to the core of what makes VFX animation work, is it \"realism\"? Or is it \"believe-ability\"? Are those two things the same? The talk investigates this question through examining \"VFX animation through art history,\" comparing depictions of water in European Romantic painting and classical Chinese ink painting. The talk argues that the Chinese ink artists come out on top because they explicitly tried to capture the \"dao\" or \"way\" of water rather than surface detail \"realism.\"The session will apply this perspective to VFX animation with a demo of how to create fire with leaf textures, taking advantage of the similarity between the *underlying patterns* of fire and leaves. Part of being an effective VFX artist is noticing the fundamental processes, or \"dao,\" or \"ways\", at work across very different things. So go out into the world and experience many different things!",
"id": "1026048",
"speakers": "Jeremy Griffith",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Riot Games",
"member content",
"Jeremy Griffith",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "The Dao of VFX Animation",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Night School Studio"
],
"description": "Night School Studio's Art Director Ruel Pascual discusses how the visual style and development of 'Afterparty' was born from a variety of new production variables. Building a follow-up game to 'Oxenfree', filled with more characters, environments, and a higher narrative and design complexity, ushered in a host of art challenges. Ruel will unravel the process of building Afterparty's pipeline for art, including modeling, rigging, and animation. Featuring concept art designs, environment assembly, lighting techniques, and scene direction.",
"id": "1026049",
"speakers": "Ruel Pascual",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Visual Arts",
"Night School Studio",
"Ruel Pascual"
],
"title": "The Art of 'Afterparty': The Devil's in the Details",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"SYBO Games"
],
"description": "When SYBO started to grow, it got multiple teams that often had to solve similar problems in UI development. Player experience suffers if a company can't provide consistency across the projects, and so does the company's brand. As such, SYBO needed to find a way to avoid inconsistency in visual and interaction patterns across projects. It was also important to find a solution that will help save time and resources in terms of maintenance.",
"id": "1026050",
"speakers": "Natalia Rebrova",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Natalia Rebrova",
"member content",
"Design",
"SYBO Games"
],
"title": "Building a Unified Cross-Project UI Framework",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Hexany Audio, Law Offices of Jeffrey W. Rose, Kraft-Engel Management, Brian Schmidt Studios, Materia Collective, LLC"
],
"description": "Moderated by Richard Ludlow and featuring panelists Brian Schmidt, Sarah Kovcas, Jeff Rose, and Sebastian Wolff, this panel is made up of some of the most business-knowledgeable individuals in the game music industry. Richard will present questions on a variety of music business topics including negotiating agreements (work for hire vs. non-exclusive), PRO rights and royalties, soundtrack monetization, representation, publishing, and more. There will also be time for open Q&A at the end. The broad spectrum of backgrounds in the business world will allow the audience to gain insight into each topic from people on very different sides of the table.",
"id": "1026051",
"speakers": "Richard Ludlow, Jeffrey Rose, Sarah Kovacs, Brian Schmidt, Sebastian Wolff",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Brian Schmidt",
"Jeffrey Rose",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Kraft-Engel Management",
"Sarah Kovacs",
"Richard Ludlow",
"Production",
"Hexany Audio",
"Materia Collective, LLC",
"Brian Schmidt Studios",
"Audio",
"Law Offices of Jeffrey W. Rose",
"Sebastian Wolff"
],
"title": "The Business of Game Music: Expert Panel",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Pole Position Production, Pole Position Production"
],
"description": "From the beginning of the video game era, the presence of vehicles in different shapes and forms has become increasingly common and important. Their sounds are equally important: how do you effectively capture the sound of a variable speed vehicle that's believable even when interacting with weather and surface materials?That, and many other questions, will be covered in this talk by the team of Pole Position Production, a Sweden-based production company with 10+ years of experience in recording vehicles and audio for games. Topic areas will include techniques for microphone placement in different situations, which software and plugins are best suited for post production, implementation, tips and tricks for the new beginners, and much more.",
"id": "1026052",
"speakers": "Max Lachmann, Bernard Lohr",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Pole Position Production",
"GDC 2019",
"Bernard Lohr",
"Audio",
"Max Lachmann"
],
"title": "Vehicle Recordings for Modern Games",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Tripwire Interactive"
],
"description": "Managing the audio for dynamic and ever changing titles like 'Killing Floor 2' and 'Rising Storm 2: Vietnam' provides unique daily challenges from complete seasonal game re-skins to memory management to addressing community feedback. This session will take attendees through some of those challenges and how they have been addressed while maintaining end user experience and game stability on a live multi-platform product.",
"id": "1026053",
"speakers": "Mark Muraski",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Tripwire Interactive",
"member content",
"Audio",
"Mark Muraski"
],
"title": "Add, Fix, and Mix: Audio for Live Games 'Killing Floor 2' and 'Rising Storm 2'",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"PlayStation"
],
"description": "Join Mike Niederquell, Lead Sound Designer at Sony PlayStation, as he provides an overview into the development process of sonically rebooting a critically acclaimed franchise in 'God of War' (2018). In this talk he will discuss sound design workflows, aesthetic direction, technical challenges, mixing philosophies, dialog implementation, and other key moments throughout the development cycle. There will also be a deep dive into a few stand out moments from the title where Mike will deconstruct the sound design content and showcase how the end result was produced. Mike has supported the 'God of War' developer, Santa Monica Studio, on multiple titles, including 'God of War: Ascension', 'The Unfinished Swan', 'Hohokum', 'Starhawk', 'Carnival Island', and 'Twisted Metal'.",
"id": "1026054",
"speakers": "Mike Niederquell",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"PlayStation",
"member content",
"Audio",
"Mike Niederquell"
],
"title": "The Sound Design for 'God of War'",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "This lecture will discuss the production strategy for helping to deliver the audio experience in 'God of War', including a deep dive into specific product methodology used by production as well as a postmortem about a bug that had the potential to severely impact audio quality and was resolved by a strong cross-department effort.",
"id": "1026055",
"speakers": "Shayna Moon",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Shayna Moon",
"Production",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio",
"Audio"
],
"title": "Shipping Greatness: Practical Lessons from Audio Production on 'God of War'",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Lagumbay Music, Independent, BlackCatBonifide, LLC, Klei Entertainment, Independent, Echtra Games, Inc."
],
"description": "This panel aims to break down the barrier of entry composers face when beginning sound design. Oftentimes, especially in the indie game scene, composers are faced with the need to fulfill both roles as composers and sound designers. However, many have not attempted to do sound design before and are put into scenarios of constant and frustrating experimentation. Where and how does one start? How does sound design differ from composing? How is it similar? Why does being able to sound design help you understand your mix better?This panel session brings together industry veterans of various backgrounds from AAA sound design teams, tocomposer-sound-designers at the indie level. Their role will be to demystify sound design for composers, and help them understand the fundamentals as well as provide insights into their styles.",
"id": "1026056",
"speakers": "Emmanuel Lagumbay, John Robert Matz, Bonnie Bogovich, Matthew Marteinsson, Penka Kouneva, Erika Escamez",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"Bonnie Bogovich",
"Penka Kouneva",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Echtra Games, Inc.",
"Erika Escamez",
"Business & Marketing",
"Audio",
"John Robert Matz",
"Lagumbay Music",
"Emmanuel Lagumbay",
"Matthew Marteinsson",
"Klei Entertainment",
"BlackCatBonifide, LLC"
],
"title": "From Trumpets to Transients: A Composer's Guide to Sound Design",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft Sofia"
],
"description": "Building an organic musical system for the gameplay is half of the success of the audio in the game. The subjects of this talk are how to create a smart interactive musical system in Wwise tailored to the specific needs of the game, and how to compose, produce, perform and implement a brand-defining score.Being a composer on 'Assassin's Creed' is a great honor, but also a great challenge. For the ten years of its existence the, 'Assassin's Creed' musical style has been well established by many famous composers in the previous game series. As the in-house composer for 12 years in the young Ubisoft studio in Sofia, Bulgaria, and as a one-woman audio department, Elitsa will share her successful story of maintaining the brand-defining style, and overcoming all the challenges in music direction of the game, composing the scores, playing and recording different instruments, audio engineering, and the implementation of the music in the audio middleware.",
"id": "1026057",
"speakers": "Elitsa Alexandrova",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Ubisoft Sofia",
"Elitsa Alexandrova",
"Audio",
"member content"
],
"title": "The Power of Music in the Immersive World of 'Assassin's Creed: Rogue' and 'Assassin's Creed Origins: The Curse of the Pharaohs'",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Kongregate"
],
"description": "Have players committed to spending money in free-to-play games before they even install the game? Are you wasting time trying to get more people to spend money in your game? What monetization metrics should you be focusing on improving instead? In this talk, Tammy uses several case studies from live Kongregate games to explore how and why some player behaviors are easier and more rewarding to change, while others have a nearly unbreakable ceiling.",
"id": "1026058",
"speakers": "Tammy Levy",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Business & Marketing",
"Kongregate",
"Tammy Levy"
],
"title": "Nature vs. Nurture: Unpacking Player Spending in F2P Games",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Future Friends Games"
],
"description": "In the era of Snapchat, Tinder and a million game releases per day most things have about 5 to 10 seconds to grab your attention, so you better make them count! This session explores the wonderful format of animated gifs and how they can be used to promote your game efficiently to players, press, influencers and other important people. From the question of what makes a good gif, how to record, compress and post them, to best practice examples, this session will provide tips like why the first frame of a gif is key, as well as platform-specific gif advice for Steam, Twitter, etc. After this session you will know how to get the most out of your beautiful animated gif babies and how to convey your game's core message within seconds.",
"id": "1026060",
"speakers": "Thomas Reisenegger",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Thomas Reisenegger",
"Future Friends Games",
"Business & Marketing"
],
"title": "PR Success.gif: How to Get Your Game Across in 5 Seconds",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Submersion Audio, Submersion Audio"
],
"description": "'Yoku's Island Express' presented a unique challenge to its audio designers: how do you score the world's first open world, 2D side-scrolling pinball/Metroidvania mashup? LucasArts alumni Audio Lead Tom Bible and Composer Jesse Harlin will walk you through the process of mashing together genres, techniques, and technologies using their combined decades of game audio knowledge to bring AAA polish to an indie title and help create one of the best reviewed games of the year. Tom and Jesse will discuss not only creative voice editing and processing, but also creative music editing and processing and how to mash together Tuvan throat singing and NES chiptunes. Jesse will also discuss the sourcing of instrumentalist talent from a diverse background without breaking the indie budget.",
"id": "1026061",
"speakers": "Jesse Harlin, Thomas Bible",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Jesse Harlin",
"GDC 2019",
"Submersion Audio",
"Thomas Bible",
"Audio"
],
"title": "Adventures in III Audio: 'Yoku's Island Express'",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Lagumbay Music, Formosa Interactive, Highwire Games, Traega Entertainment"
],
"description": "The G.A.N.G. Music Demo Derby is a longstanding tradition at GDC, and has been a cornerstone event for new and emerging composers. Attendees can submit 60 seconds of their best work for a detailed critique and feedback from a team of leading audio directors and professionals, and participate in an active discussion with fellow panelists and audience members. The Derby facilitates game audio practitioners of all levels, and is suited for producers, composers, audio directors, and anyone interested in music for games and interactive entertainment.",
"id": "1026062",
"speakers": "Emmanuel Lagumbay, Paul Lipson, Marty O'Donnell, Jason Hayes",
"tags": [
"Marty O'Donnell",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Paul Lipson",
"Jason Hayes",
"Lagumbay Music",
"Emmanuel Lagumbay",
"Formosa Interactive",
"Audio",
"Highwire Games",
"Traega Entertainment"
],
"title": "Demo Derby: Music",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Generations Productions, LLC"
],
"description": "\"Virtual presence\" is a state in which gamers fully accept their existence in a virtual world. This talk will explore how game music can enhance virtual presence in VR gaming. The talk will begin with an exploration of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory and Paul Cairns' research on psychological engagement in video gaming. By understanding how player mental activity interacts with game design, composers can create music that induces psychological states conducive to virtual presence. The discussion will include techniques to draw attention to mission objectives, facilitate concentration, enhance emotional empathy and intensify player focus. Also discussed: some of the drawbacks to virtual presence, including its fragility when exposed to negative emotions, and its possible susceptibility to the \"event boundary\" phenomenon. Musical solutions will be explored. Phillips' talk will offer techniques for composers and audio directors seeking to employ music to enhance virtual presence.",
"id": "1026063",
"speakers": "Winifred Phillips",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Winifred Phillips",
"member content",
"Audio",
"Generations Productions, LLC"
],
"title": "How Music Enhances Virtual Presence",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Polyarc"
],
"description": "When Polyarc started showing the VR 'Moss' demo at trade shows and playtests something fascinating started happening: people fell in love with the game's protagonist, Quill. Some even cried with joy. This player experience emerged from the accumulation of subtle design choices aimed at reinforcing the player's bond with their tiny virtual reality companion. In this session, attendees will learn why compelling sound design starts with design and ends with sound. Using 'Moss' as a case study for this method, learn how player comfort, immersion, scale and mixed perspective, fluid character design, nostalgic narration, and emotional sound all supported the formation of an emotional bond with Quill.",
"id": "1026064",
"speakers": "Stephen Hodde",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Polyarc",
"member content",
"Audio",
"Stephen Hodde"
],
"title": "'Moss': Design Before Sound",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Magic Leap"
],
"description": "'Create' was one of a handful of titles developed to launch Magic Leap One, and serves as a user's introduction to this new medium. As a sandbox experience incorporating 3D art, physics objects and AI-driven characters, audio plays an integral role in creating an inviting and intuitive world for users to explore. This talk will focus on lessons learned regarding the use of spatial audio techniques, designing for a wearable experience, and ensuring that audio is part of a holistic approach to experience design. From the creation of sound and music to the implementation of assets on device, this session will provide specific examples of how designers utilized audio to enhance the unique experience of 'Create'.",
"id": "1026065",
"speakers": "Dave Shumway",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Magic Leap",
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"Dave Shumway",
"Audio"
],
"title": "Bringing Virtual Audio into the Real World with 'Create'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Eidos Montreal, La Hacienda Creative"
],
"description": "Ancient pre-Hispanic cultures viewed music and sound as one unified form to be used in daily life and rituals, and were meant to emulate nature and even the supernatural; in a sense, they were the original sound designers. Drawing inspiration from this, the sound and music team behind 'Shadow of the Tomb Raider' worked together to blur the lines of what is traditionally seen as music and sound design to create a unique and unified approach, while using the very instruments and techniques that these ancient cultures used. Be prepared to be immersed, inspired and surprised in this journey into the heart of the sound of 'Tomb Raider'.",
"id": "1026066",
"speakers": "Rob Bridgett, Brian D'Oliveira",
"tags": [
"member content",
"La Hacienda Creative",
"Brian D'Oliveira",
"GDC 2019",
"Eidos Montreal",
"Design",
"Rob Bridgett",
"Audio"
],
"title": "The Influence of Pre-Hispanic Culture on 'Shadow of the Tomb Raider'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Jam City"
],
"description": "Creating a compelling narrative can make or break a game and with mobile, the opportunities to play with narrative are endless. By considering things like screenshot sharing, frequent narrative payoffs for shorter session times and cliffhangers, writers and narrative leads can help a story come to life and in turn, drive engagement, retention and virality.",
"id": "1026067",
"speakers": "Ryan Kaufman",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Ryan Kaufman",
"member content",
"Design",
"Jam City"
],
"title": "Narrative Nuances on Free-to-Play Mobile Games",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"King"
],
"description": "Watch Sabrina Carmona, a gay, Latin, female Senior Producer at King's London Studio, talk about why diversity really matters in the gaming industry. She will share experiences and what has and has not worked for King so far, and what developers all need to be doing to move the needle on diversity. The stories and practical toolkit of strategies will relate to recruitment, individual development, team dynamics and organizational structure. Why should you care, you ask? Simply because the gaming audience continues to evolve and become more diverse, from Candy Crush to Fortnite, and everyone needs to be factoring this into the development process. To serve that increasingly diverse audience, you need to not only talk the talk, but walk the walk when it comes to diversity. The purpose of this talk is to discuss the practical aspects of enabling diverse teams in a fun and accessible way.",
"id": "1026068",
"speakers": "Sabrina Carmona",
"tags": [
"King",
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Sabrina Carmona",
"Production"
],
"title": "A Great Saga Needs Different Heroes: Unlocking Diversity's Potential",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft, Ubisoft"
],
"description": "Developing and testing big open world games is an immense undertaking. In response to the scale of this challenge, Ubisoft Reflections has been developing, in the context of 'The Division', \"Client Bots\", an AI that takes control of the player, mimicking human input while also reporting issues (missions incomplete-able, performance statistics etc.). Applications of this technology include automated mission play through and report generation, follow bots that help QC and level designers to test multiplayer missions solo, streets wandering for performance data gathering, a general purpose platform for any bespoke testing and a tool to assist bug reproduction. This session will present the motivations behind the system, citing many of the Ubisoft Reflections team's use cases to give insight into the internal architecture of their client bots, the challenges they faced, and best practices on how to build content to support such a technology.",
"id": "1026069",
"speakers": "Jose Paredes, Pete Jones",
"tags": [
"Jose Paredes",
"GDC 2019",
"Pete Jones",
"Programming",
"member content",
"Ubisoft"
],
"title": "Automated Testing: Using AI Controlled Players to Test 'The Division'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Room 8 Studio"
],
"description": "This session explains how to use knowledge of macroeconomics in game design to facilitate the creation of a balanced game economy system. While game designers are trying to create a new system of the game economy or deal with problems like inflation, macroeconomics and the history of economic thought already have many answers, working models, and existing solutions. This speech will help you understand the similarity of real and game economy processes.",
"id": "1026070",
"speakers": "Daryna Yemeliantseva",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Room 8 Studio",
"Daryna Yemeliantseva",
"member content",
"Design"
],
"title": "Macroeconomics of a Game Economy",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Riot Games"
],
"description": "Discover the data and research behind the more than 140 Champions of 'League of Legends' as Nathan Blau (Researcher for Riot Games) presents how this data informs decisions at the team, product, and studio level. This talk introduces unique datasets, models, and visualizations on the game telemetry of champions, as well as player sentiment on champions through Riot's \"Mass Champion Survey\". This talk also answers questions such as: how does Riot decide what champions to update next? What can gender differences in champion preferences teach you about how to make more inclusive and iconic casts of characters? Why is Yasuo (the infamous wind samurai) beloved in China but polarizing in the US (and what can you do with that information)?",
"id": "1026071",
"speakers": "Nathan Blau",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Nathan Blau",
"member content",
"Design",
"Riot Games"
],
"title": "Data Informed Decisions with the Champions of 'League of Legends'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Interactive Entertainment"
],
"description": "In October 2018, Team ASOBI from Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios JAPAN Studio released 'ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission' for PlayStationVR (PS VR), a VR platformer which went on to become one of the highest rated VR titles of all time.In this session, the technical lead of Team ASOBI, Yuki Miyamae, covers the biggest technical challenges of making a big, beautiful PS VR title while maintaining a constant high level of performance.The talk includes examples of rendering optimizations and VR visual effect implementations that the team spent substantial time fine-tuning, such as water and clouds.",
"id": "1026072",
"speakers": "Yuki Miyamae",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Sony Interactive Entertainment",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Yuki Miyamae"
],
"title": "Taming Technologies Behind 'ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"DeepMind"
],
"description": "Technical design is still a relatively new discipline in the industry and its power tends to be poorly understood. Having a technical designer on a team is more often a happy accident than a deliberate staffing choice. However, most studios have at least one designer who can script their way out of any problem, or a programmer that can build and iterate on a game mechanic with little to no input from design.This presentation draws on personal experience to highlight that technical design is a discipline that could benefit from a more formal recognition (like technical artists) and show that given appropriate responsibilities, such people can dramatically improve the quality of life of the design, engineering and art departments, resulting in better games.",
"id": "1026074",
"speakers": "Cedric Hauteville",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Game Career / Education",
"GDC 2019",
"Cedric Hauteville",
"DeepMind",
"Career Development"
],
"title": "Technical Designers: The Master Link Between Engineering and Design",
"track": "Career Development"
},
{
"companies": [
"Gram Games"
],
"description": "'Merge Dragons!' is an independent mobile game turned breakout hit. It mashes a match-3-like mechanic of merging directly into a puzzly-collection game with cute simulated dragons. How is such a strange game so successful? Why do players play? How does the game make money? And how did Gram Games manage this with just 1 or 2 designers? Join in this session and Senior Creative Director Ray Mazza will take you on a journey from how this unlikely concept was born, through how the design pillarsof discovery, infinite play, and \"merging everything\" shaped the design into a deeply engaging game with strong monetization. The session will share many design insights and even a few fun stories, like how a duck accidentally ended up in agame about dragons (and why that is great).",
"id": "1026075",
"speakers": "Ray Mazza",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Ray Mazza",
"member content",
"Design",
"Gram Games"
],
"title": "Design Philosophies and Lessons from Developing 'Merge Dragons!'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Zynga"
],
"description": "What is the investment required to build a meaningful VIP department that consistently delivers on revenue and engagement metrics? The issue not only lies in understanding the investment required to reward VIP players but also in recognizing the level of operational investment and resources required to guarantee the success of VIP as a function. The objective is for the account manager to be part of the players' overall gaming experience, from interest finding to celebrations of milestones (personal, in game and game related) and support and solutions when problems arise, demonstrating a commitment to such valued players.",
"id": "1026076",
"speakers": "Gemma Doyle",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Gemma Doyle",
"member content",
"Business & Marketing",
"Zynga"
],
"title": "How to Build a VIP Department to Drive Engagement and Revenue in Social Gaming",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft Montreal"
],
"description": "For Honor gathers 8 players on a battlefield, with a hundred NPCs and many other interactive ingredients. With a traditional network model, it would be a nightmare to replicate while keeping the bandwidth consumption low and preserving the precision and fairness of the fight system. In this session, Jennifer Henry (Gameplay Programmer at Ubisoft Montreal) will present the non-authoritative architecture behind the game, a variation on deterministic simulation that uses time travel to not hinder fluidity and responsiveness. But, as every team that commits to new tech, the 'For Honor' team faced many challenges. From the drastic optimizations needed to run 8 times the gameplay in a single frame, to the constant need to make your tools and processes evolve; from the desynchronization bugs that come with strict determinism, to the hard balance between shipping your game and training newcomers; Jennifer will deep dive into the mysterious world of deterministic simulation, by presenting the lessons she learned with her 'For Honor' gameplay team over the past 6 years.",
"id": "1026077",
"speakers": "Jennifer Henry",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Ubisoft Montreal",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Jennifer Henry"
],
"title": "Back to the Future! Working with Deterministic Simulation in 'For Honor'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft Toronto"
],
"description": "How do children play with their toys? They skim them along the floor, tumble them around in the air, and smash them into walls. In Starlink: Battle for Atlas, one of our key pillars was that the digital ship should feel true to how children might play with its physical toy equivalent. In this talk, we will describe how we brought the ships of Starlink to life. By combining specialized but reusable behaviors, designers can control how vehicles handle in multiple navigation modes, as well as how dynamic they look on screen. The tricky bit with highly configurable vehicles is tackling the ensuing combinatorial explosion of tuning that comes from each part affecting the outcome. Finally, relaxing the coupling between physics and gameplay can lead to more interesting environmental impacts and corresponding angular momentum preserving recovery animations.",
"id": "1026078",
"speakers": "Michael Wasilewski",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Ubisoft Toronto",
"member content",
"Michael Wasilewski"
],
"title": "Starship Physics and Controls that Feel Real: Bringing the Toys of Starlink to Digital Life",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Supercell"
],
"description": "Known for its inverted-pyramid org structure and small, independent game teams, Supercell's unique culture is often credited for enabling the phenomenal success of the company's games. This talk lifts the curtain on that oft-discussed philosophy, as two members of the Brawl Stars team discuss what it actually means to hold all the decision-making power, including navigating internal pushback, shifting team roles and the challenges involved in staying true to Supercell's culture of independence.",
"id": "1026079",
"speakers": "Frank Keienburg",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Frank Keienburg",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Production",
"Supercell"
],
"title": "Independence and Responsibility: How Supercell's Culture Made 'Brawl Stars' Possible",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "The world of 'Marvel's Spider-Man' is roughly six times the size of Insomniac's previous open world game 'Sunset Overdrive'. To handle the increased data load, Insomniac Games set about to completely rewrite their production tools in C++.This talk will explain how the team went about replacing the entire tools stack in the middle of developing 'Spider-Man', without slowing down production. Ron Pieket will highlight several key technologies utilized in the new tools. Implicit sharing eliminates the need for deep copy or mutex locks when handling data in a multi-threaded application. The concept of immutable objects is a radical old idea, newly appreciated. An immutable object is never modified. Instead, changes are applied by generating a new object. The edit loop is a construct that delivers effortless and fool-proof undo, Perforce handling, and more. Ron will also discuss several pitfalls encountered, and how to avoid them.",
"id": "1026080",
"speakers": "Ronald Pieket",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Ronald Pieket",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Insomniac Games"
],
"title": "Tools for 'Marvel's Spider-Man': Editing with Immutable Data",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Avalanche Studios"
],
"description": "When planning out the needs for animation workflows during the production of 'Just Cause 4', it was necessary to rethink and revamp existing in-house animation workflows and the tools behind it all. This included building further on the groundwork of the pipeline created during development of 'Just Cause 3' for the gameplay animation team as well as building an entirely new pipeline for cutscenes in order to support a stronger push on our cinematic structure. The result was a more robust set of animation content workflows and improved tools that increased efficiency, speed, and quality. This talk will present the process of how the technical animation team went about executing some of the wants and needs of the animation and cinematics teams on JC4 that led to a much improved pipeline.",
"id": "1026081",
"speakers": "Brian Venisky",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Avalanche Studios",
"Brian Venisky",
"Visual Arts"
],
"title": "Maximizing Animation and Cinematic Content Workflows for 'Just Cause 4'",
"track": "Visual Arts"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "This session will give you an insight into how to create and maintain a highly autonomous art team without abandoning them to figure it out for themselves. Working on a AAA game like 'Marvel's Spider-Man' does not mean the studio has to turn into an assembly line. In this session Insomniac's Lead Environment Artist, Jason Hickey, will talk about the tools and best practices you can use to keep your team highly functioning and engaged with less bureaucracy and management overhead. He will use the case study of building Marvel's New York at Insomniac Games to show that the increase in productivity and ownership actually increases quality and efficiency by focusing on making the process of world-building engaging while maintaining a healthy team work life balance.",
"id": "1026082",
"speakers": "Jason Hickey",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Jason Hickey",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Insomniac Games",
"Production"
],
"title": "Marvel's New York: A Case Study in Empowering Your Artists",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Gaijin Entertainment"
],
"description": "This session describes the dynamic global illumination system that Gaijin Enterainment created for 'Enlisted'. Its implementation is based on a regular light probe field that is calculated in an accurate way from scene representation (voxel and/or triangles) and allows real-time multiple bounce lighting from semi-dynamic light sources and semi-dynamic scene. This method simplifies an artist's work, and allows them to create realistic lighting on huge scale locations.The talk will cover technical details of the system and how it can be implemented in any deferred rendering pipeline. A number of solutions to common problems are presented, such as how to handle probe bleeding in indoor areas and handle foliage. The session also discusses performance and memory optimization, and optional benefits from using modern ray tracing GPU capabilities.",
"id": "1026083",
"speakers": "Anton Yudintsev",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Anton Yudintsev",
"member content",
"Programming",
"Gaijin Entertainment"
],
"title": "Scalable Real-Time Global Illumination for Large Scenes",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "'Marvel's Spider-Man' presented a challenging traversal target where players enter with high expectations of functionality, fluidity, control, and presentation. In this session, Doug will provide an in depth view into how the traversal system for the game was created. The talk will focus on how the swinging mechanic was originally executed and the process through which it evolved in order to increase usability and player engagement. This will include a discussion on the integration of additional mechanics as well as how the camera was designed to increase the sense of speed, power, and enjoyment for the system.",
"id": "1026084",
"speakers": "Doug Sheahan",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Insomniac Games",
"Design",
"Doug Sheahan"
],
"title": "Concrete Jungle Gym: Building Traversal in 'Marvel's Spider-Man'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"description": "The hallmark 'God of War' combat has been genre defining for more than a decade. With the latest entry into the franchise, the change in direction along with a much more intimate and player-controlled camera would fundamentally change the combat experience... and it had to be better. The old tricks of the past decade wouldn't work anymore, the GoW developers needed new ones. By exploring the balance between reinventing combat and retaining their core identity, Mihir Sheth will cover how the Sony Santa Monica Studio approached the design and technical challenges of implementing combat systems to deliver a bold new action experience that evolves yet stays true to 'God of War'. Jeet Shroff will join him at the end of the session for Q&A.",
"id": "1026085",
"speakers": "Mihir Sheth",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Mihir Sheth",
"Design",
"Sony Santa Monica Studio"
],
"title": "Evolving Combat in 'God of War' for a New Perspective",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Ubisoft Barcelona"
],
"description": "When a small team inside the Ubisoft Club online service decided to create a prototype for an AI chatbot dedicated to video games, they didn't imagine the adventure they just started. This talk explores the 9 months of development of the first Personal Gaming Assistant: \"SAM\", from the early prototype to the worldwide release of the BETA version and the collaboration with game teams like 'Rainbow 6: Siege' and 'Assassin's Creed: Odyssey'. The talk will focus on key lessons from the development team and the discoveries that were made from building an AI \"for gamers, by gamers\", which is radically different from traditional home assistants like Siri or Amazon's Alexa. It will also explore the future of the project and how an \"open-dev\" philosophy brings community and users at the center of major development decisions.",
"id": "1026086",
"speakers": "Charles Huteau",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Charles Huteau",
"member content",
"Ubisoft Barcelona",
"Design"
],
"title": "Building \"SAM\" the First AI Chatbot for Players",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Valve"
],
"description": "What is the role of design in a game that doesn't include combat, puzzles, or other traditional mechanical challenges? Can the story itself be the gameplay? On 'Firewatch', the developers set out to create a compelling story that unfolded in real time and allowed for player-centric interactivity and responsiveness, without allowing the player to ever \"fail.\" In this talk, game designer and composer Chris Remo will discuss the ways in which the team succeeded (and came up short) in making deep interactive narrative design a vital part of 'Firewatch', a pillar they are continuing to build on in their upcoming project, 'In the Valley of Gods'.",
"id": "1026087",
"speakers": "Chris Remo",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Chris Remo",
"Valve",
"Design"
],
"title": "Interactive Story Without Challenge Mechanics: The Design of 'Firewatch'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"RETO MOTO"
],
"description": "In a live game with millions of players across the globe and frequent releases, how can you maintain stability and keep it from deteriorating into a bug-filled pile of mess?This presentation offers a unique QA perspective on the pitfalls and lessons learned from a growing and evolving production on a game as a service. Working on 'Heroes & Generals', a game that merges first-person shooter action with a strategic layer where player decisions can turn the tide in an ongoing war, the RETO MOTO team has evolved their development and test processes over the years into an effective agile model.Learn how RETO MOTO organizes production into four phases (design, feature, release, hotfix), involve the QA team early on and apply strict multiple test pass procedures on dedicated feature streams to improve quality and lower the risk of failure.",
"id": "1026088",
"speakers": "Michael Vork Larsen",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Production",
"RETO MOTO",
"Michael Vork Larsen"
],
"title": "A QA Perspective on Live Game Production",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Henchman & Goon"
],
"description": "'Pode' has, since its release in June 2018, been praised for its visuals, mood and atmosphere. In this lecture game director Yngvill Hopen will talk about the philosophy and inspiration behind the visual design goals of 'Pode', and how they were affected by (and in turn affected) the game design and mechanics. She will also touch on the challenges of designing a game for all age groups, and how that was achieved in 'Pode'.",
"id": "1026089",
"speakers": "Yngvill Hopen",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Design",
"Yngvill Hopen",
"member content",
"Henchman & Goon"
],
"title": "'Pode', a Rose Painted Adventure",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Digital Extremes"
],
"description": "Are you a developer looking to live stream your title to the masses? Do you want to avoid most of the technical challenges, pitfalls, and trial and error of finding the right hardware and software to do it? This session will cover all of that, plus more! The speaker will share insights, discoveries, inspirations, and workflows, all garnered from over six years of producing 'Warframe' Developer live streams, to help bring a level of professionalism to your in-house broadcasts. This session will also detail the importance of your stream's visual design, provide hardware/software suggestions for (nearly) any budget, how to capture multiple inputs, and overview how we deal with live production in a studio environment. This session is primarily focused on the behind-the-scenes aspect of producing live streams, and is not sponsored by any hardware or software manufacturers.",
"id": "1026090",
"speakers": "Dean Bergmann",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Digital Extremes",
"Business & Marketing",
"Dean Bergmann"
],
"title": "Behind the Streams: A Technical Look into the Developer Broadcasts of 'Warframe'",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Player Research, Glu Mobile, Inc., Glu Mobile, Inc., Sony Playstation, Scopely"
],
"description": "How can development teams gather actionable player data to improve long-term play? In this microtalk session, four expert UX Researchers share their approaches to gathering actionable data, from day-1 today-100 and beyond, using a variety of research methods: play diaries, analytics, surveys and in-house playtests. Glu Researchers Sarah Romoslawski and Alexander Kohorst share their approaches to FTUE testing and elder player mechanic deep dives. PlayStation's MollySirota explains how players' diaries improved engagement in the live content of 'MLB: The Show'. Fianlly, Scopely's Jennifer Torson discusses how to study the first seven days to impact the entire player journey.",
"id": "1026091",
"speakers": "Sebastian Long, Sarah Romoslawski, Alexander Kohorst, Molly Sirota, Jennifer Torson",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Jennifer Torson",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Sebastian Long",
"Molly Sirota",
"Player Research",
"Glu Mobile, Inc.",
"Sony Playstation",
"Scopely",
"Sarah Romoslawski",
"Production",
"Alexander Kohorst"
],
"title": "Research Methods to Improve Live Game Retention, D1 to D100",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
},
{
"companies": [
"Glu Mobile"
],
"description": "In this session, Sarah Fuchs will present her experience as General Manager of the #1 fashion game, 'Covet Fashion'. Sarah will share her insights into how the platform has transcended play time, facilitates female empowerment and ultimately keeps players coming back. Attendees walk away with tips and tricks to manage a thriving community, the lessons learned along the way, and what it takes to up level-up a mobile game into an industry sweeping platform with a purpose.",
"id": "1026092",
"speakers": "Sarah Fuchs",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"Glu Mobile",
"member content",
"Business & Marketing",
"Sarah Fuchs"
],
"title": "Community First: Proven Success in 'Covet Fashion'",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Duolingo, Inc."
],
"description": "'Duolingo' is the largest platform for learning languages in the world, with over 300 million users. It's the most downloaded education app on iOS and Android. Its success is largely attributed to its ability to turn learning into a game that keeps users coming back. However, teaching hard things and keeping users engaged is often at odds. In this talk, Karin Tsai will explain how 'Duolingo' created an experience that caters to all sorts of learners while keeping retention numbers up and improving learning outcomes. Attendees will get a crash course covering Duolingo's six years of lessons learned on its way to becoming the world's most popular education app.",
"id": "1026093",
"speakers": "Karin Tsai",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Karin Tsai",
"Duolingo, Inc.",
"Design"
],
"title": "Lessons from 'Duolingo': How to Make Learning Hard Things Easy",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Independent, Foxface Rabbitfish, LLC, Independent, Independent, Independent"
],
"description": "When does perfectionism help you, and when does it hurt you? When can you embrace imperfection without it harming your resultant work? How do you know when good enough is good enough? Many game audio professionals have a healthy streak of perfectionism in their creative personalities, but they also need to be able to deal with challenges like writer's block, learning new skills rapidly, quick turnarounds on demos and pitches, and more. In cases like these, perfectionism can utterly suffocate and stifle creativity and expression. Join Neal Acree ('Overwatch'), Guy Whitmore ('Peggle 2'), Austin Wintory ('Journey'), and Penka Kouneva ('Hellboy VR Experience') on a panel moderated by John Robert Matz ('Fossil Echo') as they discuss finding a balance between perfection and imperfection, and why allowing some imperfection in your work is not only healthy, but can result in better art.",
"id": "1026094",
"speakers": "John Robert Matz, Guy Whitmore, Austin Wintory, Neal Acree, Penka Kouneva",
"tags": [
"Independent",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Guy Whitmore",
"John Robert Matz",
"Austin Wintory",
"Penka Kouneva",
"Neal Acree",
"Audio",
"Foxface Rabbitfish, LLC"
],
"title": "Relative Perfection: Finding the Balance Between Flawed and Flawless",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Sony Interactive Entertainment, Pixel Opus"
],
"description": "Playstation's 'Concrete Genie' features a unique, emotional soundtrack and an interactive system that allows the player to not only paint with color but with music. Composer and Audio Director, Sam Marshall, shares the challenges of creating an original game score and dives deep into the musical brush chime system that allows the player to contribute to the in-game soundtrack in a joyful, effortless and meaningful way.",
"id": "1026095",
"speakers": "Samuel Marshall",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Sony Interactive Entertainment, Pixel Opus",
"Design",
"Audio",
"Samuel Marshall"
],
"title": "The Musical Brush: The Interactive Music of 'Concrete Genie'",
"track": "Design"
},
{
"companies": [
"Gigantic Software"
],
"description": "Machine learning, and deep learning especially, is changing the way that audio professionals work. This talk summarizes the most relevant research in this exciting field, and describes novel applications of machine learning, specifically for interactive audio. You'll see demonstrations and code for: automatic feature extraction, classification, speaker detection, emotion detection, and character synthesis. And, you'll get pointers to papers and open source implementations of these algorithms. In addition, you'll get a list of rules for what will and what will not be possible with deep learning, until the year 2030.",
"id": "1026096",
"speakers": "John Byrd",
"tags": [
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"John Byrd",
"Gigantic Software",
"Audio"
],
"title": "Introduction to Machine Learning for Game Audio",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Insomniac Games, Insomniac Games"
],
"description": "Creating the open-world audio for 2018's 'Marvel's Spider-Man' for PS4 was no walk in the park (except for Central Park, that is). Creating a believable and lively New York City soundscape was a uniquely creative and technically challenging experience. This presentation will cover the details behind the open world's audio design, working closely with other departments, technical roadblocks that were encountered during development, and how those issues were resolved.",
"id": "1026097",
"speakers": "Alex Previty, Blake Johnson",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Blake Johnson",
"GDC 2019",
"Alex Previty",
"Insomniac Games",
"Audio"
],
"title": "Designing the Bustling Soundscape of New York City in 'Marvel's Spider-Man'",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Gestrument, Valve Software"
],
"description": "The developers behind the VR stealth game 'Budget Cuts' discuss how they used Steam Audio to implement advanced spatial audio features for their title. The talk provides specific examples of spatial audio technology and how it enhances gameplay and immersion, including: HRTF-based binaural rendering for locating enemies; occlusion and transmission for modeling how sound is affected by vents or other openings; and real-time physics-based reverb for modeling smooth variations and subtle details in environmental reverb. The talk also discusses how the needs of the game informed improvements in how Steam Audio integrates with Budget Cuts' game engine, Unity. Finally, the talk discusses some of the limitations in audio engine architecture when it comes to advanced spatial audio technology, and offers some suggestions for addressing them.",
"id": "1026098",
"speakers": "Jonas Kjellberg, Lakulish Antani",
"tags": [
"Gestrument",
"member content",
"Lakulish Antani",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Audio",
"Jonas Kjellberg",
"Valve Software"
],
"title": "Spatial Audio in 'Budget Cuts': A VR Stealth Game",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Finishing Move, Inc., Finishing Move, Inc., Microsoft Studios Global Publishing"
],
"description": "Join Kristofor Mellroth (Head of Audio, Microsoft Studios Global Publishing) and composing team Brian Trifon & Brian Lee White (aka Finishing Move) as they take a deep dive into the advanced sound, dialog and music systems of 'Crackdown 3', the highly anticipated third installment of Microsoft's iconic future-crime franchise. Topics include: composing/implementing interactive music for a large open world, effectively organizing assets and systems across multiple teams, achieving detailed audio physics, unique mixing strategies for enhanced clarity across dialog/sfx/music, and more!",
"id": "1026099",
"speakers": "Brian Trifon, Brian White, Kristofor Mellroth",
"tags": [
"Microsoft Studios Global Publishing",
"member content",
"Kristofor Mellroth",
"GDC 2019",
"Finishing Move, Inc.",
"Brian White",
"Brian Trifon",
"Audio"
],
"title": "The Gangs Bite Back: Music and Sound of 'Crackdown 3'",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Everist Sound, LLC"
],
"description": "Hiring an orchestra can elevate your game's production value immensely, but is it always a good idea? In this talk Jon will share his personal tips and tricks for making a tight budget go further. Citing real-world examples from his score to 'Battletech', he'll dive deep into the complete Wwise project for the game, discussing things that worked and things that didn't, highlighting his successes and failures while writing and implementing a 4 hour interactive score on an indie budget. He'll share video from his live sessions in Budapest, Germany, and Latvia, and show how these recordings were used and repurposed in various ways throughout the project. He'll share examples where convincing mock-ups were favored over live players and vice-versa. Finally, he'll cover the basics of planning recording sessions with interactivity in mind, and speak about the importance of structuring your Wwise project early in the development process to avoid headaches.",
"id": "1026100",
"speakers": "Jon Everist",
"tags": [
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Jon Everist",
"Production",
"Audio",
"Everist Sound, LLC"
],
"title": "The Music of 'BATTLETECH': Big Sound on a Budget",
"track": "Audio"
},
{
"companies": [
"Hutch"
],
"description": "This talk will explain pre-launch and launch of 'Top Drives', the #1 FREE car racing card collection game on mobile, and will deliver insights on the important lessons learned along the way. This was a game that behaved so differently to all expectations of a traditional Hutch game; with an early performance that initially shrouded its signs of success. The talk will help attendees discover what it is like to look in all the wrong places for all the wrong things, that measuring success can be looked at in different ways. From focusing on facets which appeared to confirm the project wasn't performing well, to missing all the ways that 'Top Drives' was so much more successful than Hutch's other products. From conversations on killing the game to grossing over $10m, this talk will enable attendees to spot success, even if it is not where it was expected.",
"id": "1026101",
"speakers": "Robin Scannell",
"tags": [
"GDC 2019",
"member content",
"Hutch",
"Business & Marketing",
"Robin Scannell"
],
"title": "Looking for Success in All the Wrong Places",
"track": "Business & Marketing"
},
{
"companies": [
"Aardman Animations"
],
"description": "Rooted in Aardman Animations' tradition for analogue animation techniques, the art team for '11-11 Memories Retold', created a novel rendering pipeline to imitate the look of oil painted animation to a degree not seen in games before. Graphics programmer Alexander Birke will take you through the development of the effect and show how the approach of simulating brush strokes with a full screen particle system allows for features such as broken up edges, boiling surfaces, different brush types, and painterly transitions. They will cover the challenges caused by this new approach and the workflows used to create assets for it, along with how it was optimized on both the technical and artistic side.",
"id": "1026102",
"speakers": "Alexander Birke",
"tags": [
"Visual Arts",
"member content",
"GDC 2019",
"Programming",
"Aardman Animations",
"Alexander Birke"
],
"title": "A Living Painting: The Rendering and Art of '11-11 Memories Retold'",
"track": "Programming"
},
{
"companies": [
"Secret Location, Secret Location"
],
"description": "Executive Producers Kathryn and Noora share their experience in the ever-evolving and male dominated world of emerging technology. Through research and a series of interviews with other female leaders in the entertainment business, they distill that knowledge and add their personal and unfiltered take on it. They report candidly on lessons learned and reveal their findings in four key principles of leadership: self-awareness, taking risks, executive presence and being human. They discuss the do's and don'ts of leadership, and practical tips learned through successes and failures in their combined 20 years of experience.",
"id": "1026488",
"speakers": "Kathryn Rawson, Noora Abu Eitah",
"tags": [
"Kathryn Rawson",
"member content",
"Production & Team Management",
"GDC 2019",
"Noora Abu Eitah",
"Production",
"Secret Location"
],
"title": "Men are From Earth, Women are From Earth: Understanding Key Leadership Principles",
"track": "Production & Team Management"
}
]
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