GDC 2012 reveals Star Wars: The Old Republic postmortem, Notch Q&A, more

Author: by Staff

With less than 48 hours left until the early registration deadline for the 2012 Game Developers Conference, the show's organizers have debuted some major new talks, featuring a look at Star Wars: The Old Republic, a fireside chat with Markus "Notch" Persson, and an exciting rant panel featuring notable game developer moms and dads. All of these sessions will join the major lineup for the show's Main Conference, which features six specialized tracks, covering Audio, Business, Marketing & Management, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts. To check out all of the notable talks within the show's Main Conference, make sure to purchase an All Access or Main Conference pass on the official GDC website (a specialized Audio pass is also available). In addition, early registration for the show ends Thursday, February 2 at 11.59pm ET, so interested parties should act soon to save up to 35 percent on full price passes. Here are the newly announced lectures for GDC 2012's Main Conference: - Over in the Game Design track, the creator of Minecraft will take part in a rare on-stage Q&A dubbed, "A Fireside Chat with Markus 'Notch' Persson." Speaking to former Maxis veteran Chris Hecker (SpyParty), Persson will discuss Minecraft itself, indie game design, and much more. Questions for Persson will be solicited via Twitter in the coming weeks, so please watch the official GDC Twitter feed for more information. - In the show's Production track, MMO veterans and BioWare Austin leads Richard Vogel and Dallas Dickinson will discuss how Star Wars: The Old Republic positioned itself to break into the World of Warcraft-dominated MMO market. Throughout the talk, "SWTOR - Creating A True Competitor in the AAA MMO Space," Vogel and Dickinson will discuss the numerous internal strategies the team used to prepare the game for a strong debut. - Also in the Game Design track is the latest in GDC's long-running series of "rant" panels. This year, the panel will give game developer parents a chance to vent their frustrations about topics of their choosing. The session, "BURN THIS MOTHERFATHER! Game Dev Parents Rant," will be co-hosted by Jason Della Rocca and Eric Zimmerman, and will feature developers and industry figures including Ubisoft's Jade Raymond, Zynga New York's Frank Lantz and his son James, 1st Playable Productions' Tobi Saulnier, and Zebra Partners' Perrin Kaplan. In addition to these new sessions, GDC organizers have previously debuted many other exiting talks, featuring Audio-focused presentations on Bastion and Crysis 2, Summit talks on Fez and localization, and much, much more. 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.