GDC Online adds Ultima Forever postmortem, Unity, startup sessions

With GDC Online's October kickoff quickly approaching, the show's organizers have revealed a trio of new talks, including a postmortem of BioWare Mythic's Ultima Forever, a Unity session on multiplatform game development, and some bootstrapping tips from social startup PerBlue. These new talks all fall within GDC Online's Main Conference, which offers some of the world's leading content on persistent and online games. The event will be held Tuesday, October 9 to Thursday, October 11 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. The full details on GDC Online's newly announced sessions are as follows: - In Ultima Forever: Reimagining a Classic, BioWare Mythic senior creative director Paul Barnett will discuss how the studio drew inspiration from the classic Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, and reimagined it as an all-new free-to-play online game. This lecture will join the previously announced Ultima Online classic game postmortem, and will showcase how the renowned Ultima franchise has been updated by modern game designers to put a distinctly different spin on the IP. - As part of GDC Online's Production track, Unity director of games monetization Adam Gutterman will host "The Challenges (and Promise!) of Multiplatform Production." Here, he will outline the challenges of multiplatform game development, and will offer some business-focused advice to help developers decide whether this production strategy is the right fit for their game. - Elsewhere, highly rated GDC speaker Justin Beck will share some tips for getting a startup off the ground in the Business & Marketing track session, "Bootstrapping 101: How College Kids Built a Thriving Game Company in Under Three Years." Here, he will share lessons learned from the social startup PerBlue (Parallel Kingdom), detailing "why we turned down seed funding and how we compensated team members when we had no money." These talks join numerous other sessions at GDC Online, including Narrative Summit presentations on Halo 4 and Guild Wars 2, and Main Conference talks on King.com, CastleVille, and much more. For more on these or any of the 100+ talks at GDC Online, check out the show's official Schedule Builder. For more information on GDC Online, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.