GDC Next debuts talks on Adrift and the value of failing fast

The GDC Next team continues to work with the best and brightest in the game industry to organize a great session lineup for GDC Next 2014 featuring ADC this November. Today, they're excited to share two more excellent talks that will take place at this year's conference - The Workshop's industry veterans will share knowledge about the virtues of failing fast, while developer Adam Orth will tell the origin story of his dream game Adr1ft. GDC Next and ADC, which aim to highlight practical ways for developers to increase the creative and financial success of their projects, are taking place simultaneously on November 3rd-4th, 2014 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Last year Adam Orth spoke at the inaugural GDC Next about the destructive power of toxic behavior in online games. This year, he and fellow Three One Zero cofounder Omar Aziz (as well as independent artist Hogarth de la Plante) will lead a GDC Next session on the unorthodox development process that took Three One Zero's current project, Adr1ft, from a concept on paper to a unique game/VR prototype to a publishing deal with 505 Games in the span of 5 months. In their Production track talk, titled "10 Weeks, 3 Guys, 1 Shot: Taking Adr1ft from Concept to Publishing Deal", Orth, Aziz and de la Plante will detail the goals they set at the beginning of the process, how they achieved them and share everything they learned along the way to illuminate and inspire other developers to take a chance on making their dream a reality. Over on the Design track, GDC Next organizers are excited to welcome industry veteran Laralyn McWilliams and her Workshop Entertainment cohort Rick Ernst to speak at this year's conferene. Their talk, "Fast Fail Your Systems With Modeling", should help shed light on both basic and new ways for developers to fine-tune game pacing, cadence and mechanics. The pair plan to show examples of modeling action game mechanics via a board game and a complete model of reward/monetization cadence via a Unity simulator. Using tools like these, they believe we can not only better understand our players' experience, but also help foster a key shift in metrics and tools to focus on making positive, fun play experiences. Conference organizers look forward to programming and announcing many more interesting talks in the months before this year's GDC Next featuring ADC, which takes place November 3rd-4th, 2014 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. For additional details about GDC Next and ADC or to register for the event, visit the conference homepage. Gamasutra, GDC and ADC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech.