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Designers behind Assassin’s Creed III and the Gears of War series will present sessions on design and storytelling at GDC Europe 2013.
Stven Masters will show Assassin’s Creed III’s design, Epic’s James Brown will discuss empowering the player in storytelling and long-time producer and designer Don Daglow will look at the ‘treasures and traps’ of next-gen.
These sessions with be part of the design and business track, which take place on Monday through to Wednesday, August 19th to 21st at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany.
For the Design Track keynote, Ubisoft Montreal’s Steven Masters will discuss how he organised the work of 600 people across three years in ‘Designing Assassins Creed III.’ Ubisoft’s GDC 2013 production panel, ‘Three Years of Collaboration on Assassin’s Creed III’ focused on handling the large-scale collaboration for the massive hit franchise. However, Masters’ talk at GDC Europe 2013 will detail how Ubisoft reinvigorated the core gameplay, including the use of frequent playtesting to refine the multi-million selling title.
Epic Games’ lead level designer James Brown, whose work includes the Gears of War franchise, will examine popular techniques for storytelling in games and attempt to explain “how almost everybody has it wrong” in his session, ‘Once Upon a Time: Giving Players the Freedom to Create Their Own Story’.
Finally, industry veteran Don Daglow, whose 40-plus years in the game industry include the first baseball game (Baseball), the first PC RPG (Dungeon), and the first god game (Utopia), will speak about the challenges and opportunities ahead in ‘This Time It’s Different: Treasures and Traps in the Next Gen’.
He will be asking: What if download-only games were the norm on next-gen game consoles? What would your favourite game feel like that was different from what we’re used to getting from the US/Canada, Japan and the UK? What would F2P feel like on console? And What if the online interaction were the most important feature for the player?
More talks will be revealed throughout the months leading up to GDC Europe in August.
Early bird registration for GDC Europe 2013 is now available, with discounts up to 20% off admission, as are group admission discounts. Visit the GDC Europe website for more info and to purchase tickets.
