Developers of Destiny, AC Unity share lessons learned at GDC 2015

With registration officially open for the 2015 Game Developers Conference, we're excited to announce a fresh batch of top-notch talks for next year's March show. From the core engine architecture of Bungie's Destiny to Ubisoft's cinematic storytelling approach to Assassin's Creed Unity, these sessions will help shed light on what it takes to successfully pull off a large-scale studio production. Bungie engineering director Chris Butcher likes to pitch his GDC 2015 talk as a letter to himself six years ago, when the studio decided to forgo its aging Halo engine and build a new one from scratch for Destiny. During his session, "Lessons from the Core Engine Architecture of Destiny," Butcher will explain how and why Bungie spent six years developing its new multiplatform engine -- as well as the mistakes it made along the way. Regardless of how you feel about Bungie's technical decisions, the studio deserves a nod for launching a major cross-platform multiplayer game like with relatively minor fuss -- a rare achievement in the contemporary AAA space. Launching games is hard, especially for big companies; few developers know that better than Electronic Arts development director Ashley Bennett, who will share his launch triage strategies in a GDC 2015 Production track talk titled "Get ready for Launch: How AAA Titles Do It." Bennett has helped launch Battlefield 4 and other big titles during his eight years at EA, so his war stories should prove top-notch. Of course, storytelling in games is heavily influenced by films and television, but using cinematic techniques to tell a story in games is tough; Video game cinematics pipelines don't look anything like film or TV production. Ubisoft cinematics director David Footman tackled that challenge head-on when he and others at Ubisoft's Toronto studio were tasked with producing cinematic sequences for the four-player cooperative missions in Assassins Creed Unity that told a compelling story, yet could be played in any order. It seems like an impossible task, but they seem to have pulled it off -- learn how during Footman's GDC 2015 talk, "Igniting the Shared Experience with Cinematics In Assassin's Creed Unity." And as always, conference organizers look forward to announcing many more GDC 2015 sessions in the months ahead. In the meantime, don't miss your chance to register early -- the deadline for discounted Early Bird passes, including a lower-priced Summits, Tutorials & Bootcamps Pass, is January 21, 2015. GDC 2015 itself will take place March 2-6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information on GDC 2015, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS. Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech.