GDC 2012 to include lectures on Diablo III, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City

The first lectures for GDC 2012's Main Conference have been announced, and include a look at the art of Diablo III, a postmortem on Halfbrick's Jetpack Joyride, and Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City's visuals and animation.

Lecture details are listed below, courtesy of Gamasutra:

• Visual Arts - Blizzard Entertainment's Christian Lichtner will pick apart the art direction for the studio's much-anticipated Diablo III. The session, appropriately titled "The Art of Diablo III," will explain the creative process that led Blizzard to the game's painterly style, and Lichtner will point out the ways in which the game's art serves to benefit Diablo's gameplay and overall design.

• Game Design - Halfbrick Studios designer Luke Muscat will look back at the development of the studio's most recent mobile title with a session dubbed, "Depth in Simplicity: The Making of Jetpack Joyride." Here, Muscat will outline the project's successes and shortcomings, and how it transformed from a small side-project into the studio's most ambitious title to date.

• Programming and Visual Arts - Ben Hanke, software engineer at Slant Six Games will host "Rigging a Resident Evil - Inside the Bone Code of Operation Raccoon City," detailing the animation techniques used in the studio's upcoming third-person shooter. During this engineering-focused session, Hanke will explain and demonstrate "the practical application of expression-driven helper bones," and how it relates to Slant Six's game.

GDC 2012 runs March 5 through March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.