When you arrive at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next month, don't forget to check out all the great sponsored content available to you as you're planning out your time at this year's show!
Amazon, Google, Unity, and other game industry leaders are presenting a ton of interesting sponsored talks during GDC 2020, and many offer in-depth technical discussions and business guidance aimed at helping game developers succeed on these companies' platforms.
For example, Amazon is sponsoring a promising talk about how the AI-driven endless text adventure AI Dungeon is served up to hundreds of thousands of players without issue. Presented by Nick and Alan Walton, founders of game dev Oasis Tech, "AI Dungeon - Serving a 5GB ML Model for 400K players" will reveal to you how Amazon machine learning drives AI Dungeon with infinite content creation, limitless options, and unique experiences tailored for each player!
If you're excited about machine learning and you're familiar with Unity, consider sitting in on Unity's "Leveraging Machine Learning and Simulations for Better Game Mechanics" sponsored session at GDC this year. Unity's Jeffrey Shih will walk you through how to use machine learning and large-scale simulations to test game mechanics, and why you should. Plus, you'll learn how to train intelligent player bots and how to embed them with the Unity Inference Engine to run game behavior. Finally, see how to use these trained agents and run tests at scale to balance your game via a cloud-based service.
"Bringing Destiny to Stadia: A GDC Postmortem", by contrast, will afford you a privileged look inside the process of porting Bungie's Destiny 2 to Google's recently-launched Stadia game streaming service. From multiplayer testing, graphics tweaking, backend infrastructure, and latency, the Bungie team will share insights into what it took to launch on day one with Stadia!
If you want to learn more about how to build an effective subscription system for your game, check out payment provider Xsolla's sponsored session on "Earning More With Subscriptions: How to Convert Players Into Monthly Subscribers." Xsolla's Anthony Mendoza will analyze different ways that developers have incorporated subscription offerings, and share some best practices for how to successfully build an effective subscription program into your game's monetization strategy for consistent additional monthly revenue.
If you're one of the many who use Autodesk's Maya software in your game dev career, swing by the company's sponsored "Maya 2020: Next-Gen Animation and Artist Workflows ft. Respawn Studio" session to get an inside look at the latest updates in animation, modeling and rigging. Together, Autodesk's TJ Galda and Ryan Lastimosa from Respawn (Apex Legends, Jedi: Fallen Order) will share their insights and give you a behind-the-scenes look at one of Respawn's recent hits to reveal how Maya accelerated its development.
Last but certainly not least, don't miss The Khronos Group's "glTF, WebGL & 3DCommerce" sponsored session at GDC next month. This session will present the current state of both the WebGL API and glTF file format; the latest features of both will be demonstrated, as well as how they're being used in the wild. The glTF roadmap will be covered including next-generation materials and compressed textures with KTX2 and Basis Universal. 3D Commerce will present ways to distribute and experience 3D content at scale. Don't miss it!
GDC 2020 runs from Monday, March 16th through Friday, March 20th. This will be the 34th edition of GDC, and now that registration is officially open, you'll want to take a look at the (ever-expanding) session schedule and your GDC pass options -- register early to lock in the best price!
For more details on GDC 2020 visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.