Learn from top game artists and directors at the GDC 2018 Art Direction Bootcamp!

If you're coming to GDC 2018 next month, you should know about some of the informative and intriguing sessions taking place during the day-long Art Direction Bootcamp which will help kick off the conference.

It's just one of many great Bootcamps and Tutorials scheduled during the first two days of GDC (Monday and Tuesday, March 19th and 20th this year) and offer attendees the chance to focus on the critical components of a game's art direction, and its creators' broader artistic vision.

GDC 2018 attendees are invited to attend the Monday bootcamp and join the leading artistic forces of our industry as they share their experiences and discuss some of the most important issues of the day. Learn a ton about what really matters in art, and how to build or support a vision and make friends doing it.

There will be a wealth of concentrated art-specific information from the top minds of the industry that should be interesting not just to newbies and students, but seasoned professionals who are concerned with pressing issues of the day and industry realities.

For example, in a session titled "Artistry in a New Medium: 'Lone Echo' and the Magic of VR" Ready at Dawn art director Nathan Phail-Liff will talk about how the studio's journey from making console games to creating Lone Echo for VR required letting go of a lot of previously held beliefs, making a lot of mistakes, and ultimately leaning into the things that are so powerful and unique about VR.

From achieving a high degree of player presence and immersion, gearing artistic design towards putting comfort at the forefront, and pushing the expectations of visual fidelity under daunting performance targets, this talk will touch on a number of the challenges and lessons learned through the process, as well as what the speaker found so exciting about the medium, from both from an artistic and creative standpoint.

And in the split-focus session "'Windup': An Animation Feature Quality Rendering in Real-Time" & "On Cultures of Shared Creative Ownership"" Unity's Yibing Jiang will show how she and her team built a test scene of animation feature quality in Unity. He will go step by step with consideration to concept, color scripts, timeline, camera setup, character creation, environment building, and lighting. Rather than use methods seen in VFX, Jiang will show how Unity took methods from AAA game production that pushed the visual bar while being real-time.

In the second half of the hour-long session, Naughty Dog's Andrew Maximov will ask: can developers self organize and ship products without absolute and utter chaos destroying the production? The answer, at least as he hopes to give it, is “sometimes”.

It requires some very fundamental cultural shifts but Maximov believes it has been proven to work at Naughty Dog, bringing you some of the most celebrated video game titles and earning hundreds of millions of dollars at the same time. All while encouraging every individual on the team to take a more active role in realizing their potential. Come by this talk and engage in this dialogue on what you can do today to inspire shared creative ownership on your team.

For more details on these and other sessions taking place at GDC 2018, head over to the conference Session Scheduler. 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