Games and Learning

The clock is ticking… Developers have until April 7 to enter for a drawing to be allowed to purchase a $1,600 ticket.

If you have $1,600 (plus hotel costs) and a little bit of luck you could be headed to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco in June.

The conference allows 5,000 developers to gain insight into new versions of the Apple operating system – specifically its iOS and OS X. WWDC also promises more than 100 sessions and access to some 1,000 Apple technicians, App Store folks and other experts.

“Every year, the WWDC audience becomes more diverse, with developers from almost every discipline you can imagine and coming from every corner of the globe,” Mashable quoted Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, as saying. “We look forward to sharing with them our latest advances in iOS and OS X so they can create the next generation of great apps.”

There are a few elements of this year’s conference that may be of special interest to learning game developers, including a planned break-out session focused on Apps for Children, an App Store Lab that helps with marketing ideas as well as user interface and game design labs.

The labs, in particular, have received high ratings from past attendees. One wrote in a guide to first-timers last year, the labs are “unstructured, hands-on time with the people who write the frameworks and applications we use every day.”

The conference also plans sessions that may help developers working on particularly high-end games, with the WWDC site promising attendees will “Learn how to create apps that are 64-bit optimized, motion aware, power smart, and take advantage of the rich capabilities of iOS and OS X.”

The reasons to go may seem obvious – opportunity to scoop competition with apps that make special use of newer iOS features, a chance to sell Apple on the coolness of your product, probably some hip swag – but getting the chance to even shell out the $1,600 for a single, non-transferrable ticket is not that easy.

Here’s how you get the chance to buy a ticket. First sign up in the next five days here.

Then, well, we’ll let the WWDC run you through the drill:

• Be a member of a paid Apple Developer Program as of the announcement of WWDC (April 3, 2014 at 5:30 a.m. PDT), at the time of your ticket purchase, and for the duration of WWDC
• Submit your information to be included in the random selection process for the opportunity to buy a ticket
• Be randomly selected by Apple

If you’re not already a member of the developer program we will try to get you some information – the kind permitted under Apple’s disclosure rules when the event rolls around in June.