The 2016 Game Developers Conference is happening later this month, and organizers are eager to let you know about some of the great talks on free-to-play game design that will be taking place during the March conference.
Each of these talks is part of the GDC Free to Play Summit, one of eight that will take place Monday, March 14th and Tuesday, March 15th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA during the first two days of the conference.
Each Summit offers a comprehensive overview of a specific game industry discipline, and the Free to Play Summit is shaping up to be particularly interesting this year with insightful talks from leading F2P game makers.
For example, David Edery, CEO of multifaceted development studio Spry Fox, will be delivering an earnest postmortem of the studio’s popular mobile puzzle game Alphabear. Simply titled “Alphabear Postmortem,” Edery’s talk will run down what worked and what didn’t, what Spry Fox learned from the game, and what mistakes the studio made in creating Alphabear — and how you can avoid making similar mistakes in your own work.
And in “The Tower of Want” talk monetization expert Ethan Levy, now with N3twork, will show you how to design an escalating series of short- and long-term goal opportunities into your game. Check it out to learn how to visualize your game’s unique “Tower of Want” and pin down the critical questions your design must answer in order to engage and monetize players over the long term.
Plus, Next Games’ Sulka Haro will be delivering an intriguing look at what’s involved with developing F2P games based on prominent IP in “‘The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land’ Postmortem.”
Haro’s team tried to design a game (pictured) that would reflect, through its mechanics, the same tension and tough choices that characterize The Walking Dead franchise; thus they committed to turn-based combat mechanics married with a character development system, simplified to be accessible as a mobile game.
In this talk, Haro will reflect on the choices made by the team and how they shaped the game’s success in a crowded F2P mobile game market.
You can find more details on these and all other announced talks over on 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.
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.Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech.
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