Fez, Woolsey, Failure Workshop sessions added to GDC 2012 Summits

Author: by Staff

In the latest update for the 2012 Game Developers Conference, show organizers have revealed three new specialized Summit talks, including a technical postmortem of Polytron's Fez, a localization overview with legendary translator Ted Woolsey, and the indie-focused Failure Workshop. These talks join an already jam-packed lineup for the show's eight specialized Summits, which cover emerging or otherwise influential sectors of the game industry, from Independent Games to Localization and beyond. The Summits will take place during the first two days of GDC 2012 -- from Monday, March 5 through Tuesday, March 6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Those interested in checking out all of the exciting Summit content can do so by registering for an All-Access or Summits & Tutorials pass on the official GDC website (a specialized Independent Games Summit pass is also available). The following are some of the newest sessions to be added to the GDC 2012 Summits: - Within the Independent Games Summit, programmer Renaud Bedard of Polytron Corporation will host "Cubes All the Way Down: Fez Technical Postmortem." Here, Bedard will outline the challenges of bringing the highly-anticipated IGF nominee Fez to life, while sharing some lessons learned from the game's four year development cycle. - Over in the Localization Summit, former Squaresoft translation guru Ted Woolsey (Final Fantasy series) and industry veteran Matt Whiting (both from Microsoft Studios) will go over the history of video game localization, while offering a look at emerging trends in the practice. The talk, "Game Localization: Using the Past to Understand the Present and Predict the Future," will begin with a look at the early 90's, and will eventually look toward the future to evaluate the viability of machine translation, crowd sourcing, and more. - Finally, the popular "Failure Workshop" will return to the Independent Games Summit this year to provide a platform for key indie devs to outline their missteps and lessons learned from some of their most recent projects. The Indie Fund's Ron Carmel will host this year's proceedings, and participating developers include Scott Anderson and Steve Swink (Enemy Airship, discussing Shadow Physics), Jamie Cheng (Klei Entertainment/Shank, discussing Sugar Rush), Amir Rao (Supergiant Games, discussing changed elements in Bastion), and Colin Northway (Fantastic Contraption, discussing multiple projects). In addition to the above sessions, GDC organizers also recently debuted Summit talks covering Playdom's Gardens of Time, the Flash MMO Realm of the Mad God, and Google's approach to Open Web tech. For more information on these or any other sessions at GDC 2012, please check out the event's official Schedule Builder, which shows the current (and constantly-growing) lineup for the show so far. Also be sure to keep an eye on the official GDC news blog, which will showcase exciting new announcements for the show, in addition to this continuing series of posts pointing a spotlight at the show's most exciting, informative, and usual content. To keep up-to-date on all the latest news about GDC 2012, please subscribe to updates from the GDC news page via Twitter, Facebook, or RSS. GDC 2012 will take place March 5 through March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and is owned and operated by Gamasutra parent company UBM TechWeb.