GDC Canada Confirms FarmVille Keynote, Reminds On Early Reg Deadline

Author: by Staff

GDC Canada organizers remind prospective attendees that tomorrow, March 31, is the deadline for early registration for the May 6th-7th Vancouver event. At the same time, Zynga vice president and FarmVille general manager Bill Mooney has been confirmed as the event's opening keynote, kicking off the event with a lecture on May 6. Mooney's prior experience includes major game publishers like Activision and LucasArts, in addition to five years as a trial lawyer and stints as a television writer. At GDC Canada, he'll speak from his experience developing Zynga's social game hits Mafia Wars and FarmVille in a keynote entitled "Building Social Games: Games at the Speed of Light." In addition to previously-announced talks from Obsidian, Telltale, Blizzard, Diner Dash creator Nick Fortugno and many more, a new set of featured speakers has been highlighted for the upcoming conference, slated to discuss key focal points for the event like new distribution models, developing new global titles, and managing established franchises. - In a talk called Rendering With Conviction, Ubisoft 3D Technical Lead Stephen Hill will discuss "challenges, advancements and lessons learned in the development of Splinter Cell: Conviction from a rendering perspective", highlighting the tech behind the much-awaited Xbox 360 stealth action game. - In 85 Million Farmers Can't All Be Wrong, Virtual Currencies GM Jason Bailey will discuss "what makes a game 'Social vs. Viral'. (Viral is how you grow, social is what you do to interact with others, most 'social' games are actually 'viral' games)," plus which game companies (besides Zynga) make millions -- and how they use metrics to succeed. - Ubisoft Vancouver senior tools programmer Jeremy Walker will present Reflection For Tools Development, a talk that "explores common patterns that programmers encounter while developing tools for content authoring." He'll share techniques used at Ubisoft Vancouver to solve workflow tool development problems with the help of C++ reflection. In its second year at the Vancouver Convention Centre, the new GDC Canada, presented by Reboot Communications and this website's parent the UBM Techweb Game Network, will also host evening networking events, as well as an expo hall. More information on the 2010 GDC Canada event, including pricing specifics, lectures announced to date and registration deadlines -- including early registration, which ends tomorrow, March 31st -- are available on the official GDC Canada website, GDC-Canada.com.