👐🏻 🆖 👧🏽 GDC-2020: what to expect from one of the largest gaming development exhibitions 😧 🧖🏼 ☝🏽

From March 16 to March 20, 2020, the annual game developers conference, GDC, will be held in San Francisco. The main mission of the event is to exchange experiences, ideas and interesting cases of various companies involved in the gaming industry: from small indie studios to AAA giants.

We have compiled our guide on the conference program and below we will consider which of the developers is announced among the speakers and which topics will be touched upon during the exhibition this year.

Well, for those who are not going to go, but are still interested in what is happening, it is worth mentioning the GDC Vault - a paid online repository of all the important reports of GDC participants from different years, which we ourselves use.

UPD.Due to the outbreak of the coronavirus Covid-19, Kojima Productions, Electronic Arts, Sony, Facebook, Unity, Microsoft, Epic Games and Oculus refused to go to the conference, but the companies assured that all materials will be published online in one way or another.

Update 02.29.2020. The conference was rescheduled for the summer.

Update 03.25.2020. List of all online lectures from GDC-2020 here .

Hot topics

Microsoft will give a presentation on spatial sound in games, and will pay special attention to the next-generation consoles: according to the presentation, the new Xbox Series X will have a dedicated hardware sound accelerator. Intel

Corporation will hold a special session at the GDC , which will present details of the hardware architecture of the new line of graphics processors Xe . Intel Xe will be used in all technical segments, from mobile devices to high-performance computers. The release of Xe architecture is scheduled for the end of the year. Khronos Group Company

She stated that ray tracing technology could become part of the Vulkan application programming interface standard , which she will discuss at the conference with representatives of AMD, Intel and Nvidia .

Sega returned to service 20 years after leaving the console race. Asian producer Sega Games Co. Yusuke Okunari talks about ideas and events that ultimately led the company to create the Sega Genesis Mini .

Exchange of experience with the AAA industry

At sessions devoted to the 15th anniversary of World of Warcraft , game developers will tell you what challenges they had to face so that the game’s life cycle lasted so long, as well as the philosophy of building the legendary world . The server development team will talk about the incidents that they have encountered in the course of server maintenance, and will share their strategies that may be useful for their colleagues.

A number of lectures will be held by Remedy representatives , who have gained quite unique experience during the development of CONTROL : we will discuss the procedural destruction of in-game objects andimitating the physical materials used in the game, and about the narrative design , and about ray tracing to create lighting, and how the level of the "Ashtray Labyrinth" is arranged .

No less rich in variety of material is Respawn studio with its Jedi: Fallen Order . Visitors to the conference will be able to learn firsthand how the gameplay was developed , how the controller of the protagonist with all the numerous mechanics of movement and combat was programmed , and how to create inter-level connections in the game. Maya in collaboration with Respawn will hold its session under the name“ Maya 2020: The Next Generation Animation ” , in which Respawn 3D art director Ryan Lastimosa will share his own experience in using the program and show fragments of the development process of his latest hits.

Representatives of Rockstar Games will tell about their experience in developing Red Dead Redemption 2 : about the construction of an in-game ecosystem and work on creating an animal world (in particular, horses ), about the animation of the protagonist’s movement and about methods to achieve the game’s cinematicity . Mortal Kombat 11

developers will talk about tools forautomatic testing , to create a UI-interface of the game, about the process of creating characters and the development of a training mode for your game.

Sessions on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will cover topics such as the difficulties of automated testing and patch production, asset pipeline companies and the use of ray tracing to design shadows.

Roman Lebedev from Saber Interactive Inc. will talk about porting the third Witcher to the Nintendo Switch , focusing on optimizing memory and processor.

The Bungie development team will talk about the process of transferring Destiny 2 to the Stadia streaming service and what pitfalls they encountered before they managed to launch their game on the Google cloud .

Next, we divided the guide into separate blocks with a selection of selected lectures in various areas of development.

Art

glTF, WebGL and 3DCommerce : The Khronos Group at its session will talk about the benefits of using glTF, WebGL and 3DCommerce formats for rendering graphics in browsers and storing 3D scenes.

Democratizing real-time film production technology for indie game developers : Glassbox Technologies CEO Norman Wang will talk about what else needs to be done in the industry so that VFX tools become more cost-effective and, therefore, more affordable for small studios and individuals.

The subtle art of not doing VFX (represented by The Coalition) :It will cover the skills needed by the artist in order to achieve greater success in a team environment. How to work with empathy, share ideas, communicate between departments, give and receive feedback, respond to failures and use them in your experience.

How to create complex VFX systems using simple management tools (provided by Sumo Digital) : an overview of useful software development methods for working with VFX systems, as well as quick and successful troubleshooting.

Game design

Using machine learning for optimal matchmaking (Session 343 Industries) .

“Forgiveness Mechanics”: the ability to read minds to improve the gameplay : according to the speaker, Seth Coster from Butterscotch Shenanigans, thanks to the so-called “forgiveness mechanics”, you can create an exciting gaming experience that players will want to come back to again and again.

Press Y to cry: how to build a narration in video games to evoke the emotions of the players (Independent session) .

Shadow design: creating interactive elements for existing IPs :Christopher Denman, Walt Disney Imagineering audio designer, talks about working with iconic characters and stories and transforming them into an interactive experience, as well as showing soundtrack and sound design examples for franchises such as Marvel, Star Wars, and Disney / Pixar .

Using Machine Learning and Modeling for Better Game Mechanics (Submitted by Unity Technologies) : An overview of Unity's machine learning and simulation capabilities and how they can help solve some of the pressing issues related to testing and balancing games.

4D level design in Outer Wilds :Outer Wilds developers talk about their approach to level design that can control the pace of storytelling as part of a large-scale physical simulation that dynamically changes the game world.

Manifold Garden: designing impossible geometry should be made more accessible : the session will show you the different level design methods used to create a potentially disorienting 3D space. It will also examine issues arising from this among players, such as loss of interest and feelings of depression, and methods for solving them.

Artificial Intelligence

Developing AI to motivate players using the example of Marvel Future Fight (presented by Sentience) : this session will examine the AI for Marvel Future Fight, which helps developers understand and segment each player’s personality and tests various hypotheses that may cause them to drain.

DLSS - image reconstruction for real-time rendering using deep learning (represented by NVIDIA) :in this talk, Edward Liu of NVIDIA highlights the latest advances in deep supersampling (DLSS), which uses NVIDIA's deep learning and tensor cores to recover super-sampled frames in real time. It demonstrates why scaling and restoring images for real-time rendering is an extremely difficult task, and also explores the cause of common artifacts created by traditional upsampling techniques.

Creating AI agents for testing and researching a first-person shooter : a review of a simple but effective approach to creating AI agents for testing and evaluating a game in the process of its development by AI scientist Igor Borovikov from EA.

Adapting PvP matchmaking systems for the PvE difficulty of the game : Set Cooper from Northeastern Boston University will talk about how this approach to matchmaking can help to better retain players.

What kind of masterful creation is man: strange problems with AI at Elsinore : representatives of Riot Games will talk about what incidents with artificial intelligence they had to solve when developing their Shakespearean drama Elsinore.

The Challenges of Creating AI for Starcraft II : Timo Ewalds from DeepMind talks about how AlphaStar was created and how experience building it can help to better use AI in video games.

Avoid mistakes when using deep learning to test and create NPCs :The session will address issues such as the differences between the RL and IL bots and the general problems of implementing deep learning in Unity.

Expressive NPC Animation (NetEase Session) : The participants in this session will learn about the technical details, potential benefits and practical problems of modern probabilistic models and computational algorithms for animation synthesis technologies, as well as how to create an animation generator with a modern approach to automatic trajectory calculation.

Community management

How to measure the impact of business processes on social media : here, Pixel Federation students will learn how to analyze content and create a whole system of user reports to get an idea of what Facebook subscribers think of you.

Improvement of observation and interaction metrics: how to help developers accelerate involvement in your game : Azarus and Ubisoft will tell you how to turn “media investments” into a real involvement of users in the game, as well as open your eyes to some of the possibilities of extensions on Twitch.

Soft skills are hard: a community manager’s message : the session will discuss how important it is to develop a healthy gaming community and develop ourselves, as well as support and take care of your team and more.

Marketing

Pre-marketing marketing: a guide to the game market and competitive analysis : a step-by-step guide on how to assess the market potential and viability of your game using market research, competitor analysis, SWOT analysis and how to use this information to best promote and position the game.

How not to kill your game too quickly: competitiveness and how to find out when your excellent game becomes a great business (ironSource lecture) : early game performance indicators and tests and best practices for maximizing profit.

DayZ Resurrection: Streamers returning to a five-year game :The session will discuss how to choose the right channels for sponsored campaigns and how to manage them for free long-term coverage.

Ost? OMG! Composer's Guide to the Soundtrack for the Game : Composers from Finishing Move Inc. The lecture will discuss strategies for effectively converting highly interactive in-game sounds into a soundtrack, as well as its subsequent release.

Forget about CPI: Dynamic Mobile Marketing : Kongregate's Heather Geiner talks about how the market has moved away from CPI ratings and what early marketing metrics can help you evaluate project success now.

Targeting a non-gaming audience with realistic game design (Edgeworks Entertainment lecture) : specific examples of successful targeting of non-gamers will be considered due to the emphasis on gaining experience that they find exciting - for example, space exploration - as well as the question of how to organize a successful community from such players.

Mobile development

Migrating over 300 million Pokémon Go players to Aurora PostgreSQL (provided by Amazon Game Tech) : Students will learn how Pokémon Go developers transferred 300 million players to Amazon PostgreSQL and Amazon DynamoDB without any downtime.

Cross-platform Vainglory: problems of transferring a mobile game to a computer : the session will talk about how it was necessary to expand and what to change in the game in order to prepare it for the release on the new platform.

Mobile advertisements are your best weapon against high customer acquisition costs :the audience will know why, if the business relies on paid user engagement, it’s necessary to establish the process of creating ads, as well as how to actually create and test them in order to maximize the possibilities of automatic campaign management on Facebook and Google.

Improving the performance of mobile devices with the Unity Burst Compiler (represented by Arm and Unity) : Unity and Arm representatives will talk about the latest updates to Burst Compiler and how to efficiently use the latest multi-core processors to create more complex games and optimize battery usage on mobile devices.

Advanced effects for mobile platforms : procedurally generated UV-cards, vertex shaders for changing and deforming geometry, re-mapping and using them to solve a wide range of VFX problems on mobile platforms, AR or VR.

Multiplayer

Stable relationships: how proper hosting can save your multiplayer game (represented by Improbable) : effective hosting solutions and how they are related to SpatialOS technology.

Organization of a multi-user company: tools and methods to overcome any multiplayer problems (presented by Improbable) : the audience will gain an understanding of new technologies that make multiplayer development more efficient, effective and affordable for any online game.

Is your game ready for cross-platform? An overview from AccelByte of the difficulties and technical investments needed to create a cross-platform game.

What else is interesting

If you are interested in not only listening to lectures, but also attending parties, then here is their list .

Also within the framework of the conference will be held:

own film festival;
Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards.

The full conference schedule can be found on the official website .

GDC-2020: what to expect from one of the largest gaming development exhibitions