Learn from Epic, Crytek and Playful's VR game dev experts at VRDC

Heads up, VR game enthusiasts: GDC 2016 organizers are excited to welcome VR experts from Epic Games, Crytek, Playful Corp and more as speakers for the inaugural Virtual Reality Developers Conference in March.

Think of it like a sister conference to GDC proper, one divided into Game VR/AR and Entertainment VR/AR tracks to help attendees find the talks most interesting to them.

Each of these sessions is part of the Game VR/AR track of talks at VRDC, which will take place Monday, March 14th and Tuesday, March 15th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA during the first two days of GDC 2016.

Attendees who are excited about the possibilities of VR game development should make time to check out "Going Off the Rails: The Making of 'Bullet Train'" from Epic Games' Nick Whiting and Nick Donaldson. The pair will cover the entire process, from start to finish, of creating Epic Games' Bullet Train (pictured) VR demo.

Design considerations surrounding the user experience of adding interaction to traditionally passive experiences will be highlighted, including a breakdown of alternative paths that were considered but didn't make the cut. Additionally, the speakers will discuss where they had to diverge from their original design choices in order to match the players' expectations of the world they interact with. 

Also, don't miss Playful Corp design director Dan Hurd and engineer Evan Reidland unpacking the mysteries of 3rd-person VR platformer design in "Lucky's Tale: The Unexpected Delight of Third-Person Virtual Reality, a Postmortem." 

It's a postmortem on the processes and surprising revelations Playful devs had while working on Lucky's Tale, their first 3rd-person, character-action platforming game designed exclusively for VR. The pair will recall moments of thrilling success and challenging failure and openly discusses the discoveries they have made as they share useful guidelines for VR development.

Plus, the unique challenges of crafting great interfaces for VR games will be addressed in Crytek designer Riho Kroll's talk on "Building 3-Dimensional UI for VR." Kroll will draw on hard-won experience designing VR UI to talk about the technical challenges of building such interfaces using traditional game development pipelines.

The talk will be insightful and technical, with lots of details on the design process of creating 3D menus, the many new interaction methods available in VR games, and the technical challenges of rendering UI in a 3D renderer.

For more details on these and lots of other great announced talks, head over to the online GDC 2016 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.

And of course conference officials look forward to announcing many more GDC 2016 Summit sessions spanning a diverse array of game industry issues in the months ahead. For now, don't miss the opportunity to save money by registering for the conference early -- the deadline to register for passes at a discounted rate is Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016.

GDC 2016 itself will take place March 14-18th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information on GDC 2016, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

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