GDC Online adds Kabam, King.com talks, reminds on early reg deadline

With just one day until Early Bird registration ends for October's GDC Online event, show organizers have added talks from Kabam and King.com, plus a lecture on how female developers can help broaden the industry's reach and diversity. These new talks all fall within GDC Online's Main Conference, which offers some of the world's leading content on persistent and online games. The event will be held Tuesday, October 9 to Thursday, October 11 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. The full details on GDC Online's newly announced sessions are as follows: - As part of the Production track, Riccardo Zacconi, CEO and co-founder of major social game developer King.com, will discuss his philosophy for multi-platform game development in "Building a Multi-Platform Game Business out of Facebook and onto Mobile." Zacconi will look back on major King.com titles like Bubble Witch Saga to present his strategy for creating games that offer a smooth user experience, achieve high ratings, and successfully integrate cross-platform gameplay. - Over in the Design track, Kabam art lead Josh Viers and general manager Justin Lambros will discuss how they leveraged their art and design talents to improve engagement and monetization in Kabam's latest social strategy game, Trojan War. Their session, "Enhancing Engagement with Art and Design in Hardcore Social Games," will offer a behind the scenes look at Kabam's design process for games that exist across Facebook and the web. - Finally, Jill Schneiderman, the VP of games at SGN (Bingo Blingo), will host "For Women, by... Men?" -- a Design track lecture examining the implications of gender imbalance in the game industry. As Schneiderman will explain, women make up a large portion of the video game-playing audience across social, mobile, and other platforms, yet only a small fraction of the people making these games are female. She'll examine the state of the industry and outline the key insights that women can bring to the development process. These sessions join other previously announced sessions for GDC Online, including a classic postmortem of Ultima Online, a detailed look at Zynga's CastleVille, and over 100 talks in total listed on the three-day event's nearly completed schedule. For more information on GDC Online, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.