Professional Game Development Development

Minnesota Mobile Game Developer Group

So after much discussion yesterday, I finally took initiative, and decided to make an idea a reality that I’ve had for a while now: starting a local meetup for mobile game developers. I set up a google group today, and spammed a bunch of local mailing lists I’m on, including our local IGDA chapter, Mobile Twin Cities, and the Cocoaheads of MN. My co-worker Breon, who is going to be a co-organizer, posted it over at the MN Android Developers Group, and the TC GTUG (Google Technology Users Group). I even have a pending event listing at tech.mn.

We’re obviously casting a wide net, so I hope everyone who might be interested in it gets to hear about it.

Game Camp

But a monthly user group isn’t the only thing we’ve got in the works! I recently stumbled onto the website for Game Camp, a bar camp style conference for game design. Here’s what the website says it’s about:

GameCamp gatherings are for the people who are building that world. It’s for the designers, coders, artists, writers, thinkers and, above all, the players who are making the 21st century the century of the game. GameCamp is about more than making games: it’s about playing them, thinking about them and how they affect our lives for good or for ill.

In the immortal words of Liz Lemon, “I want to go to there.”

We are in the VERY early stages of planning, but right now we’re
thinking this should happen in October of 2012 sometime.

National Game Development Month

And finally, there was one other game development community effort I discovered this week. I have no organizational stake in NaGaDeMo, (or National Game Development Month), but as a 3-time NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) alum, I know how powerful these shared experiences can be. And since I’m already working on a number of games, I don’t think it’ll be that great a stretch to start and finish a new one in the month of June.

I’ll definitely be posting more on at least some of these topics in the future. Here is the post about our first Mobile Gamedev Meetup next Tuesday, where you can find the eventbrite link and read about where and when exactly we’re going to be meeting.