Get art tips from Ustwo, Naughty Dog and the remakers of Halo at GDC

The field of visual design for games has never been more exciting, and thus Game Developers Conference 2015 officials are eager to highlight another great set of sessions about the practice of crafting art for games that you'll want to keep on your radar.

You can find full details on these and other excellent art talks at GDC 2015 via the Visual Arts track session list.

Monument Valley lead designer Ken Wong will be demonstrating how a fundamentally unique game experience can be created by centering your game around strong visual design, rather than mechanics, in a great talk titled simply "The Art of Monument Valley." Wong believes the game's award-winning visual aesthetic was key to its success, and during his talk he'll explain how the M.C. Escher-meets-Middle Eastern architecture aesthetic of Monument Valley (pictured) required Ustwo's team of game developers to tackle some very real technical design challenges.

Speaking of technical challenges, Naughty Dog's Damon Shelton will be at GDC 2015 to lead an excellent session on the design and development process of the motion capture pipeline used to create The Last Of Us. Check out "Capturing The Last Of Us: Motion Capture Pipeline" for an inside look at the tools and techniques Naughty Dog uses to make movies; hopefully you'll walk away with some new ideas and tricks you can use in your own development practices.

Also, make time to see Michael Pavlovich run down the artistry at work in producing Halo 2 Anniversary, the remastered version of Bungie's classic title that was recently included in Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Pavlovich serves as a senior character artist at Certain Affinity, which helped develop the project, and in his GDC 2015 talk "Blurring Separation Between Concept and Production on Halo 2 Anniversary" he'll detail the studio's process for rapidly turning concept art into final game assets. He'll also demonstrate production of a set of Halo 2 Anniversary Spartan armor from start to fnish, so don't miss it.

A list of all announced talks is available in the online GDC 2015 Session Scheduler, where you can begin to build your conference week and later export it to the up-to-the-minute GDC Mobile App, coming soon.

Also, conference officials look forward to announcing more GDC 2015 sessions spanning a diverse array of game industry issues in the months ahead.

For now, don't miss the opportunity to save money by registering early -- the deadline to register for passes at a discounted rate 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.

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