Refine your mobile game-making skills at the GDC 2018 Mobile Summit!

As the game industry prepares for the 2018 Game Developers Conference, organizers want to make sure you know about some of the great talks about the art and business of making mobile games that will be taking place during the event.

Each of these talks is part of the GDC Mobile Summit, one of eight that will take place Monday, March 19th and Tuesday, March 20th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA -- the first two days of the conference.

As in every GDC Summit, the Mobile Summit is filled with talks that, together, give you a comprehensive overview of a specific game industry discipline. 

For example, in their GDC Mobile Summit talk on "All the Families: The Making of 'Animation Throwdown'", Kongregate's Katrina Wolfe and Peter Eykemans will be presenting a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Kongregate's hit free-to-play game Animation Throwdown.

The game is packed with popular cartoon characters and the story of how it was made is fascinating, involving a skeleton crew split between two developers, one publisher, one IP owner, and five individual IPs. Together, the pair will explain how it happened. They'll also share lessons learned about structuring a complex production involving multiple parties, making limited resources work, and the pitfalls to watch out for when trying to undertake something so big, including working with well-known IP.

Plus, King's Stephen Jarrett and Rob Woodburn will be presenting an earnest talk about "Implementing Pixar's Brain Trust Model at King, and How It All Went Wrong."

Pixar’s Brain Trust is, of course, a small group of creative leaders at Pixar who oversee development on all movies. The group came about during the development of 'Toy Story' and is an open candid forum where creative leaders get together with a movie’s director to openly discuss problems and solutions.

Pixar claims this is a huge success and has helped the animation powerhouse score 14 box office hits in a row. Sounds like this should work for game development too, right?

King tried to implement a similar system called the Product Champions, a team of talented and experienced individuals in production, art, and game design that would advise and help game teams lift quality. Together, Jarrett and Woodburn will speak at GDC 2018 about what went wrong,  the lessons they learned, and how. 2 years later, they may have finally made it work.

And in "Going Cross-Platform: Is It Worth the Effort?" Kongregate VP of publishing Tammy Levy will help you answer the titular question by walking you through several case studies from live Kongregate games, including Animation Throwdown (!), Spellstone, and Bit Heroes.

If you're not sure whether or not it makes sense to launch your game on multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Steam, etc.) you want to see this, because Levy will share the pros and cons of going cross-platform and allowing players to play where they want to!

For more details on these and all other announced talks head over to the online GDC 2018 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.

For more information on GDC 2018, 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 Americas