Microsoft Game Stack @ GDC 2019
Visit us at GDC to find out the best ways to host your game in the cloud, operate your live titles, or reach the most passionate and engaged gamers on the planet.
March 18-22, 2019 // San Francisco, CA
Game Stack @ GDC Events & Exhibits Guide
Our mission is simple: empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
At GDC, that mission is focused on you. People who make great games. People who tell amazing stories. People who create worlds with art, science, and technology. Microsoft is headed to GDC to help you dream bigger, code faster, and scale to the size you need to reach gamers all over the planet.
Lobby Lounge
Are you ready to test your game development and design experience in a challenging card battle of twists, turns, cost overruns, and production delays? Set down your swag, rest your weary feet, and get your hands on a Limited Edition card game built just for you.
Game Stack @ GDC Schedule
Join us for a full week of programming, including events, demos, talks, exhibits, and support.
Monday, March 18
Microsoft Lobby Lounge
Looking for a place to chill out and try something new? Eyes need a rest from all the great digital experiences you’ve been… experiencing? Come join us at the Microsoft Lobby Lounge where you’ll have a chance to go hands on with a new game that challenges you to do what you do best.
Tuesday, March 19
Microsoft Lobby Lounge
Looking for a place to chill out and try something new? Eyes need a rest from all the great digital experiences you’ve been… experiencing? Come join us at the Microsoft Lobby Lounge where you’ll have a chance to go hands on with a new game that challenges you to do what you do best.
Wednesday, March 20
Microsoft Lobby Lounge
Looking for a place to chill out and try something new? Eyes need a rest from all the great digital experiences you’ve been… experiencing? Come join us at the Microsoft Lobby Lounge where you’ll have a chance to go hands on with a new game that challenges you to do what you do best.
Thursday, March 21
Microsoft Lobby Lounge
Looking for a place to chill out and try something new? Eyes need a rest from all the great digital experiences you’ve been… experiencing? Come join us at the Microsoft Lobby Lounge where you’ll have a chance to go hands on with a new game that challenges you to do what you do best.
Friday, March 22
Microsoft Lobby Lounge
Play analog games with us in the downtime between sessions and expo hall adventures. We’d also love to hear from you on ways we can improve our efforts to support and partner with you.
Game Stack @ GDC Sponsored Sessions
11 hours of talks and many world-first announcements of new programs & technology for game developers.
Azure PlayFab: New tools and services to take your LiveOps to the next level
If you haven’t seen Azure PlayFab recently, now’s the time. The PlayFab team has been hard at work adding new tools and services to what’s already one of the most powerful platforms in the game industry for operating live games.
Get a first look into the PlayFab roadmap with services like team-based matchmaking, hosted C# CloudScript, data warehousing, multiplayer server orchestration, and some that are so exciting we can’t even share them yet.
Improving your LiveOps stack has never been so easy.
Project Acoustics: Fast and Accurate Physically-Based Rendering for Acoustic Design
Project Acoustics does for audio design, what baked physically-based lighting techniques did for graphics, using the power of Azure. Do you want to spend your time designing sounds instead of faking the physics of sound wave propagation? Do you find tuning complex spatial sound environments costly, time consuming, and not feasible to achieve the results you want?
Project Acoustics solves these problems and saves you time. Project Acoustics is a codeless wave physics-based system that – while maintaining designer control and freedom - calculates acoustic parameters for wave propagation effects like portalling, reverb, occlusion and obstruction based on the materials and geometry of your virtual world. Design your acoustics from that detailed starting point without placing reverb volumes or casting rays. Apply the results in microseconds at runtime. Learn how to use this system to improve acoustic quality and save time today!
Spatial Sound: Bringing Immersive Game Audio to Millions of New Devices and New Formats
Games designed with 360-degree Spatial Sound set the standard for immersion, supported by Dolby Atmos for headphones and home theater on millions of Xbox consoles and Windows PCs.
This talk includes an announcement by the Microsoft Audio team for how game developers can take advantage of Spatial Sound support expanding to reach even more customers with new form factors and support for new encoding formats, giving gamers and game developers more choice for wrapping their ears in the best gaming audio experiences the world has ever heard.
Xbox Live: Growing & Engaging Your Gaming Community Across Platforms
Get a first look at the SDK to enable game developers to connect players across platforms.
DirectX: Boost rendering performance with hardware accelerated Variable Rate Shading (VRS)
Variable Rate Shading is a new DirectX 12 API that lets developers increase image quality and improve framerates. VRS gives developers fine-grained control of a game’s shading rate, making it simple to selectively reduce unnecessary detail with minimal code changes.
It’s a powerful, versatile tool that we believe is the next step to unlocking performance for amazing visuals on modern GPUs with native VRS support.
Come see a deep dive on how the API works and hear from our partners who’ve already had success using it.
DirectX: Variable Rate Shading, a Deep Dive, Deriving Screen Space Shading Rate, Implementation Tips and Sparse Lighting
Variable Rate Shading is a new DirectX12 API giving developers fine-grained control over shading frequency, enabling significant frame time savings on modern GPUs. This talk presents a deep dive on VRS and the algorithms used to drive shading rate. Included are integration details, tips and optimisations. Learn how to take VRS to the next level, by exploiting the VRS signal with a new deferred lighting technique, Sparse Lighting.
Project xCloud: The Future of Streaming Xbox Games on Mobile Devices and Beyond
Yes, you can play your Xbox games on mobile!
Project xCloud is enabling Console Native games to stream through our Azure-hosted game servers and streaming clients. Any Console Native game currently shipping in the Microsoft Store on Xbox will be capable of streaming to a mobile device. Project xCloud is an open platform with a customizable Client UX where streaming starts with Xbox game developers not having to modify a single line of existing game code.
This talk - brought to you by the Xbox backwards compatibility team – will go deeper into how Cloud Aware games built with the Project xCloud SDK will help games adapt for mobile through the same graphics and input paradigms as Console Native development. You will also learn about the new microservices layer that allow customization such as glass and touch input when a game controller is not available, all outside of the game.
Best practices for building resilient, scalable, game services in Microsoft Azure.
Looking to scale your game from 10,000 to 1,000,000 players at launch? Want to focus on building games and let Azure solve the hard distributed systems problems such as reliability, scalability, management, and latency?
Come hear the latest best practices from the Azure team and how Wizards of the Coast built its game services for Magic: The Gathering Arena from the ground up on Azure.
Save Time for Creativity: Unlocking the Potential for your Game’s Data with Microsoft Azure
This talk covers how Azure is streamlining Microsoft’s many flexible, reliable, and secure data services and solutions for game developers.
Wherever your data is, Microsoft Azure will help you unlock its potential. Support rapid growth and save more time for innovation with a portfolio of secure, enterprise-grade, fully managed database services that support open-source database engines.
Whatever you build, we’ll help you get it to market quickly, distribute it widely, and manage it easily and confidently.
Accessibility as a First Class Input for Games
Xbox has added new options to ensure that accessible technology – software and hardware interfaces that help people adapt to their digital world – can go with them wherever they create, work, and play.
Part 1 of this talk dives deeper into the Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC) that works with existing games on console and PC and provides endless possibilities for hardware and software partners take full advantage of the XAC to create powerful, personalized experiences.
Learn how Xbox Mouse & Keyboard support unlocks access to the thousands of devices from partners such as Razer and Tap Systems, already enabling gamers and game developers with the ultimate flexibility to make gaming, fun for everyone. Stay around for Part 2 that reintroduces speech as an accessible input.
Accessible Voice & Text Chat with Azure PlayFab
Xbox has added new options to ensure that accessible technology – software and hardware interfaces that help people adapt to their digital world – can go with them wherever they create, work, and play.
This talk focuses on in-game communication. Chat can dramatically enhance player experience in multiplayer and social encounters. Pick up Microsoft’s tips and suggestions for an accessible in-game chat user experience. Get introduced to new PlayFab communication technology that delivers voice chat with speech-to-text transcription and text to speech to make it easier for gamers with disabilities to play online. Come experience this new tech live in the Microsoft Game Stack booth (GDC Expo Hall).
Introducing DirectML: How to move machine learning from research into production
Innovation with machine learning in gaming creates a demand for real-time inferencing, capable of integrating well with high performance applications. Do you have a machine learning model? Do you need machine learning for your rendering workloads, tooling, game engine or content pipeline?
This 401-level session will cover DirectML, a fast and powerful DirectX library that meets game developers’ needs by providing hardware-accelerated operators to take your neural networks from research to production. For this demo we will show how to achieve super-resolution with a DirectML engine plug-in and bring our collaborators on stage to walk through examples of using DirectML to power their machine learning workloads.
Game Stack @ GDC Theatre Sessions
Snack-sized sessions about LiveOps, Graphics, Engines, Art, and more. Rest, watch, & learn!
Day 1
LiveOps 101: The inside scoop
LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice — whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.
Environmental Storytelling on Forza Motorsport
Tales and Tracks – The art of environmental story telling at 120 miles per hour – An insight into designing narrative inside the Forza Motorsport universe.
The Art and Science of Live Events
Live events are the cornerstone of an effective LiveOps strategy. Join this talk to learn the ingredients of a successful event, how to plan an overall live event strategy, and how to build and operate live events in your game.
Leverage the wisdom of your team with Visual Studio IntelliCode and Live Share
In this demo heavy session, learn how to collaborate seamlessly with your team via Visual Studio Live Share and how to add custom AI-assisted IntelliSense to your workflow. We’ll show you how to get a real-time time editing and debugging experience with your teammates from the comfort of your favorite tools and walk you through how to create custom models through Visual Studio IntelliCode in order to gain contextual recommendations off your own private classes and types.
LiveOps 101: The inside scoop
LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice — whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.
Opportunities for Students and Recent Grads
Are you a current student or recent graduate interested in internship or full-time opportunities at Microsoft? We will briefly discuss the available opportunities and application process in addition to a Q&A for any questions you might have! Important note: As we have completed recruiting for the current school year, we will only be discussing opportunities for 2020 and beyond.
Cloud Script grows up: PlayFab’s new serverless compute offering
Moving your game’s logic to the cloud just got much easier with PlayFab’s new Cloud Script C# support and VSCode integration. Breakpoints! Debugging! Improved github integration! If you’ve spent any time working with PlayFab’s current cloud script solution, then this talk will move you to tears.
How to Bring Your Unity Game to Xbox One
Unity is a powerful real-time engine, used to create half of the world’s games. Our flexible real-time tools offer incredible possibilities for game developers. In this session you will learn how to unleash the power of Unity on Xbox One, learn about the latest features built over the past year and how to successfully bring your creative vision to Microsoft’s powerful console for millions of players to enjoy.
Project Acoustics
Projects acoustics does for audio design what baked physically-based lighting did for graphics, using Azure cloud power. Do you want to spend your time designing sounds instead of faking the physics of sound wave propagation? Do you find tuning complex spatial sound environments costly, time consuming, and unfeasible to achieve the results you want?
Project Acoustics solves these problems and saves you time. Project Acoustics is a codeless wave physics-based system that – while maintaining designer control and freedom - calculates acoustic parameters for wave propagation effects like portalling, reverb, occlusion and obstruction based on the materials and geometry of your virtual world. Design your acoustics from that detailed starting point without placing reverb volumes or casting rays. Apply the results in microseconds at runtime. Learn how to use this system to improve acoustic quality and save time today!
LiveOps 101: The inside scoop
LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice — whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.
Gameye: Powering And Scaling The Next Generation Of Competitive Play
If you are interested in possibilities to improve the multiplayer game experience of your customers, attend Gameye’s presentation about providing deployment solutions for game servers and creating matchmaking capabilities globally, using a powerful yet cost-efficient tool to deploy servers as close to the user as possible.
Introducing Entities: PlayFab’s New Programming Model
With the introduction of entities, PlayFab has redesigned the programming model for leveraging PlayFab services in your game to increase consistency and boost productivity. Now you can more easily share code between your game client and server, and across players, characters, and groups. Come see examples of all the new functionality that is now available — and how easily you can integrate it into your new or existing games.
Integrating PlayFab into your Unity Game
PlayFab supports all major game engines, but Unity is the most popular with more than 80% of the games on PlayFab built in Unity. Attend this talk to learn how easy it is to integrate PlayFab’s powerful suite of backend tools and serviced into your own Unity-powered game.
Leveraging Intel Tools to Maximize your Game’s Experience on Windows 10
Achieving a great gaming experience can be difficult without the proper tools. Join us to learn more about the tools available by Intel and our partnership with Microsoft to help you scale your game's performance efficiently on a wide range of hardware and reach a larger audience.
Day 2
Orleans - Building scalable game services with ease
Orleans is a popular open source framework that powers high scale services behind many Microsoft and 3rd party games (Halo, Gears or War, Minecraft). It helps build cloud services that can handle a very wide range of load with top performance without requiring the backend developers to become distributed systems experts. Attend this talk to learn how you can use Orleans to build your own game services.
LiveOps 101: The inside scoop
LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice — whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.
PlayFab Multiplayer - Scaling your community with matchmaking, servers, and parties
Multiplayer games foster community by connecting players together, but can be hard to build and difficult to scale. PlayFab provides turn-key solutions for matchmaking, cloud server orchestration, and player-to-player communication via low-latency message transport and voice chat. Attend this talk, and see these services in action, with a focus on sychronous, cross-network, and cross-platform play.
IncrediBuild with Azure. Faster Dev. Better Games.
This quick demo can save you thousands of wasted hours! Join us for a live demo showing how IncrediBuild seamlessly translate hundreds of cores in Azure into unparalleled game development speed. We’ll demo x7 performance boost of code builds, physics engines workloads, rendering, data processing and other game dev aspects. If you don’t want to miss your deadline, don’t miss this demo.
Designing for LiveOps
With LiveOps, design is no longer a one-time thing, but a continuous process. Learn how common tools like Excel can be paired with PlayFab to plan and manage your game’s economy, balance, scripts, content, social features, and events — and integrate design smoothly into your ongoing workflow.
LiveOps 101: The inside scoop
LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice — whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.
Using Leaderboards to get to the Top
Learn how to use leaderboards to engage your players and keep them coming back. Global leaderboards, friend leaderboards, bucketized tournament leaderboards -- all are great tools you can use to always give your players something more to shoot for, and all can be implemented simply and easily on any platform using PlayFab.
Azure Mixed Reality – how to enhance and accelerate your mobile games with AR
Thinking about AR? Come by to learn about interesting ways that AR can enhance your mobile game and Azure services that make it easier to build multi-player AR games.
A Vision for the Future of MMO Development
The biggest MMOs today use homegrown solutions for developing, running and supporting their game. This talk will look at what a customizable out-of-the box experience could look like with the Aether Engine from Hadean.
LiveOps 101: The inside scoop
LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice — whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.
Introducing PlayFab User Generated Content: Built for Minecraft, Now Open to All
User Generated Content (and the associated marketplace) has been one of the most successful new features rolled out in Minecraft in the last two years, fostering an even stronger sense of community and engagement among Minecraft’s tens of millions of players. And now thanks to this new service coming soon to PlayFab, you too can add the same UGC features to your own game! Attend this talk for a deep dive into how it works, and be among the first to try out this new service.
Build, test, and distribute your game more efficiently with App Center and PlayFab
Visual Studio App Center offers a powerful set of services to build, test, and distribute your game across a range of devices. And now, with PlayFab integration, you can make crash detection and customer follow-up part of your overall LiveOps strategy. Come see App Center in action, and how these two powerful tools can work together.
Still digging: How Idle Miner Tycoon proves LiveOps is a marathon not a sprint
Idle Miner Tycoon from Kolibri Games has been out for 2.5 years, yet thanks to an effective LiveOps strategy and continuous change and experimentation, is still setting new monthly records. Learn the key ingredients of their strategy, and see how they are using PlayFab as well as other partners to make it all happen.
LiveOps 101: The inside scoop
LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice — whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.
PlayFab Parties: A cross-platform multiplayer networking and accessible chat service
Join us for a deep-dive into PlayFab Parties, the newest service from PlayFab. Parties provide a cross-platform, device-to-device messaging service that makes it easy to add voice and text chat to multiplayer games, host social experiences such as in-game gatherings and lobbies, and enable peer-to-peer multiplayer without the cost of dedicated game servers. And with integrated speech-to-text technology, Parties offers accessibility that can help open up your game’s full experience to everyone.
Day 3
Project Acoustics
Projects acoustics does for audio design what baked physically-based lighting did for graphics, using Azure cloud power. Do you want to spend your time designing sounds instead of faking the physics of sound wave propagation? Do you find tuning complex spatial sound environments costly, time consuming, and unfeasible to achieve the results you want?
Project Acoustics solves these problems and saves you time. Project Acoustics is a codeless wave physics-based system that – while maintaining designer control and freedom - calculates acoustic parameters for wave propagation effects like portalling, reverb, occlusion and obstruction based on the materials and geometry of your virtual world. Design your acoustics from that detailed starting point without placing reverb volumes or casting rays. Apply the results in microseconds at runtime. Learn how to use this system to improve acoustic quality and save time today!
Backpack to the Future: Designing a game from concept to Mixer integrations in a world where time travel sets the stage
How did we develop a game prototype about Back to the Future with interesting time travel mechanics? Not only does our game take place in three separate time periods, but our Microsoft Mixer integration was designed as an addition for the ultimate dynamic experience. Learn how our contest entry to the Universal GameDev Challenge was shaped with fans of Marty’s adventures in mind from concept to final prototype.
LiveOps 101: The inside scoop
LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice — whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.
Adding real-time analytics and experimentation to any game
Data is the lifeblood of your game. Learn how you can use PlayFab to measure and react to game data in real-time, with features like A/B testing, real-time dashboards, and daily reports — all easily integrated into any new or existing game, on any platform.
Unifying the data: How Hyper Hippo is using Data Exchange to import, analyze, and act on their marketing, game, CRM, and social data.
If data is the new oil, then we're drowning in it. We know it's useful, but how to make it actionable? That was the problem facing Hyper Hippo maker of the hit AdVenture Capitalist game. Learn how they are using PlayFab's new Data Exchange service to bring together all of their data into a single place, including Iron Source, DeltaDNA, AppsFlyer, Google Analytics, ZenDesk, MailChimp, and Facebook – then using other PlayFab tools to take action based on insights gleaned from this data.
Cross Platform development with PlayFab: The SDK view
Nearly all games release on more than one platform, and for good reason — you need to be where your players are. Come and learn what PlayFab’s SDK team is doing to make it easier to build and operate your game cross-platform, and get a preview of what’s to come with new services like PlayFab parties, real-time pub-sub, and device telemetry.
Getting Started with PlayFab and Your Facebook Instant Game
Learn why PlayFab is the best backend platform to unlock the power of LiveOps in your Facebook Instant Game. In this live demo, see how to easily integrate PlayFab into your game, then how to leverage Azure and PlayFab together to build a Messenger Platform Bot to further engage your players and boost retention.
LiveOps 101: The inside scoop
LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice — whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.
Game Stack @ GDC Booth Exhibit
Our booth this year is a unique experience that maps to a game developer’s needs.
Zone 1: Theatre
Right-sized talks on a variety of topics to help you get the information you need.
Zone 2: Techspert Lounge
Ask any question that will unblock your game development and we will match you with an expert who can help you find the right solution. Xbox, Azure, PlayFab. Graphics, Cloud Gaming Services, Developer Tools, Cross-Platform Multiplayer. Anything. We go where you need us – meet at the show in person, get a follow-up online or after the show.
Zone 3: Game Design & Development Loop
Latest tech and experts to design, build, test, & publish your game. Hear from fellow game developers in the ID@Xbox how Microsoft helped them succeed!
Zone 4: Game Operations Loop
Latest tech and experts to measure, monetize, engage players, and grow your game.
