Gamedev.world free online conference starts today with 35 talks from developers

If you're interested in the making of your gamesausage, do have a look at Gamedev.world this weekend. Starting today at noon, it's a new free game developer-focused conference with 35 talks over three days in multiple languages, all streamed online. Subjects on the schedule include Pathologic 2's questlog, designing multiplayer games to avoid awfulness, the making of Gris, tools, the faux-2D art of La-Mulana 2, free-to-play monetisation, collaboration in audio design, local independent development scenes, how to set up a games studio... a whole lot. For free. By professionals. That's neat.

More than just a snappy cybername, Gamedev.world is the domain through which to access all this. Head on over to watch and check out the talk schedule. The event has live closed-captioning and translations so folks can watch it in Arabic, Simplified Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. A number of venues around the world, including Cardiff and Dundee, are showing the stream at live events too.

The executive director of Gamedev.world is Rami Ismail, the half of Nuclear Throne developers Vlambeer who seems to forever be talking at conferences across the world and also created dev-helping tools like presskit(). Voice actor and event organiser Sarah Elmaleh is organising the event while Myriame Lachapelle is producing, and oh so many developers and translators and moderators and volunteers are lending their time too.

Ismail has long been agitating for alternatives to the monolithic Game Developers Conference, in particular the main GDC in San Francisco. Expensive tickets, an expensive host city, mandatory English, and the hostile national borders make that far from a universal event. A three-day event online, free, in multiple languages seems a heck of a grassroots alternative. I'll be watching with interest.

Disclosure: Rami Ismail crashed in my flat years ago after talking at a local event. He'd just jetted in from god knows where and needed somewhere to sleep and our flat had space that night so hey. Also a group I'm part of, The Wild Rumpus, puts on the Mild Rumpus showcase at GDC at year. Not to boast, but Mild Rumpus really is great.