GDC 2012 Debuts Diablo III, Jetpack Joyride, Resident Evil Sessions

Author: by Staff

GDC 2012 organizers are excited to announce the first batch of lectures for the show's Main Conference, which includes a look at Diablo III's art, a postmortem of Halfbrick's Jetpack Joyride, and a breakdown of the visuals and animation in Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City. The upcoming conference will take place Monday, March 5 through Friday, March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and will offer seven tracks covering key disciplines in the games industry, including Audio, Business & Management, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts, with a sponsored track on Monetization. The following lectures are the first to be announced for the GDC 2012's Main Conference: - In the Visual Arts track, Blizzard Entertainment's Christian Lichtner will pick apart the art direction for the studio's much-anticipated Diablo III. The session, appropriately titled "The Art of Diablo III," will explain the creative process that led Blizzard to the game's painterly style, and Lichtner will point out the ways in which the game's art serves to benefit Diablo's gameplay and overall design. - Over in the Game Design track, Halfbrick Studios designer Luke Muscat will look back at the development of the studio's most recent mobile title with a session dubbed, "Depth in Simplicity: The Making of Jetpack Joyride." Here, Muscat will outline the project's successes and shortcomings, and how it transformed from a small side-project into the studio's most ambitious title to date. - As part of the Programming and Visual Arts track, Ben Hanke, software engineer at Slant Six Games will host "Rigging a Resident Evil - Inside the Bone Code of Operation Raccoon City," detailing the animation techniques used in the studio's upcoming third-person shooter. During this engineering-focused session, Hanke will explain and demonstrate "the practical application of expression-driven helper bones," and how it relates to Slant Six's game. For more information on any of these sessions, keep an eye on the official GDC 2012 website, as more details will become available in the coming weeks. To ensure you receive the latest news about GDC 2012 as the event takes shape, please subscribe to updates from the GDC news page via Twitter, Facebook, or RSS. GDC is owned and operated by Gamasutra parent company UBM TechWeb.