GDC 2011 to Feature talks from Valve, Ubisoft, Blizzard and more

GDC 2011 is still a bit away, coming early March. But with the end of the year looming we can take a quick look at the recently announced talks that are scheduled for the conference. In regards to game design, Blizzard will be represented by Dustin Browder with 'Remaking a Classic: The Game Design of Starcraft II' which will discuss the design process for this RTS, as well as the pros and cons of creating an e-sport game.

Continuing in the vein of game design, Matt Boch and Dean Tate of Harmonix will be discussing Dance Central with their 'The Design Process and Philosophy of Dance Central' lecture. Notably, this lecture will give some insight into the design process of creating a motion based game using the Kinect hardware.

Other notable game design lectures include a session that examines how to keep player and character interests aligned by Visceral Games’ Matthias Worch, a discussion about moral storytelling in gameplay from Richard Rouse III of Ubisoft Montreal, plus a talk about how personal game-craft can help your growth as a designer, presented by Stone Librande of EA/Maxis.

If your more into the programming side of gaming then be sure to catch the lecture ‘I Shot You First:
Networking the Gameplay of Halo: Reach’  by Bungie's David Aldridge. Also on the programming front there is 'Forensic Debugging: How to Autopsy, Repair, and Reanimate a Release-built Game' by Valve Corporation’s Elan Ruskin.

Lastly there's ‘Mega Meshes - Modeling, Rendering and Lighting a World Made of 100 Billion Polygons’ by Lionhead Studios’ Ben Sugden and Michal Iwanicki, which talks about the Milo and Kate technology. The latter mentioned lecture should be particularly interesting seeing as the Milo game as we know it was canned. Then again, this lecture is more about the technical aspects, so who knows if we'll learn anything of that nature.