2011 Game Developers Conference

Organizers of the 2011 Game Developers Conference are highlighting full-day sponsored tutorials on Android, Microsoft's Kinect, Unity, and Google's full product suite, for the 25th edition of the industry's leading event for game creators.

With the overall session list for the event now almost full, organizers are taking the opportunity to highlight the sponsored full-day tutorials from major firms available to attendees.

These sessions, part of a full roster of one and two-day tutorials will once again be held alongside the GDC Summits on the first two days of the San Francisco-based event, Monday, February 28th and Tuesday, March 1st.

They will be open to those with a Summits & Tutorials or All-Access Pass, and interested parties can select their preference during the process of online registration and onsite check-in to help GDC staff with room capacity.

(Organizers note that some tutorials may become full and no longer be selectable during registration - attendees who select a particular tutorial and have it printed on their badge will be allowed into busy tutorials first.)

Sponsored GDC 2011 tutorials of particular note to the wider audience include the following:

- A Google Developer Day taking place on Monday includes Google game development-centric luminaries such as Bill Budge and Gregg Tavares, promising to allow development and business-centric attendees to "get a peek at the brand-new technologies Google is developing for games."

As the description notes: "From scalable servers, to high-speed code and graphics in web browsers, to gameplay footage on YouTube, Google online technologies can help you create better games that reach a larger audience than ever before. Join Google engineers for an in-depth technical discussion of Chrome, WebGL, Native Client, Google App Engine, and the YouTube APIs."

- In a full-day Microsoft Kinect developer tutorial, scheduled for Tuesday, Microsoft's Advanced Technology Group "will get you up to speed on natural user input and put you on track for building a successful Kinect title. Topics include deep dives into skeletal tracking, gesture and speech recognition, depth analysis, and lessons learned from shipping Kinect launch titles."

The speakers, including Pete Isensee and Scott Selfon from Microsoft will cover topics such as 'Inside Kinect: Skeletal Tracking Deep Dive', 'Building Great Gesture Detection', and 'Xbox, Listen: Driving Gameplay with Kinect Audio Input and Speech Recognition', with two separate rooms offering different lectures in the afternoon part of the tutorial.

- A full Google Android developer day scheduled for Tuesday and programmed by Google itself starts with the premise: "Games are the most popular and best selling types of applications available on Android Market... we've organized an entire day of engineering-focused sessions to quickly bring you up to speed on Android game development."

Speakers including Google's Chris Pruett and Ian Ni-Lewis will talk on subjects such as 'Building Aggressively Compatible Android Games', 'Graphics On Android' and 'Android Just Got Better: The New NDK', and over the entire day, "everything you need to know, from graphics and sound to device compatibility and C++ integration will be covered."

- Finally, the Unity tutorial day on Tuesday presents a full-day "crash course on using Unity, the award-winning game development platform for web, iOS, Android and consoles", with multiple talks and speakers including Unity's Tom Higgins, Candlelight's Adam Mechtley and more.

The session notes: "You'll learn the basics; how to write your own shaders; how to make the Unity Editor do exactly what you want; advanced techniques for extending Unity's asset pipeline to automate tasks and enhance interoperability; and scripting and optimizing for iOS and Android."

These sessions join a host of other notable tutorials, including a one-day 'Producer Boot Camp', veteran industry lawyer Jim Charne on 'Emerging Issues in Game Dev Deals', the ever-popular 'Audio Boot Camp', Evan Skolnick's highly rated 'Learn Better Game Writing in a Day', the perennial 'Physics For Programmers' tutorial, the return of 'Level Design In A Day', and the eminently practical 'Advanced Visual Effects with DirectX 11'.

At the forefront of game development, Game Developers Conference continues to deliver the most pertinent and informative updates in digital entertainment.

Game Developers Conference 2011 will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from February 28th to March 4th, and pre-show registration continues until February 27th. For more information on all aspects of the show, visit the official GDC 2011 website - http://www.gdconf.com