GDC Europe 2014 debuts talks from Killzone, Assassin's Creed devs

GDC organizers have received a mass of great talk proposals in the wake of the GDC Europe 2014 call for lectures, and today they're excited to share the first talks to debut during the August conference. Organized by UBM Tech Game Network, the event, now in its sixth year, will run Monday through Wednesday, August 11-13 at the Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany, co-located with Europe's biggest video game trade and public show gamescom. The event will include topics spanning AAA through mobile gaming and indie, both technical and business-focused. The first two announcements are focused around tech and business on consoles - but with learnings for the entire community! As part of this year's GDC Europe Programming track, Guerrilla Games lead game tech Jorrit Rouwe will give a technical talk currently titled "Killzone Shadow Fall: Threading the Entity Update on PlayStation 4." During his session, Rouwe hopes to explain how Guerrilla adapted its development process to take advantage of PlayStation 4 hardware. He notes that since the PlayStation 3 SPUs were "too limited" to handle typical Killzone entity logic (like humanoids walking around and engaging in combat, for example), the team had to run everything on a single thread. For PlayStation 4, Rouwe will explain how Guerrilla adopted the 'entity as a job' approach and multithreaded - making this talk extremely useful to game engine programmers who want to run their generic game logic on multicore machines. Over on the Design track, Ubisoft's Damien Kieken is giving a talk titled "Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag Multiplayer: Crafting Good Monetization on the Traditional Console." As the multiplayer game director for recent games in the blockbuster Assassin's Creed franchise, Kieken plans to explain the monetization design in the multiplayer portion of Assassin's Creed - and share a retrospective look back at how Ubisoft progressively introduced monetization systems into the franchise without upsetting players. During his talk he also hopes to dig deeper into specific systems that were integrated into Assassin's Creed series and explain their design, as well as share statistics that reflect what the company learned from making Assassin's Creed III and how they applied that knowledge to Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. Along the way, there should be lessons for everyone trying to monetize their game while keeping players happy. These are just two of the many exciting sessions that will be announced for GDC Europe 2014 in the coming weeks, and early birds can register for GDC Europe 2014 by July 16 to save 200 euros on an All Access Pass. In addition, this year marks the GDC Europe debut of the Student Pass, a more affordable alternative to the All Access Pass created specifically for qualified students interested in learning and networking at GDC Europe 2014 - as well as the return of the Indie Games Summit pass at an even cheaper price! All GDC Europe passes also allow visitors to attend Gamescom from Wednesday to Friday. Alongside all of this, GDC Europe 2014 will also continue to offer business and networking opportunities to all attendees with a developer-focused Expo Floor area and day and evening networking events. For more information, please visit the GDC Europe website. Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech