The Game Developers Conference (GDC) kicked off in San Francisco this morning with a two day summit focused specifically on the iPhone. The summit gathers experts from the technical and business end of iPhone game development.

Tuesday’s focus is on the technical and design aspects of making games for the iPhone, with lectures discussing the creation of server software for multiplayer games for the iPhone; the importance of breeding social networks; a postmortem on Call of Duty: World at War Zombies; and the methods that Epic used to bring its Unreal Engine 3 game technology to the iPhone platform.

Day two turns the focus to business and marketing issues affecting iPhone developers, with lectures on how to keep games on top of the charts, a legal look at the contract Apple requires developers to agree to in order to develop for the platform; the risks and potential rewards of creating an original game rather than relying on licensing an existing franchise; and a look at the guerilla marketing tactics employed by one developer to create a best-selling iPhone game that originally appeared on Flash.

That’s not all, though. iPhone and iPod touch game vendors are exhibiting at GDC, and there’s also the Independent Games Festival (IGF) Mobile awards, which heavily focus this year on the iPhone.

If you’d like to check out the iPhone finalists in the IGF Mobile awards, you can visit a special section on the App Store.