GDC 2014 Bootcamps & Tutorials include talks from Valve, Blizzard

Today GDC 2014 organizers are highlighting more informative sessions for the March conference, including an intensive two-day game design workshop, a crash course on storytelling in games and two days of highly technical talks on math and physics for programmers. All of the talks featured here are part of the Tutorials and Bootcamps held at GDC 2014, which take place during the first two days of the March conference on Monday-Tuesday, March 17-18 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. Game Design Workshop This intensive two-day workshop will explore the day-to-day craft of game design through hands-on activities, group discussion, analysis, and critique. Attendees will immerse themselves in the iterative process of refining a game design, and discover design concepts that will help them think more clearly about their designs and make better games. The workshop presents a formal approach to game design in which games are viewed as systems, and analyzed in terms of their mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. The workshop is spread across a pair of day-long sessions on Monday and Tuesday, March 17-18. Speakers include Funomena co-founder Robin Hunicke, NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz, EA/Maxis creative director Stone Librande, and more. Storytelling Fundamentals In A Day On Monday, Marvel and Lucasfilm writing veteran Evan Skolnick will host a comprehensive tutorial that covers the basics of narrative structure, vibrant character development, storytelling best practices, and more. This session, Storytelling Fundamentals In A Day, aims to provide a common frame of reference when it comes to crafting narrative, so that everyone on a team is pulling the game story in the same direction. During the day-long session Skolnick hopes to delineate narrative's place in games and some of the main theories of storycrafting. He also plans to share vital rules and tools related to characterization, exposition delivery, believability and impact on the audience. These concepts will be reinforced via insightful lectures, entertaining examples, skill-building exercises and practical case studies. Math for Game Programmers Also on Monday, the day-long Math for Game Programmers tutorial aims to bring together some of the best presenters in gaming math to concentrate on the core mathematics necessary for sophisticated 3D graphics, interactive physical simulations and effective gameplay. The day will focus on the issues of 3D game development important to programmers and includes programming guidance throughout. Topics will begin with introductory talks on Grassman algebra, rotations and quaternions, then continue with random numbers and spatial subdivision, and conclude with inverse kinematics, sampling and reconstruction, and applying K-SVD to animation skinning. Those talks include informative sessions on Random Numbers, Working With 3D Rotations, a brief Introduction to Frames, Dictionaries and K-SVD from a Google engineer, and a talk on Dictionary Learning in Games from an Activision engineer. Physics for Game Programmers On Tuesday don't miss the Physics for Programmers tutorial, a day of technical talks featuring speakers from Blizzard, AMD and Valve. Topics include character collision, constraint solvers, computational geometry, fluid simulation and debugging. The primary focus of the tutorial is on rigid body physics and real-time simulation in games, but there will be a mix of introductory topics, recent algorithms and practical tips. Plus, time will be reserved for Q&A with the experts. Highlights include a Blizzard engineer speaking about Understanding Constraints, a guide to Exploring MLCP and Featherstone Solvers, a session on QuickHull algorithms from a Valve engineer, and a talk on Debugging Physics from a Valve programmer. All of the above events are open to attendees with Summits & Tutorials and All Access passes, with those selecting the talks during the registration process getting priority. A full list of tutorials and bootcamps is available now, including other popular one-day events like the Audio Bootcamp, the Producer Bootcamp and the Animation Bootcamp. For more information on GDC 2014, 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.