Game developers around the world come to the Game Developers Conference every year to exchange ideas, learn, and network. Much of this is possible thanks to the work of our incredible GDC speakers. So how can you become one? Robin-Yann Storm, who's hosted over a dozen GDC sessions over the years, has some advice on making sure your GDC 2025 proposal stands out in the crowd.
Tool UX & Workflow Designer Robin-Yann Storm has written a guest post for GDC, which you can read below, sharing 5 tips on submitting a stellar talk for GDC 2025 (the post has been edited for length and clarity).
While the Core Concepts submissions for GDC 2025 are currently closed, GDC Summits Call for Submissions is happening now through Thursday, September 26 at 11:59pm PT. This includes everything for the GDC Summits, which run on the Monday and Tuesday of the event, as well as Friday's Game Career Seminar.
5 tips for writing a GDC submission
I’m Robin-Yann Storm, a Tool UX & Workflow Designer, I’ve been a speaker at GDC in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2023, and 2024. In that time I have held five talks and nine roundtables. GDC even used my 2023 roundtable submission as a standout example in their FAQ.
This year, GDC contacted me to share my best tips for submitting a proposal to speak at GDC. Please note that I am not a GDC advisor, so I don’t get to decide what submissions are accepted or rejected—but I can tell you what I’ve noticed works well and doesn’t work well over these 10 years of submitting GDC talks myself, and helping many others submit their talks.
Here are 5 things you should look out for.
1. Do you have actionable takeaways?
This is the number one thing that I have seen a submission get accepted or denied over. As much as I love seeing how my favourite level from a recent game was built, what you really want are strong takeaways. Those can make or break your proposal.
You want attendees who see your presentation to walk away with real things they can apply to their work when they’ve travelled back to their studios. You want attendees leaving the talk thinking: “Wow, that was useful and interesting. We should do those things too, and now I know how!”
For example, if you were to do a talk about a particular level you have built, the idea is not to just say, “Here is how we built it. These are the iterations we did. This is the end result.” Instead, present it as: “Here is how we built it, and why we built it that way. Here are the assumptions we had, and the iterations we had to do after user research. Here is the end result, which taught us that assumption X was wrong, and we should have done Y instead. You can find out if this is applicable to you by looking out for Z.” That last part is the actionable takeaway that you need.
So ask yourself: What are your actionable takeaways and can you write them down in 500 words? If you don’t have any in your proposal, then it’s probably not ready yet and needs more work before you should submit it.
2. Do you already have content that you can show?
If you think you need more than 500 words to properly convey your idea, then you can add slides or documentation to your submission. Having slides ready when submitting (and not waiting until the last moment to make them) is another huge thing that I’ve seen help submissions get accepted. Make sure the slides in your submission can be quickly skimmed and understood without a presenter present. They don’t have to look beautiful: A few screenshots and bullet points explaining what you learned already can show enough.
The same goes for roundtable submissions! You can add a document showing the questions you predict will be asked at the roundtable, as well as a Word document showcasing the anticipated timeline of the session. This indicates you have a general idea about what will be discussed, how long it will take, and what you will prepare for. It also gives the GDC advisors information they need to see whether that topic and those questions will be a good fit for the conference.
While not required, slides and other supplementary materials can show that you are prepared to talk about this topic and that it can be interesting for those attending, with actionable takeaways. It also makes it much easier for GDC advisors to give feedback in Phase 2, which happens after the regular submission process. An advisor will be assigned to “mentor” your talk and will then give you feedback to make sure your submission hits the quality bar of the conference.
3. Why would someone want to visit your talk?
Just because you care deeply about a topic doesn’t mean everyone else does too. You have to figure out how to sell your topic to both advisors and attendees. If a topic gets you really excited, that’s fantastic! Pursue that drive and use it to elevate your submission. At the same time, don’t forget that excitement alone does not relay actionable takeaways to the attendees. You have to ask yourself hard questions about why someone would care about the topic.
Questions like: Can you make other folks care about this subject? Why would the attendees pick your talk over the other twenty that are happening at the same time during the conference? Same goes for the advisors. Moscone is big but it’s not filled with infinite rooms: Why would they take your submission over someone else’s? These are hard questions to ask but they’re necessary for a good submission.
Also, the basics of game development are important, but specifically in the context of latest releases. The submissions form states: “Be specific by giving concrete examples and remember that GDC attendees are experts in their field.” The idea of GDC is that the attendees are experts in their field, seeing talks from other experts in their field. If you submit something like: “Make sure your game is not scoped too big when you start building it, as you may run out of time or budget,” then you may very well be correct that this is actionable information many studios still struggle with year after year. But at the same time it is also so basic that it’s hard to take it seriously at face value.
Instead, think about your target audience: These experts should know that scoping is important, yet the scoping issues keep cropping up. Why? Answering that question with an example is a good way of doing that. For example, you may instead say: “In our latest release ‘Game X’, our scopes for level A and feature B were too big, and we had issues 1, 2, and 3 because of that. The reason our scopes were too big was because of Y and Z. Make sure to look out for those issues to avoid those problems.” Now you have touched on both the correct point, and also shown that it still happens, as well as clearly illustrated why and how it happens and how to avoid it.
4. Are you submitting for a Summit, or the Core Concepts sessions?
Make sure you understand what section of GDC you are submitting to. GDC has two different sections: Monday and Tuesday are the GDC Summits, Wednesday to Friday are the Core Concepts talks, and Friday hosts the Game Career Seminar. Core Concepts submissions (which have ended for GDC 2025) can be any kind of topic, as long as you submit it for a particular track such as visual art, programming, design, and others.
Summits are different. They’re one or two-day events, located in one room, filled with talks about one of several specialized topics.
Imagine a whole day of talks about level design at the Level Design Summit. There may be talks about: specific levels released for recent games, how to build better blockouts or communicate blockout needs, how to teach level design to others, or how to build better VR levels. The list goes on and on.
As you can see, you can go in all sorts different directions for a Summit focused on a single topic. If you have a topic you are excited to talk about (and know a lot about), then it’s a good idea to check out the Summits to see if it could be covered there.
5. Does your submission have one or more of these common issues?
Lastly, always look out for the common issues that stop a submission in its tracks. These include:
- You’re trying to sell a product: There are specific sponsored sessions for this instead. Please take a look at the separate submission process for those.
- You want to do your talk with two or more speakers: This happens but is exceedingly rare. Other conferences may be more lenient to this, but in my experience GDC isn’t. If you need two speakers, you have to have a really big and very important reason for it. Instead, try and see if you can submit it as one person, or two separate sessions that can be accepted separately without interference between each other.
- You’ve spoken at GDC before and received a low audience rating: If this is the case then the task of getting a submission accepted has gotten much tougher. Check your emails for the audience reviews of the last time you spoke at GDC, and look at their feedback. The advisors can see those reviews too. Is there something you can do with that feedback?
- You haven’t received approval for submitting your talk: I dislike this truth, but it is an inescapable reality: Not all companies will let you submit a talk to GDC. Check with your manager on whether you’re allowed to submit something first, to make sure that you do not get accepted and then have to get out of it at the last minute. I have heard of fantastic proposals being stopped at the last minute because they were pulled out by the company the speaker worked for.
I hope these help! Feel free to contact me at Twitter/X, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions.
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