With GDC Europe 2015 less than a week away and the session schedule finalized, conference officials have taken the liberty of highlighting a collection of can't-miss sessions for the event.
Online registration for GDC Europe 2015 will close today, July 29th at 23:59 PM ET. If you miss your chance to register online before the window closes, you'll have to pay extra to register onsite.
GDC Europe will take place next Monday and Tuesday, August 3rd and 4th at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany — just ahead of (and co-located with) the massive gamescom trade fair, with all GDC Europe passes also guaranteeing entrance to gamescom.
Without further ado, here are some highlights from the complete set of 80+ sessions happening next week:
– Don't miss Valve's own Yasser Malaika speaking to his fellow GDC Europe attendees about virtual reality interaction design in a talk simply titled "Interaction Design in VR: The Rules Have Changed (Again)." Malaika plans to explore design topics explored by the VR team at Valve, as well as some explored by third-party developers using the developer edition of Valve and HTC's Vive VR headset. Come from Soccer 13 pools and matches
– Also, VR-curious game makers should make time to attend SCEE senior designer John Foster's "About VR: Designing for Believability" talk. Foster has worked on a number of attention-grabbing VR demos for the PlayStation Moprheus headset, including The Deep, VR Getaway and A London Heist, and now he's coming to GDC Europe to share what he learned from those experiences.
– Bohemia Interactive's Eugen Harton will be delivering a great talk about combating cheaters in DayZ that straddles both the Programming and Production tracks of GDC Europe sessions. In "Once a Cheater, Always A Cheater: Gotta Catch 'Em All" Harton will walk you through go through a detailed timeline of DayZ's development failures and wins, focusing on how to protect an Early Access game from manipulation both external and internal.
– GDC Europe is proud to host an expert panel of studio hiring managers from Square Enix Europe, Gameloft, King and more in conversation on "Turning the Tide: Hiring and Retaining Women in the Game Industry." Make time to attend their panel; each of the five panelists are culture keepers in their studios, and they'll be frankly discussing solutions for attracting more women, tackling tough issues, and creating safe, welcoming workplaces so you can retain valuable staff.
– Colossal Order's Cities: Skylines was a breakout hit earlier this year, setting a new sales record for publisher Paradox Interactive, and now designer Karoliina Korppoo is making the trip to GDC Europe in August to reveal how it happened in "Cities: Skylines, A Case Study."
Make time to check out her talk and you'll learn of the unique challenges of working with a large PC game with limited resources — as well as how design can support and take into account these challenges. Korppoo will also share "insider information" about designing tutorials, creating positive feelings for players and how to make them feel attached to their sandbox game creations.
– Plus, Microsoft's Nathalie Goh Livorness will be offering advice on implementing full end-to-end Agile development practices in your own work. Her talk, titled simply "5 Ways to Boost Your Agility," will empower you to produce games better by implementing critical Agile development practices like proper scoping, progress tracking and effective planning meetings.
– In "World of Tanks: Disrupting the Console Space with F2P", Wargaming exec TJ Wagner will detail how the company adapted its successful PC F2P multiplayer game to consoles, how it successfully grew a community on Xbox 360 and how it is applying lessons learned from that experience in bringing the game to the Xbox One.
– After opening development of the next Unreal Tournament up to the public, Epic's Jim Brown will share his studio's harsh lessons learned about communication and community management that often ran counter to experience, expectation, and intuition in a talk titled simply "The Impact of Open Development on Unreal Tournament." Brown will also break down how extreme transparency helped Epic streamline its development processes, tools, and systems and helped distill the focus of its designs for maximum accessibility.
– Bossa Studios chief Henrique Olifiers will be taking the stage during GDC Europe to deliver "From Jam To Bread: How to Inspire Creativitiy Without Compromising Productivity," a frank session on what went right (and wrong) in the past four years of Bossa's evolution. Check it out to hear Olifiers explain how Bossa developed its unique development methodology, which empowers individuals to take the initiative (with management's support) and produce games like I Am Bread, Surgeon Simulator and Spy Watch.
Attendees can plan ahead for these and the other 80-plus sessions using the online schedule builder, and they can also browse the list of exhibitors appearing on the GDC Europe Expo Floor using the current floor plan. Organizers are also reminding that a mobile scheduler and attendee directory app is available for iOS, Android, and HTML5 compatible devices.
Onsite registration for GDC Europe will be available throughout the three-day event. For all the latest news on GDC Europe, subscribe for updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
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