PPT

Complete the PPT according to the requirements of the question

· Concept – Students should present a clear and developed idea, not just a broad area of study.

1. What problem or questions do you intend to address?

2. Explain the problem, showing how it arises from your research.

3. What makes your problem problematic? Specifically, what are the disagreements among scholars, gaps in knowledge, or complexities or inconsistencies in the reading you’ve done characterize the problem?

· Audience – Students should consider what details are most important to their immediate audience.

1. To whom does it matter?

2. What GDC track does this fall under?

3. How much does your audience already know about the problem/issue that you are addressing?

4. How resistant is your audience to your topic?

· Research – The pitch should discuss at least 5 relevant and important sources. 

1. The sources should be credible and scholarly in nature. Less scholarly sites such as Gamasutra may be used to supplement these.

2. Presenters should use the sources to explain the problem, provide context and to illustrate how they support the overall argument.

· Takeaway – How are you adding to the discussion? 

1. What constitutes old information and new information for your audience?

2. How do you want to change your audience’s view of your topic?

3. Why is what you’re adding to the discussion valuable to your audience?

· Very Important: Include supplementary notes explaining each slide. Do not rely on a handful of bullet points to provide enough context.

· 20 slides maximum.

1. Concept: Students should present a clear and developed idea, not just a broad area of study.

2. Concept: The basic idea is relevant and beneficial to game developers.

3. Research: The pitch should discuss relevant and important sources. The sources should be credible and scholarly in nature. Less scholarly sites such as Gamasutra may be used to supplement these 5. Presenters should use the sources to illustrate how they support the overall argument.

4. Content: Provides necessary context, background info, and results. Identifies and emphasizes most important data, research correctly.

5. Depth: Is the basic idea well considered and thought out? Is the student knowledgeable regarding the history and varying viewpoints related to the topic? (Authorities on the topic, seminal works, etc.)

6. Takeaway: Is the attendee going to leave this session knowing something they didn’t know when they walked in? Are they learning or being inspired?

7. Structure: Information is organized in a logical clear progression.

8. Presentation: The ppt does not rely too heavily on just text or just graphics. Correctly identifies opportunities for implementing graphics.

9. Presentation: The ppt is free of errors, typos, inconsistencies etc.

10. Four Questions are included and complete.

GDC Track Descriptions and Topics

(Taken from GDC 2016 & 2017 Submission Guidelines. Visit

http://www.gdconf.com/conference/c4p/

for the most up to date changes.)

Below is the list of tracks for GDC 2016. Click on a track for descriptions of the topics solicited by the Advisory Board.

Advocacy

Given that the Game Developers Conference is such a large and broad forum, it is extremely important that we address new and existing issues within the realm of social advocacy. Topics to be covered should range from diversity to censorship to quality of life. With these sessions, we hope to offer an environment for discussion and ultimately a place to effect positive change for the development community.

Audio

The Audio track is soliciting submissions that cover the following topics:
Innovative, creative, technical, inspirational, practical – we feature talks on every aspect of the art, science and business of game audio. We want submissions from composers, sound designers, audio directors, coders, in-housers, freelancers, academics, indies and AAAs who are willing and able to share their experiences and skills with their peers at this cornerstone of the game audio calendar. Examples of evergreen topics include:

· Creating amazing sound design and music for games

· Your finest analysis, project, postmortems, techniques, innovations, and technology solutions

· Strategies for creating unique sounding games and music, and integrated audio experiences

· Platform Challenges – opportunities afforded by new hardware, overcoming limitations, web/mobile

· “Post-production” – real-time mixing, DSP, their aesthetics and impact on the player experience

· Development – teams, tools, pipelines, audio QA, audio localization

· Business – contracts, copyright, licensing, careers, freelancing

· Voice – aesthetics, asset acquisition and integration, performance and direction

This year we’d also love to see submissions addressing these hot topics:

· Career development, from getting started to expanding, adapting, and reinventing

· Diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and skills

· Cross-disciplinary audio: when sound assists or interacts with other elements of gameplay in novel ways

· Real-time synthesis and procedural audio – music, sound, and speech

· Novel audio system implementations and programming best practices

· “MIDI music” – the power of note data and just-in-time scoring

· Sound and music for immersive and interactive virtual/augmented reality experiences

Business & Marketing

The Business & Marketing track is soliciting submissions that cover the following topics:

– Business model and marketing innovation
– The intersection of game design and business
– Monetizing games in today’s market
Examples which we’d particularly like to see submissions include:

· Key Software Platforms of Today & Tomorrow
Third-party analyses, including real data, of what game platforms you could/should publish on. Developing budgets for different platforms. Cross Platform vs. Platform Specific Advantages/Disadvantages Under Key Platforms

· The Entrepreneur
Tips / Strategies / Challenges / War Stories

· Marketing
Identifying Target Markets / Social Marketing / Guerrilla Marketing / Developer-Consumer Interaction / Community / Brand advertising for F2P (TV, print, etc) / Discover for mobile, web and digital downloaded games

· User Acquisition

· Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is changing how games are funded, what are the legal ramifications around this? We want to hear how crowdsourcing is changing the legalities around funding a game

· Company Values

Culture / Goals / Feedback / Managing Talent

· Streaming

Is a really different animal now, with streamers earning millions+, cutting rev share deals, etc, we want to hear about it

· F2P

F2P is no longer just the top 5 games making a profit. Many companies small and big are making a business in F2P and we want to hear those stories

· Virtual Reality

Deep dive into how to finance, distribute and monetize VR games

· And Many Other Topics

Virtual Goods, Community Management, Game Metrics, Practical Law Specifics, Funding, Smart/IPTV Gaming Opportunities/ESports business opps/PR, Developer Branding, International Markets  

Design

Design submissions in all areas are welcome, and we are particularly interested in high quality, deep and insightful game design talks presented at an advanced level for experienced professional game designers. These can range from the production side of design, like designing characters for diverse audiences or dealing with testing for a procedural content generation system, to the nuts and bolts design problems of character ability tuning, to the aesthetics side of design, like how to create an interactive space that elicits certain emotions from players, or anything in-between. The past year has seen amazing new developments in hardware and platforms, an ongoing evolution of business models, and huge changes to our audiences and the way they engage with our games – talks that explore and explain the impact of these changes and how to better design games in consideration of them will be especially welcome. As usual, however, the key is to show that you have deep and non-intuitive insights into your topic, forged through hands-on experience working on relevant games.

Production & Team Management

The Production & Team Management track is looking for experienced producers who have shipped games to share their best techniques or experiences which helps them produce better games or build better teams. We are financing/genre/platform/business model agnostic – we just want the world’s best producers to share their knowledge.
We are looking for case studies from everyone! Huge, tiny, startup, established: AAA console developers, Indie developers, Mobile teams, Cross-platform teams, Service teams, etc. A few project case topics the Production & Team Management Track is looking for, but not limited to, are the following topics:
Production Case Studies or day in the life of…

· Making games for new platforms

· Producing VR

· Challenges of shipping on multiple platforms simultaneously

· Building and running a service or managing communities

· Managing licenses

· Any other best practices

Studios & Teams

· Producing with multiple types of production process

· Habits and culture of successful teams

· Building a new team: Start- up, new teams, mature team

· Communication methods for your team and from your team across the organization

· Managing creative people through difficult transitions

Production Roles

· Working as/with external publisher production

· Doing production when not a producer (very applicable for small/indie teams)

· Transitioning into a producer role from another discipline

· Training and career progression of producers

· Producing multiple projects

· Working with a Product Management team

· Working with or producing your QA group

The Producer’s Toolbox
There are a bunch of things we do every day as production. We would like to hear case studies covering these subjects:

· Day in the Life of Production

· Games development best practices – project management methodologies, your role as producer

· Identifying risk early and developing and implementing problem solving solutions

· Strategies for dealing with tight deadlines

· Managing play testing throughout development

· Everything you need to know about QA

· Localization: tricks, tips and gotchas

· The importance of good workflow & pipelines

· Managing licenses

· Outsourcing best practices

· Creating effective work spaces

Communication

· Team motivation

· Effective ways of providing visibility of project status to the team, or outside of the studio

· Upward Management: how to present information clearly but without setting off alarm bells – communicating upward

· Reporting (status reports) Panel or Posters

· Communicating with the team (how and what to communicate)

· Media & presentation training

Programming

The Programming track is soliciting lectures focused on new techniques in programming, in particular:

· New Game Platforms
How have emerging technologies and display devices changed game development? How do you tackle the constraints of Virtual Reality enabled games? Do you have tips and tricks to share?

· Core Engine Techniques
Case studies of difficult problems in core engine development. Possible topics include: advanced multithreading approaches, streaming and open world games, working with massive data sets, techniques for rapid iteration, and other challenging core engine problems.

· Advanced in World Simulation
How have gains in computing power allowed for higher fidelity physical simulation? Are these techniques better suited for implementation on CPU or GPU? Possible topics include soft and rigid body physics, cloth, fluid simulation, destruction, and new approaches to animation.

· AI Behavior Design
How has AI and NPC behavior advanced over the last year? What new techniques are driving this advance? Has scripting reached its limits? How should the AI deal with rendering techniques that are quickly descending the slope of the uncanny valley?

· High-fidelity Character Animation
How has character motion improved to match increasing visual fidelity? Possible topics include advances in data representation (e.g. point clouds, motion graphs, compression), facial animation, interactive and synthesized animation, and runtime retargeting.

· Online-centric Games
We want to hear about new developments in persistent universes, pervasively online games, cloud server usage, player-driven economies, multi-authority networking models, and security.

· Achieving the Most with Smaller Teams
Most titles are now created with small teams of programmers tightly focused on the specific needs of their title. How do you create complex systems on short time scales and with limited resources? What techniques have you evolved for supporting release on multiple platforms with highly varying specifications? What specific programming problems of larger teams do you avoid? What are the main challenges for smaller programming teams?

· Advances in Rendering
Show us your cutting-edge techniques that demonstrate what new hardware is capable of! Possible topics include content amplification, physically based materials and lighting, real time global illumination, new approaches to deferred and forward+ rendering, and advanced usage of compute shaders and GPGPU techniques. Postmortems are welcome, as are examinations of aspirational techniques difficult to achieve in current games.

· Tools and Pipelines
Content sizes are increasing dramatically with new platforms. How are you solving the difficult problems in content creation tools, content pipeline development, working with massive data sets, and providing rapid content creator iteration?

· Gameplay Subsystems
We’d love nitty-gritty detailed talks on various gameplay-oriented subsystems, things that are not rendering, networking, physics, and AI. Examples include object systems, inventory and encumbrance, dynamic reactions to damage, conversation systems, etc. A great example from GDC 2012 was Elan Ruskin’s talk,

AI-driven Dynamic Dialog through Fuzzy Pattern Matching. Empower Your Writers!

.

· Automated Testing in Games and Game Engines
What automated tools have you used to catch bugs in your game or engine? Or any other automated processes that improve robustness and quality of complex games.

· And anything new, fresh or experimental!
If you are doing something in a different way that advances the state of the art, we would love to hear about it!

Visual Arts

Last year was the most popular ever for the GDC Visual Arts track, and we want you to help us build on that momentum. We want disruptive, inspirational and amazing artists, art directors, and art managers to speak at GDC 2014. We’re looking for people who are willing to share their skills and techniques with us. We want to hear from directors and managers who can teach us how to build great art teams, and create outstanding visuals on tight budgets and schedules. And we’re seeking out top notch technical artists to show us new insights in look development and tool creation.

· Inspirational Art Direction Talks
Continuing with our ‘coffee table book’ art direction sessions from last year we’re looking for art directors who are willing to not only talk about the evolution of their game’s style but to show us that evolution. Whether you’re a AAA big budget developer or a small 2-person indie team, pull back the curtain and reveal the sketches, concepts, prototypes and in-development shots/videos that led you to the final look of your product.

· TECHNIQUES and DEMOS!
Visual artists are just that, visual. We want to see what you know, not just hear about it. We want artists to teach us new techniques, new tools and new styles. Can’t talk and draw at the same time? No problem, we’ll even let you have two presenters – one to talk and one to demonstrate. Show off your 3D modeling techniques, concept art drawing, and animation work to the best audience in the world – your peers.

· Next Gen Art Techniques
A console transition is looming, and it’s time to start planning for all the new graphics goodies it will bring. What will we be able to do with lighting, with procedural art generation, with materials, or with new pipelines? Help set the agenda for the next generation of graphics by sharing your cutting-edge techniques and plans.

· Art Management and Production Talks
Did you develop an interesting strategy that saved you art development time and/or money? Did an in-house or 3rd party tool help alleviate your production pipeline woes? How do you manage to keep your artists from seeing the trees instead of the forest? We’d love to hear about your solutions to these problems and more!

· Art Culture
What core values are you looking for when you hire artists? How do you manage critiques within your organization? Managing creative people with disparate personalities can be daunting. How does your team manage that? Share your successes (and failures) in this with us so we can create better collaborative environments at our studios.

· Animation
What sets your game’s animation apart from everyone else in the industry? What went right in your latest game’s motion capture sessions? What went wrong? What have you learned from studying animation techniques used in other entertainment industries? Share your lessons with other animators as we want to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly regarding animation trials and tribulations.

· 2D Art Production Pipeline Talks
It is surprising how some aspects of 2D art production pipelines are a lot more work than 3D art production pipelines. We want to hear from someone who cantalk about an interesting 2D art production pipeline.

· Character Design Talks
We’d like to see a character talk that speaks to the DESIGN of the characters, not just how to sculpt high-frequency detail in Zbrush or do pretty rendering in Photoshop so the character design can pass a publisher focus test.

· Show us your tech, TAs
You’re the glue that holds art production together, TAs. What new ideas in tools and pipelines have you developed this past year? What new shader techniques are you investigating for next-gen? Is there look development work you’ve done that would enlighten us? Come show us and inspire us!