The Game Developers' Conference, usually shortened to GDC, enters into its 30th annual showcase at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, while also being accompanied by the first annual Virtual Reality Developers' Conference. Both events will run throughout the week, offering developers and gamers alike a lot of insight, info and even demonstrations of some of the emerging tech on the horizon and some groundbreaking tech that's currently available.
The parent company over the GDC event, UBM, sent out the press release to inform the gaming world that GDC has hit the ground running and will last between March 14th to March March 18th, this Friday. The accompanying VRDC will run through March 15th, this Tuesday. Both events will offer gamers, game designers, artists and creative hopefuls the opportunity to experience a look at some brand new tech as well as plenty of information and workshops to help indies, mid-budget studios and even AAAs gain some perspective on different aspects of the gaming industry and technology.
The VRDC in particular will focus on bridging together the tech sector, the film sector and the gaming sector together as they explore the rise of virtual reality and augmented reality, two markets that are expected to take off greatly this year with the release of HMDs like the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive and Sony's secretive PlayStation VR.
In fact, some of the speakers who will offer insight and info at VRDC will include those from Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic, Lucky Palmer from OculusVR, developers from Epic Games, Sony London Studio, Electronic Arts and more.
If you're hoping that the event will play host to some big new announcements for AAA and indie titles, don't hold your breath. There may be some announcements present that gamers may find useful in the consumer market but most of the announcements coming out of the event will be related to middleware, engine tech, peripherals and the future of virtual reality. Also, don't be surprised if more VR software tools are announced to help developers better adapt to the tech, similar to Valve's SteamVR development kit.
There will also be development postmortems on classic games like Ms. Pac-Man, Rez and Diablo, giving gamers insight into the development of these iconic titles, along with development sessions from Activision, Blizzard Entertainment, DICE, Bungie, Disney Interactive, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Nintendo and even Amazon. If you're curious why Amazon is there it's because they just launched a free new game engine called the Lumberyard. It's likely that they will walk developers some of the new features and possibilities of the engine.
There will also be the Independent Games Festival,which has been an annual part of GDC for quite some time. The IGC will reward various indie developers for their achievements in game design. The former chairman, Brandon Boyer, recently stepped down last year amid allegations of corruption, but he's been replaced by Kelly Wallick. In light of Wallick taking over they've made a couple of different changes to the format of the IGF, so we'll see how that turns out.
Nevertheless, the main hook for this year's GDC will be VR, VR... and more VR. They even have a special VR lounge where demonstrations of VR games and AR tech demos will be on display. You can learn more about this year's Game Developers' Conference by visiting the official website.
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