Develop Conference is on in Brighton next week, the UK's answer to GDC and a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting bash to boot. Here's our pick of the sessions.

The first conference keynote is from Realtime Worlds' Dave Jones, in which he'll be talking about making games purely designed for online. Funnily enough, he's making some little MMOG called APB at the moment, so expect to hear a little about that. Meanwhile, APB's character art team lead, Jimmy O'Ready, will be explaining how he has created its sharply designed and customisable characters to simultaneously appeal to the very different South Korean and US markets.

Sticking with the avatar theme, Rare art director Stephen Mcfarlane and head of animation Louise Ridgeway will be talking about how they designed Xbox 360's Avatars and the collaborative role the studio took in the development of NXE.

Media Molecule's Kareem Ettourney and Mark Healey will talk about how they came up with LittleBigPlanet's eclectic art style, while audio designer Kenneth Young will speak about the use of realtime audio manipulation in games.

And while we're on audio, consider Guerrilla Games sound director Mario Lavin's talk on the technology behind Killzone 2's superlative sound effects, whose timbre is modulated by the size, shape and materials of the environments you're in.

Sony's keynote on cutting edge technologies for PS3 will hopefully bring some more details on the motion control tech Sony revealed at E3, as well as descriptions of advanced graphic techniques some forthcoming PS3 and PSP titles are using.

Look out, too, for David Perry, who will be speaking about his intriguing new browser-based game streaming service, Gaikai for the first time since he revealed it on his website last week.

Jenova Chen will describe the process of making Flow and Flower, and also be taking the stage with Parappa's Masaya Matsuura to play each other's games and talk about the gaming art house.

Dave Jones will join Frontier's David Braben to play their two open world-defining games - Elite and Grand Theft Auto - and discuss how they were made and their legacies. Silicon Knights founder Denis Dyack will argue that videogames should be recognised as the "eighth art".

Most importantly, though, don't miss the Edge Panel, in which Edge Online editor Alex Wiltshire will discuss the missing links between videogames and architecture with Half-Life 2 art director, Viktor Antonov, features editor of The Architect's Journal, Rory Olcayto, and Rob Watkins, artist at Lionhead Studios.

There's a lot more besides - take a look at the full session list. And if you can't make it to the seaside, Edge will be there to provide coverage from the conference. Look out for that on Wednesday and Thursday next week.