Got a great idea for a Programming talk? Pitch it now for GDC 2020!

New Game Platforms 
How have new platforms and display devices changed game development? How do you tackle the constraints of Virtual or Augmented Reality enabled games? Do you have tips and tricks to share?

Core Engine Techniques
Case studies of difficult problems in core engine development. Possible topics include: advanced multithreading approaches, streaming and open world games, working with massive data sets, techniques for rapid iteration, and other challenging core engine problems.

Advances in World Simulation
How have gains in computing power allowed for higher fidelity physical simulation? Are these techniques better suited for implementation on CPU or GPU? Possible topics include soft and rigid body physics, cloth, fluid simulation, destruction, and new approaches to animation.

AI Behavior Design
How has AI and NPC behavior advanced over the last year? What new techniques are driving this advance? Has scripting reached its limits? How should the AI deal with rendering techniques that are quickly descending the slope of the uncanny valley?

High-fidelity Character Animation 
How has character motion improved to match increasing visual fidelity? Possible topics include advances in data representation (e.g. point clouds, motion graphs, compression), facial animation, interactive and synthesized animation, and runtime retargeting.

Online-centric Games
We want to hear about new developments in persistent universes, pervasively online games, cloud server usage, player-driven economies, multi-authority networking models, and security.

Achieving the Most with Smaller Teams
Most titles are now created with small teams of programmers tightly focused on the specific needs of their title. How do you create complex systems on short time scales and with limited resources? What techniques have you evolved for supporting release on multiple platforms with highly varying specifications? What specific programming problems of larger teams do you avoid? What are the main challenges for smaller programming teams?

Advances in Rendering
Show us your cutting-edge techniques that demonstrate what new hardware is capable of! Possible topics include TAA strategies, content amplification, physically based materials and lighting, real time global illumination, new approaches to deferred and forward+ rendering, and advanced usage of compute shaders and GPGPU techniques. Postmortems are welcome, as are examinations of aspirational techniques difficult to achieve in current games.

Tools and Pipelines
Content sizes are increasing dramatically with new platforms. How are you solving the difficult problems in content creation tools, content pipeline development, working with massive data sets, and providing rapid content creator iteration?

Gameplay Subsystems
We'd love nitty-gritty detailed talks on various gameplay-oriented subsystems, things that are not rendering, networking, physics, and AI. Examples include object systems, inventory and encumbrance, dynamic reactions to damage, conversation systems, etc. A great example from GDC 2012 was Elan Ruskin's talk, AI-driven Dynamic Dialog through Fuzzy Pattern Matching. Empower Your Writers!.

Automated Testing in Games and Game Engines
What automated tools have you used to catch bugs in your game or engine? Or any other automated processes that improve robustness and quality of complex games.

And anything new, fresh or experimental! 
If you are doing something in a different way that advances the state of the art, we would love to hear about it!