GDC 2013's Free Vault Content is Up

Clip from "Brave New World: New Bungie IP", Bungie's talk on Destiny

All Free Content for GDC 2013

Brave New World: New Bungie IP by Joe Staten (Bungie) and Christopher Barrett (Bungie)
We Are Not Heroes: Contextualizing Violence Through Narrative by Walt Williams (2K Games)
Classic Game Postmortem: Myst by Robyn Miller (Zoo Break Gun Club)
I don't know how I missed the memo, but GDCVault has posted the GDC 2013 content, and there are dozens of new full-session videos up for free. There are some really cool design and narrative talks, some great post-mortems, and other sessions, as well as a lot of sponsored programming talks, which can be great for those looking to learn more about a specific soft.

UDK's Official Tutorials and Documentation

UDK homepage banner

UDK Front Page
UDK Resource Depot
UDK Video Tutorials
UDK, another of the more popular game engines alongside Unity, also has a huge community of support, from extensive and pretty well-organized documentation to video tutorials, downloadable samples and starter kits to help adapt the engine to various genres other than FPS, and of course a forum. It can take a few clicks to find a specific topic, as there's so much content it's fairly nested, but everything's still pretty easy to find. Out of the box, UDK is best-suited to FPS games, but it's a tremendously versatile engine that's a lot of fun to work with. Portfolio-wise it can be a great place to create real-time visual effects, shaders, environments, and other portfolio samples. Finally, it's also a fairly common non-proprietary engines to see in professional studios, so experience working within it is great for a resume and often readily applicable in the workplace.

World of Level Design

World of Level Design splash image and their top quick links

World of Level Design
World of Level Design is a huge collection of introductory content, interviews, and all levels of tutorials on level design, working within various engines, and a fair bit of effects work and environment art and optimization as well. It's ostensibly FPS-focused (but then, so are most of the free 3D game engines), but this is probably one of the best level design resources on the internet and an excellent place to dive in with any of the major engines or elements of level creation.

In addition to all the general and engine-specific level design tutorials, there's a pretty solid collection of tutorials for Maya, texturing, and some other elements of environment art.

Current-Gen Knife Tutorial by Joe Harford

Splash screen from Harford's new tutorial

Tracker Knife tutorial playlist
Joe Harford has released a great modeling tutorial for creating a knife game asset, from high-poly modeling to final asset to texturing. It's a good hour and a half of instruction, and he does a great job covering everything a new modeler might want to know and the logic behind why he chooses to go about many things the way he does.

He does his modeling in Max, but it's not an introduction to the software by any means- while some of the terminology varies slightly I never saw him pause to explain a specific feature. So if you're just looking for an excellent introductory tutorial on current-gen modeling technique and asset creation, this is a great series to watch.

Digital Tutors Free Content

Sample of Digital Tutors free tutorials

Free complete tutorials
Digital Tutors website
Digital Tutors has a massive archive tutorials, which in my experience are very high-quality and thorough. Amongst these are a huge number of free introductory (and not so introductory) tutorials for various software packages on their website, including many common game art packages such as Maya, Max and Zbrush. Their subscription tutorials also often have the first 2-10 segments for free, so if you're looking for some particular tidbit of information on a program you may be able to find it in there as well.

(P.S. I'm sorry for the long pause in updates! I've been working on some large chunks of site content, and GDC time is always pretty crazy.)