GDC Europe 2013 adds Kick Off classic postmortem

Organizers have confirmed a classic postmortem of Kick Off from Dino Dini for August's GDC Europe in Cologne, also adding talks on Warface's optimizations for low-end PCs and Heidi McDonald on stirring up romance games. These talks are part of the visual arts, programming, and design tracks in GDC Europe 2013, which will take place 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. Notably, organizers are revealing an in-depth postmortem of seminal soccer game Kick Off from original creator Dino Dini as this year's European-centric Classic Postmortem, following last year's classic postmortem of GoldenEye. Much beloved among European players and developers, Dino Dini's top-down arcade soccer games Kick Off 1 & 2 were released by Anco in 1989 and 1990 respectively, and were made available for a host of platforms, including the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. In the talks, Dino Dini himself will explore the making of the entire series of soccer-related games he made in the '80s and '90s. He'll include analysis into the design evolution that made the original game, including the 'kick ahead' mechanic, so successful, and add insight into its sequels and related titles. These include Player Manager (the first soccer game to twin management and a soccer game engine) and his later title Dino Dini's GOAL!. Elsewhere, in 'Warface: Creating AAA Graphics for Low-End PCs,' Crytek lead artist Konstantin Molchanov will share optimization tricks deployed to make the free-to-play FPS run on even lower-end hardware. The tricks will cover character, weapon, and environment asset creation, all in an effort to keep its download size small and spec-compliance minimal. Finally, adapting from a popular GDC San Francisco 2013 talk, 'Romance Games: Unpopular Genre or Untapped Market?', Women in Gaming Rising Star Award 2012 recipient Heidi McDonald of Schell Games will present her research on why this genre has historically failed in Western cultures. She will also explain her ICING Model for narrative romance as a way to improve the genre's success. More talks will be revealed throughout the weeks leading up to GDC Europe in August. The schedule builder is live with a partial list of talks already available. Early bird registration for GDC Europe 2013 is also live, with discounts up to 20% off admission. Group admission discounts are also available. 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.