GDC Europe 2013 reminder on next week's packed session line-up

With GDC Europe 2013 less than a week away and the session schedule finalized, organizers have highlighted a collection of can't-miss sessions for the event. Highlighted talks include postmortem sessions on Candy Crush, Ridiculous Fishing, Badland, and the classic soccer sim Kick Off, along with next-gen tech talks featuring a new demo of Quantic Dream's The Dark Sorcerer, Sony's PlayStation Shading Language for PS4, and Oculus VR on Virtual Reality game development. GDC Europe will take place next Monday through Wednesday, August 19th-21st at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany -- just ahead of (and co-located with) the massive 275,000 person Gamescom event, with all GDC Europe passes also guaranteeing entrance to Gamescom. Highlights from the complete set of 80+ sessions happening next week are as follows: King.com's Tommy Palm will present the 'Candy Crush Postmortem: Luck in the Right Places,' discussing the mega-hit casual game's genesis. Palm's talk will describe how Candy Crush progressed from a small, competitive Flash game, to building a social envelope to adjust the game for Facebook, to an aggressive cross-platform push onto mobile. Those interested in the graphics shader pipeline for Sony's upcoming console will want to attend SCEA engineers Chris Ho and Richard Stenson's talk on the 'PlayStation Shading Language for PS4.' In a special reveal session, Ubisoft Montreal creative director Patrick Plourde (lead design on two Assassin's Creed titles and creative director on Far Cry 3), will speak about making 'Small Projects in AAA Studios' by showcasing a new game, Child Of Light. In Vlambeer's Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman's 'Cloned at Birth: The Story of Ridiculous Fishing' session, they will explain how they went from watching Ridiculous Fishing get cloned and distributed on the App Store, to winning the Apple Design Award for the game. In another mobile game postmortem with a much shorter development schedule, entitled 'How to Launch a Premium Priced Indie Game in the App Store,' Trials Evolution lead programmer turned Frogmind co-founder Johannes Vuorinen will discuss what he believes led to his Apple Design Award winner Badland selling over 100,000 copies in its first week. Along with its two-men, one-year development story, Vuorinen will share the choices made to launch the game successfully on the App Store while staying completely independent. For this year's European-centric Classic Postmortem, original Kick Off creator Dino Dini presents an in-depth postmortem of his seminal soccer game. Multiple award-winning Heavy Rain developer Quantic Dream CEO David Cage will cover the visual arts techniques from his latest two projects in 'The Dark Sorcerer and Beyond: Shooting, Directing and Filming Virtual Actors.' These techniques will cover everything needed for using virtual actors in next-gen titles, and will be demonstrated with exclusive footage from The Dark Sorcerer. Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey and VP of product Nate Mitchell will speak about the challenges virtual reality presents for game devs, why VR will change the way games are played, and what VR means for the industry in 'Virtual Reality Gaming and Game Development.' Those considering working with external art teams will want to hear Gears of War: Judgment and Fortnite producer Chris Mielke's talk, 'Building Epic Worlds Through the Strengths of Outsourcing.' Mielke will share how Epic smoothly integrated with outsourcers while preserving the studio's artistic vision on multiple platforms. In 'Designing Assassin's Creed III,' Ubisoft Montreal lead game designer Steven Masters will provide insight into the design processes used during the game's 3-year development cycle and a practical set of design tools that can be applied to any size of game production. Attendees can plan ahead for these and the other 80-plus sessions using the online schedule builder, and they can also browse the list of exhibitors appearing on the GDC Europe Expo Floor using the current floor plan. Organizers are also reminding that a mobile scheduler and attendee directory app is available for iOS, Android, and HTML5 compatible devices. Onsite registration for GDC Europe will be available throughout the three-day event. For all the latest news on GDC Europe, subscribe for updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS. Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech.