The days between here and the big GDC Europe conference this August are dwindling, and today GDC organizers are proud to announce another excellent, expert talk that will be taking place at the renowned event in Cologne, Germany.

Joost Van Dreunen is the chief of video game market research firm SuperData Research, and as such he has direct access to a wealth of fascinating data about the trends and tendencies of the game industry. At GDC Europe he's going to share some of that wealth in a session simply titled "All the Insights, Data, and Trends" that promises to be a fascinating talk.

This year's GDC Europe conference in Germany is coming up quick, and today event organizers like to tip you off to a great talk about strategy game design that will take place at the summer conference.

Come August, GDC Europe 2016 attendees will have an opportunity to attend the "Strategy Game Design and the Operational Level of War" talk from Plarium's Guy Ulmer. 

The one-time Red Alert modder now serves as an expert on optimizing mobile games, and during his presentation he'll show you how a better understanding of some basic military discipline when building a strategy game will help designers better define their niche in the crowded strategy/RTS game markets.

The popular GDC Europe conference in Cologne, Germany is coming up fast, and as organizers continue to line up great talks for the show they're excited to announce that Activision Blizzard is backing a talk on the art production process behind the hit Call of Duty games.

Check out the "Art Production for 'Call of Duty'" talk to hear Activision Blizzard's Carlos Garcia and Red Hot CG's Claas Grimm take you behind the scenes of AAA game production.

From setup to planning to execution, the pair will afford attendees detailed insight into the inner workings of a large-scale art production process. They'll also offer advice and lessons learned about resource management, tools selection, creative challenges, and ongoing trends in the game industry.

GDC organizers are working with top game industry talent to line up great talks for this year's GDC Europe conference in Germany, and today they're happy to debut a fresh talk on the design of video game backend architecture that automatically scales.

Check out "Developing an Automatically Scaling Game Backend Architecture with Microservices," a GDC Europe talk from experienced backend developer Kevin Daniel Setiono, and you'll walk away with a solid understand of how to develop actor-based game features optimized for distributed, survivable systems.

Setiono's goal is to teach attendees to perform technical miracles by utilizing a state of the art game backend that's simple in its design. He'll show you how to leverage Service Fabric, an Actor Model-based software framework on Azure, and distributed systems that won't add unnecessary complexity to existing monolithic counterparts -- but will add the peace of mind that comes with disaster recovery and scalability. 

The popular GDC Europe conference in Cologne, Germany is coming up fast, and as organizers continue to line up great talks for the show they're excited to announce that longtime game designer Mata Haggis will be there delivering a great talk on interaction design in games.

In "Narrative Experience First: Interaction Design in Fragments of Him," Haggis will showcase the many small design choices made to amplify the game's narrative through interactions in order to better keep the player 100 percent immersed in the narrative.

Haggis aims to cover the successes and failures we came up against in the development of the game, including many practical examples of topics such as reticule design and iteration, forced player movement, removing interactions to create additional immersion, and more.

GDC officials are pleased to announce another great talk taking place at the big GDC Europe conference this August in Germany, one that will offer advice and support to anyone starting up their own game business.

IEP president and EEDAR cofounder Greg Short has a long career in the game industry, and at GDC Europe he'll deliver a talk on "How to Survive Your Start-Up." Check it out and you'll learn about the darker side of start-ups and how to survive some of the most dangerous perils they face.

Some of the topics Short plans to cover include: burning your boats, managing angel investors, when friends become foes, planning for growth, and riding the motivation roller-coaster. Whether you're already in a start-up now, or are thinking of one in the future, this session will help to prepare you for the worst, so you can work to be the best.

Heads up, European devs: GDC Europe is just months away, and today conference organizers are pleased to debut an intriguing session on the growing popularity (and power!) of game hubs that will take place during the conference in Germany this August.

Modern Dream (Typing of the Dead: Overkill [pictured]) director and cofounder Oliver Clarke also helped cofound U.K. coworking space Arch Creatives, and at GDC Europe he'll be delivering a great talk on "Game Hubs: A Quest to Revolutionize Game Production."  

His talk will provide a clear understanding of what Game Hubs are, why they're popping up around the world, what the advantages are for developers -- and what major pitfalls to avoid. His talk will also provide ideas on how to set one up, and afford you a better understanding of their potential to improve your game production process.

GDC officials are organizing some great talks for this year's big GDC Europe event in Cologne, Germany, and today they're happy to announce another exciting session taking place at the August conference.

Sophie Vo is an experienced product lead at longtime German game developer Wooga (Futurama: Game of Drones, Jelly Splash [pictured]) and in her talk "In It For The Long Run -- Sustaining Mobile Hits Over Years" she'll show you how to take an old dog of a mobile free-to-play game, teach it some great new tricks and give it a fresh lease on life.

Wooga has had a lot experience successfully doing just that, and if you check out Vo's talk you'll learn from that experience how to make a maturing casual mobile game profitable and growing again, as well as how to innovate and test new features without harming live operations.

The big GDC Europe conference in Germany is just months away, and today GDC organizers are happy to debut another excellent, expert talk that will be taking place at the Cologne conference in August.

David Lightbown serves as User Experience Director at Ubisoft, and at GDC Europe he'll be presenting a fascinating take on applying game design principles to improve your game production tools and process. 

Check out his talk, "Hiding in Plain Sight: The Untapped Resource that is Helping Ubisoft to Make Better Tools" to learn how, exactly, Ubisoft has helped its teams work more efficiently by applying game design tenets to its production pipelines.

Game Developers Conference Europe 2016 organizers are excited to once again open a special call for European indie game developers to submit to the third annual European Innovative Games Showcase.

Taking place during the Independent Games Summit at the Cologne, Germany show this August, the winning creators will be offered 5-minute microtalks at the final session of GDC Europe's IGS, showcasing what's special about their current project.

For an idea of what we're talking about, check out the videos of of last year's EIGS showcase & the inaugural 2014 event via YouTube and GDC Vault - some of the outstanding independent games previously highlighted include Gang Beasts, Beyond Eyes, Future Unfolding, Fabulous Beasts and more.

GDC officials are lining up some great talks for the big GDC Europe conference this August in Cologne, Germany, and today they're happy to announce another exciting session taking place at the show.

In developing the crowdfunded PC RPG Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian Entertainment sought to create a spiritual successor to beloved '90s PC RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment. That involved a host of technical and creative challenges, as well as the tricky work of designing a game with contemporary sensibilities that could also appeal to fans of those classic games.

At GDC Europe, Obsidian's Josh Sawyer willl speak frankly about those challenges in his talk "Looking Back and Moving Forward with Pillars of Eternity." Make time to check it out, and you'll walk away with insight into the into the benefits and pitfalls of making a "retro classic", especially for a crowdfunding audience that is emotionally (and financially) invested from the start of the project.

This year's big GDC Europe conference in Cologne, Germany is coming up in August, and today we're excited to announce that game industry veteran John Romero will be delivering a talk at the conference about game coding principles he learned in his early days at id Software.

His talk on "The Early Days of id Software: Programming Principles" is part of the Programming track of GDC Europe talks, and promises to offer unique insights on game production gleaned from Romero's time at one of the game industry's trailblazing studios. 

As co-founders of id Software, John Romero and John Carmack created the code behind the company's seminal titles, including Doom and Quake. The principles they defined through experience in id's earliest days built upon one another to produce a unique methodology and a constantly shippable codebase.

GDC organizers are working with top game industry talent to line up great talks for this year's GDC Europe conference in Germany, and today they'd like to tip you off to one such talk from the folks at Wargaming about rebooting the classic game Master of Orion.

Come August, GDC Europe 2016 attendees will have the chance to check out "Alien Cultures: Rebooting 'Master of Orion' with a Global Team" and get an in-depth look at the process of rebooting a beloved strategy game in a way that both satisfies diehard Master of Orion fans while simultaneously showcasing the appeal of space strategy games to a new audience.

Wargaming's Chris Keeling and Jacob Beucler both worked closely on the project, and in their talk they'll discuss how the Master of Orion team overcame obstacles and managed remote third-party teams across multiple languages, time zones, and cultures.