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Why Now Is the Best Time Ever to Be a Game Developer

Ingress: Design Principles Behind Google's Massively Multiplayer Geo Game

Playing with 'Game'

Gathering Your Party with Project Eternity (GDC Next 10)

D4: Dawn of the Dreaming Director's Drama (GDC Next 10)

Using Plot Devices to Create Gameplay in Storyteller (GDC Next 10)

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Making CounterSpy (GDC Next 10)

Luck and Skill in Games

Minimalist Game Design for Mobile Devices

Broken Age: Rethinking a Classic Genre for the Modern Era (GDC Next 10)

GDC 2012 Category

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Knowing the Past: Game Education Needs Game History
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SKU#: GDC12-3291
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Description: Knowing the Past: Game Education Needs Game History

Speaker/s: Clara Fernandez-Vara (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab), Jesper Juul (New York University) and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (University of California Santa Cruz)
Day / Time / Location: Tuesday 1:45- 2:45 Room 2004, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: GDC Education Summit / 60-Minute / Lecture / Intermediate
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Though our students are often described as "digital natives" or as natural video game players, most students have a cursory and selective understanding of video game history. This presents problems both in school and after graduation. Teachers need to actively include game history in their curricula, so that students understand how game genres and technologies develop, can draw on the past for critical discussion and creative inspiration, and can participate in informed discussion with peers, mentors, and the public. The presenters discuss why we need to teach game history, describe what the challenges they have come across, and suggest their strategies to overcome them.

Managing the Masses: Crafting AI for Online Games
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SKU#: GDC12-3290
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Description: Managing the Masses: Crafting AI for Online Games

Speaker/s: Robert Zubek (Zynga) and Mike Lewis (ArenaNet Inc.)
Day / Time / Location: Monday 3:00- 4:00 Room 2006, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: AI Summit / 60-Minute / Lecture / Intermediate
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Recently, MMOs and social games have begun pushing the envelope by adding rich AI agents to fill out their human-driven worlds. This movement exposed a new set of challenges. How do you create and manage thousands of simultaneous MMO agents that may interact with tens of thousands of users? And how do you do it in a manner that allows the fast-paced and often iterative release schedule of today's online games? This lecture will outline the challenges unique to architecting AI for online games, and explain some of the solutions used by Zynga's CityVille and ArenaNet's upcoming Guild Wars 2.

A Holistic Approach to A/B Testing [SOGS Business]
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SKU#: GDC12-3289
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Description: A Holistic Approach to A/B Testing [SOGS Business]

Speaker/s: Jesse Hull (GSN)
Day / Time / Location: Monday 10:00-11:00 Room 130, North Hall
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Social and Online Games Summit / 60-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Most social game developers claim to a/b test these days, but to succeed testing must be part of your culture. How can you foster this across the organization and avoid common pitfalls? At GSN every developer, designer and marketer thinks about a/b testing. This is how we have managed to sustain growth on the Facebook platform for over 3 years.

What are common mistakes people make when designing tests? What shouldn't you test? How long should your let your tests run.

Setting Bejeweled Blitz Free: Lessons Learned Moving From Premium to Freemium on iOS
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SKU#: GDC12-3288
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Description: Setting Bejeweled Blitz Free: Lessons Learned Moving From Premium to Freemium on iOS

Speaker/s: Giordano Bruno Contestabile (PopCap Games)
Day / Time / Location: Tuesday 1:45- 2:45 Room 134, North Hall
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Smartphone and Tablet Games Summit / 60-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Bejeweled Blitz has been one of the first games to be fully integrated between Facebook and iOS and one of the most successful. In December 2011, PopCap launched a freemium version of Bejeweled Blitz on iOS (iPhone / iPad): previously, the game was available only on iPhone as a game mode inside Bejeweled 2, a premium product. This session will cover the decision process that led PopCap to launch the product as a freemium offering and the launch process itself, and highlight the most important lessons learned from it. The session will also focus on the most important aspects of launching and operating a cross-platform social product (mobile and Facebook).

Datamining: How to Harvest the Gold in your Game Sales Database [SOGS Business]
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SKU#: GDC12-3287
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Description: Datamining: How to Harvest the Gold in your Game Sales Database [SOGS Business]

Speaker/s: Nick Berry (DataGenetics)
Day / Time / Location: Tuesday 4:30- 4:55 Room 130, North Hall
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Social and Online Games Summit / 25-Minute / Lecture / Intermediate
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: You've spent years and countless dollars, building up sales of your traditional game product, but what do you really know about these customers? How can your leverage this investment? Social game developers have easy access to rich demographic information about their customers, but traditional game developers have not had this luxury until now. This presentation will show how to use a novel technique to gain valuable business intelligence on your customers by the intersection of your customer database with large (public domain) government databases. In addition to an explanation of the technique, a walk-through example will be shown with real data.

Concrete Practices to Be a Better Leader: Framing & Intention
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SKU#: GDC12-3285
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Description: Concrete Practices to Be a Better Leader: Framing & Intention

Speaker/s: Brian Sharp (Bungie)
Day / Time / Location: Friday 2:30- 3:30 Room 2003, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Production , Business and Marketing and Management / 60-Minute / Track Keynote / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: This talk is about leading well by doing two things: communicating effectively and maintaining perspective. Conversations obviously bear meaning on many levels beyond explicit words; here we'll talk about frames, the assumptions and context we bring to our interactions. Skillful framing is worth the practice, as it can inspire, motivate and energize, help you navigate the shores of professional power dynamics and strengthen relationships of all kinds.

Of course, it only does those things if you want it to, which brings us to intention, the motivation behind your every action. It's deceptively easy to believe we're acting for one reason, often a noble one, when our true intention is something else. When we do that, our behavior often ends up causing harm and sabotaging our true goals. We'll talk about the work involved in staying aware of your intention and steering it in a direction that'll yield the right results.

Entertaining the Enterprise: Helping You Level Up & Conquer Work
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SKU#: GDC12-3284
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Description: Entertaining the Enterprise: Helping You Level Up & Conquer Work

Speaker/s: Li-Te Cheng (IBM), Jennifer Michelstein (Microsoft Office Labs), Alexander Moore (Baydin, Inc.) and Ian Bogost (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Day / Time / Location: Monday 1:45- 2:45 Room 2009, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Game IT Summit / 60-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Making work fun sounds great in concept, but the reality isn't so casual. Three inspirational case studies come together to provide a set of talks that shed light on how games can be used for training, social networks and productivity, for individuals and businesses alike. Ribbon Hero 2 is the Office Labs effort to turn Microsoft's bestselling Office suite into a learning game. In the game, players hop on board Clippy's stolen time machine and explore different time periods, playing challenges in Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote in order to advance to the next level. Hear how the game was conceived, how the team responded to critical user feedback from the original version to "make it more like a game," and core takeaways as it relates to building a game into productivity software. IBM Research explores opportunities for game developers seeking to make a new breed of game experiences ready for corporations. Not only will we explore how we see the overall landscape evolving, but using examples from two experimental games developed for accessible browser-based technologies we will document a specific case using games to improve the uptake of a new social network application for collaboration and planning. Baydin is changing the way you feel about email. Hear how a day spent avoiding email (and playing Total War instead!) turned into the spark that lead to a game that helps people helps you get to the bottom of their own email dungeon. By using subtler, more abstract game experiences that supplant points and badges as the primary tools The Email Game has become one of the fastest-growing mail clients of the decade.

Evolution of the Cinematic Process: The Gears of War Trilogy
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SKU#: GDC12-3283
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Description: Evolution of the Cinematic Process: The Gears of War Trilogy

Speaker/s: Greg Mitchell (Epic Games)
Day / Time / Location: Thursday 5:30- 6:30 Room 2009, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Visual Arts , Production / 60-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: This session discusses the creation and evolution of cinematics for the Gears of War Trilogy. The IP started around the launch of a new console cycle and the team at Epic Games had to adopt new methods for the production of next-gen cinematics. Story content increased during the making of Gears 2 and Gears 3, so the developers made advances in their cinematic process to accommodate the titles. Learn how through trial and error, a small team of artists revamped the way they approached production, motion capture, presentation and the toolsets used to produce over 3 hours of cinematic content for the Gears of War series.

Incubating Indie Games at University
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SKU#: GDC12-3282
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Description: This is Not an Orientation: Gameful Layers for the Freshman Experience

Speaker/s: Jeff Watson (USC iMAP program), Benjamin Stokes (USC Annenberg), Donald Brinkman (Microsoft Research Connections), Elizabeth Lawley (RIT School of Interactive Games & Media) and Ryan Martinez (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Day / Time / Location: Tuesday 10:00-11:00 Room 2004, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: GDC Education Summit / 60-Minute / Panel / Intermediate
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: A comparison of two experimental games that each attempt to scaffold the first year university experience. "Just Press Play," from RIT, an achievement-based system that encourages students to think of the obstacles in their path as part of a narrative of their educational development. "Reality Ends Here," from USC, is a DIY media-making ARG that introduces students to the culture and history of the cinema school, challenging them to become part of the school's storied tradition. Designers and evaluators from each team discuss learning goals, design strategies, assessment approaches, preliminary outcomes and next steps for these innovative digital learning environments.

This is Not an Orientation: Gameful Layers for the Freshman Experience
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SKU#: GDC12-3281
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Description: This is Not an Orientation: Gameful Layers for the Freshman Experience

Speaker/s: Jeff Watson (USC iMAP program), Benjamin Stokes (USC Annenberg), Donald Brinkman (Microsoft Research Connections), Elizabeth Lawley (RIT School of Interactive Games & Media) and Ryan Martinez (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Day / Time / Location: Tuesday 10:00-11:00 Room 2004, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: GDC Education Summit / 60-Minute / Panel / Intermediate
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: A comparison of two experimental games that each attempt to scaffold the first year university experience. "Just Press Play," from RIT, an achievement-based system that encourages students to think of the obstacles in their path as part of a narrative of their educational development. "Reality Ends Here," from USC, is a DIY media-making ARG that introduces students to the culture and history of the cinema school, challenging them to become part of the school's storied tradition. Designers and evaluators from each team discuss learning goals, design strategies, assessment approaches, preliminary outcomes and next steps for these innovative digital learning environments.

Like Herding LOLcats: Managing the Internet's Most Unruly Gaming Communities [SOGS Business]
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SKU#: GDC12-3280
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Description: Like Herding LOLcats: Managing the Internet's Most Unruly Gaming Communities [SOGS Business]

Speaker/s: Mike Drach (Forumwarz)
Day / Time / Location: Tuesday 11:15-11:40 Room 130, North Hall
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Social and Online Games Summit / 25-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: It's official: Everyone's a troll nowadays. In an age where civility has become an antiquated notion, how do you manage and engage your audience?

Forumwarz -- a popular indie web RPG and the world's first "troll-playing" game -- attracted a crowd known for its deliberately antisocial, nasty behavior. Mike Drach, Creative Director of Forumwarz will discuss moderating and managing the trolliest communities out there. He will outline a number of strategies they employed to deal with trolls, what worked, what didn't, and what they'd do differently in the future.

Nuke It From Orbit: the Making of Atom Zombie Smasher
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SKU#: GDC12-3279
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Description: Nuke It From Orbit: the Making of Atom Zombie Smasher

Speaker/s: Brendon Chung (Blendo Games)
Day / Time / Location: Monday 3:35- 4:00 Room 2003, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Independent Games Summit / 25-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Scrapping a project is never easy and scrapping it twice is downright agonizing. Join Blendo Games in recounting the development of Atom Zombie Smasher, a self-funded project made by a one-man team. Come listen to our journey, starting from our early prototypes and project restarts, to our showing at the Penny Arcade Expo. We'll also talk about post-launch data, including user support, sales numbers and digital distribution statistics.

Perhaps a Time of Miracles Was at Hand: The Business & Development of #Sworcery
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SKU#: GDC12-3276
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Description: Perhaps a Time of Miracles Was at Hand: The Business & Development of #Sworcery

Speaker/s: Nathan Vella (Capy)
Day / Time / Location: Monday 11:15-12:15 Room 2003, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Independent Games Summit / 60-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Sometimes the best decisions are the ones that appear to be the worst on paper. From the beginning, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP was a woefully risky project that required new approaches to both business & development. This talk will outline and explain the choices made by the team that helped one of the App Store's weirdest games become a critical and financial success. Specifically, the audience will learn how the team handled 'truly collaborative' development, the process of developing a PR 'voice' to promote the game, and how the team mitigated business risk by being as risky as possible.

Designing for Free: How Free-to-Play Games Blur the Line Between Design and Business
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SKU#: GDC12-3275
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Description: Designing for Free: How Free-to-Play Games Blur the Line Between Design and Business

Speaker/s: Soren Johnson (Game Developer Magazine), Ben Cousins (ngmoco Sweden), Matthias Worch (LucasArts), Tom Chick (Quarter to Three) and David Edery (Spry Fox)
Day / Time / Location: Friday 4:00- 5:00 Room 2003, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Game Design , Business and Marketing and Management / 60-Minute / Panel / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: The free-to-play movement is here to stay and will touch every corner of the games industry. However, the format blurs the line between game design and game business, so that business decisions will become increasingly indistinguishable from design decisions. Free-to-play content must be fun enough to attract and retain players but not so much fun that no one feels the need to spend some money. Managing this tension makes free-to-play design extremely difficult, especially for traditional game designers who are used to simply making the best game possible. Our panelists will discuss this transition and best practices for building free-to-play games with soul.

Experimental Gameplay Sessions
Price:$3.95

SKU#: GDC12-3274
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Description: Experimental Gameplay Sessions

Speaker/s: Robin Hunicke (thatgamecompany), Daniel Benmergui (Independent), Steve Swink (Enemy Airship), Jenova Chen (thatgamecompany), Douglas Wilson (Die Gute Fabrik), Pietro Righi Riva (Santa Ragione), Nicholas Clark (thatgamecompany), Rami Ismail (Vlambeer), Mathias Nordvall (Linkoping University), Robin Arnott (WRAUGHK), Alex Kerfoot (RPM Collective), Anna Anthropy (Auntie Pixelante), Mars Jokela (Self Aware Games), Kurt Bieg (Simple Machine), Bennett Foddy (foddy.net), John Sear (WallFour), Nicolo Tedeschi (Santa Ragione) and Ramsey Nasser (Pizza Party)
Day / Time / Location: Friday 2:30- 4:30 Room 3014, West Hall, 3rd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Game Design / 2-Hour / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: The Experimental Gameplay Session is back for its 10-year anniversary at GDC!

In this fast-paced, game-packed session we will showcase a selection of surprising and intriguing prototypes made by innovation-minded game developers from all over the world. By demonstrating games that defying conventions and traditions in search for of new genres and ideas, this session aims to ignite the imagination of all game makers. Many games debuted at this session have enjoyed critical and commercial success- including Katamari Damacy, flOw, Braid, Portal, World of Goo and Today I Die. Come see what's happening on in the world of Experimental Gameplay and be inspired!

Art History for Game Devs: In Praise of Abstraction
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SKU#: GDC12-3273
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Description: Art History for Game Devs: In Praise of Abstraction

Speaker/s: John Sharp (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Day / Time / Location: Thursday 5:30- 6:30 Room 135, North Hall
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Game Design , Visual Arts / 60-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Abstraction-- the process of generalizing a phenomenon in order to gain new perspectives and understanding-- has been a vital tool for creating experiences in nearly all art forms. Games themselves are of course abstract systems, but as a medium, we do not take full advantage of all the ways other arts use abstraction to approach their art forms and to expand their expressive potential. John Sharp will look at the ways painters, animators, poets, comic artists, decorative artists and dancers use abstraction to expand, deepen and give new shape to their artforms.
Takeaway: Attendees will come away with new methods for thinking about and using abstraction as a game design tool. The talk will as well provide developers with ways to look to painting, poetry, comics, dance, animation and the decorative arts for inspiration for conceptualizing and focusing their design work. Game developers will gain new perspectives on abstraction as a tool for creating richer and more varied play experiences.

Embracing the Dark Art of Mathematical Modeling in AI
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SKU#: GDC12-3272
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Description: Embracing the Dark Art of Mathematical Modeling in AI

Speaker/s: Kevin Dill (Lockheed Martin Global Training & Logistics) and Dave Mark (Intrinsic Algorithm)
Day / Time / Location: Monday 1:45- 2:45 Room 2006, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: AI Summit / 60-Minute / Lecture / Intermediate
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Utility-based AI is a widely-used approach, particularly for games with deeper or more complex behavior. While new users may find utility functions complex and intimidating, experienced users see them as a natural and comfortable way to express behavior. In a follow-up of their 2010 lecture, Kevin Dill and Dave Mark will show how simple problems can be laid out quickly and easily using common design patterns. Additionally, they will show how complex situations can make use of utility functions to express more nuanced behavior. They will then walk through real-world examples, showing how they would be expressed in a utility-based architecture.

Less A More I: Using Psychology in Game AI
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SKU#: GDC12-3271
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Description: Less A More I: Using Psychology in Game AI

Speaker/s: Dave Mark (Intrinsic Algorithm) and Brian Schwab (Blizzard Entertainment)
Day / Time / Location: Tuesday 1:45- 2:45 Room 2006, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: AI Summit / 60-Minute / Lecture / Intermediate
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: When dealing with game AI characters, psychology can't help but come into play. Players process what they see and experience through a filter of expectations. We expect human-like game characters to exhibit human-like traits. A by-product of the quest to improve AI decisions, however, is that characters can begin to "feel" robotic and sterile. This session will begin by showing various psychological biases that we as game players bring to the experience. We will then show how characters can be imbued with simple affects to exploit these expectations in order to seem more "alive" and believable.

Army Attack! Postmortem: Fighting in the Free to Play War [SOGS Postmortem]
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SKU#: GDC12-3270
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Description: Army Attack! Postmortem: Fighting in the Free to Play War [SOGS Postmortem]

Speaker/s: Aki Jarvinen (Digital Chocolate)
Day / Time / Location: Monday 5:05- 5:30 Room 130, North Hall
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Social and Online Games Summit / 25-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Digital Chocolate's Army Attack! found a highly viable niche in strategic war gamers on Facebook, peaking near 600K of daily active users during 2011 and continues its success on other platforms. The lecture will walk the audience through development and post-launch learnings from the game. Creative director Aki Järvinen will present what went right and what went wrong with the project and summarize the findings into the key contexts of social game development: virtual goods, metrics and software as service.

Why I Hate Women in Games Initiatives
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SKU#: GDC12-3269
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Description: Why I Hate Women in Games Initiatives

Speaker/s: Mare Sheppard (Metanet Software Inc)
Day / Time / Location: Wednesday 12:30-12:55 Room 2022, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Advocacy / 25-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: The video game industry needs help. We need to stop seeing people different from us as "other", or at least stop seeing "other" ideas as anything but an opportunity to grow our businesses, change our ways of thinking and improve our games. This talk explores the issues we face, the potential we each have and the social fabric that we exist within in order to pursue discussion and implementable strategies.

When the Consoles Die - What Comes Next?
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SKU#: GDC12-3268
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Description: When the Consoles Die - What Comes Next?

Speaker/s: Ben Cousins (ngmoco Sweden)
Day / Time / Location: Wednesday 5:35- 6:00 Room 3009, West Hall, 3rd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Business and Marketing and Management / 25-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Everything dies, eventually. Our industry is in a period of rapid, tumultuous change as social games, iOS/Android and PC free-to-play grow from nothing to hundreds of millions of users right before our eyes. Meanwhile, consumer technology is trending away from the use of specialized devices like MP3 players, digital cameras and GPS receivers towards multi-use devices like a laptop computers, tablets or smartphones.

What could these two trends mean for the central hardware platform and business model of the current games industry - the PS3, Xbox 360 or Wii sitting under your TV? Is the games console as we know it under threat? In this talk Ben Cousins examines questions that many are beginning to ask - will the console die? If so, what will kill it and when? What can console developers do to avoid their jobs dying with the platform?

Marketing for Indies: The Indie Games Summer Uprising
Price:$3.95

SKU#: GDC12-3265
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Description: Marketing for Indies: The Indie Games Summer Uprising

Speaker/s: Dave Voyles (Armless Octopus)
Day / Time / Location: Friday 2:30- 3:30 Room 2002, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Business and Marketing and Management / 60-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Ever wonder how how to market your game as an independent developer? Are you short on the funds to promote your own game? Did you ever wish there was a place where you could learn to showcase your work and talents? Then this speech is for you. This 60 minute discussion will focus on how 2011's Indie Games Summer Uprising, which consisted of over 70 development teams on Microsoft's Xbox LIVE Indie Games platform, managed to put together a successful marketing campaign. Learn about the design, teamwork, planning, and pitfalls which took place through the promotion from Co-Coordinator Dave Voyles.

A Two-Part Technique for Efficiently Scaling Build and Test Automation
Price:$3.95

SKU#: GDC12-3263
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Description: A Two-Part Technique for Efficiently Scaling Build and Test Automation

Speaker/s: Josh Nixdorf (Electronic Arts)
Day / Time / Location: Wednesday 5:35- 6:00 Room 2022, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Programming / 25-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Keeping the build stable is expensive. QA effort is best spent checking for authenticity and fun, not looking for software bugs. Developers can write unit tests or run extensive at-desk testing, but their time is best spent writing and tuning features. Developer-side automated builds and tests help ensure that everyone's time is focused on what they do best, but automation is challenging to scale efficiently; increasing concurrent soak, sniff, and smoke tests often results in duplicate builds or idling while builds copy. Our two-part technique, involving virtual machines and hard-disk virtualization, can alleviate many of the costs associated with scaling automation. We will present our approaches for parallelizing the build and test processes, how virtual machines can help reduce the duration of the check-in to test result cycle and how hard-disk virtualization can be used further facilitate parallelization and avoid lengthy file copies.

Terrain in Battlefield 3: A Modern, Complete and Scalable System
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SKU#: GDC12-3262
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Description: Terrain in Battlefield 3: A Modern, Complete and Scalable System

Speaker/s: Mattias Widmark (EA DICE)
Day / Time / Location: Wednesday 5:00- 6:00 Room 2006, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Programming / 60-Minute / Lecture / Intermediate
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: In the session, we'll take a complete look at the terrain system in Frostbite 2 as it was applied in Battlefield 3. The session is partitioned into three parts. We begin with the scalability aspects and discuss how consistent use of hierarchies allowed us to combine high resolutions with high view distances. We then turn towards workflow aspects and describe how we achieved full in-game realtime editing. A fair amount of time is spent describing how issues were addressed.

Finally, we look at the runtime side. We describe usage of CPU, GPU and memory resources and how it was kept to a minimum. We discuss how the GPU is offloaded by caching intermediate results in a procedural virtual texture and how prioritization was done to allow for work throttling without sacrificing quality. We also go into depth about the flexible streaming system that work with both FPS and driving games.

Words With Friends: Building and Growing a Game on the Top of the Charts
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SKU#: GDC12-3261
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Description: Words With Friends: Building and Growing a Game on the Top of the Charts


Speaker/s: Vijay Thakkar (Zynga With Friends)
Day / Time / Location: Thursday 10:00-11:00 Room 130, North Hall
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Production / 60-Minute / Lecture / Intermediate
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: Developing and growing Words With Friends has been a project that has spanned multiple platforms, multiple studios and is beloved by millions of players. Before solidifying a position on the top of the charts, it had much smaller roots stemming from a library in McKinney, Tx. Come hear about lessons learned while building the With Friends platform and scaling the technology. Topics will cover the technical trials and tribulations of a large scale service to managing multi-platform, cross-team development. It should be a learning experience for game developers in any space, from indie developers to AAA.


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