Monthly Archives

March 2012

April Monthly Meeting featuring Andy Moore on Rapid Game Prototyping

By | General, Meetings, Presentations | No Comments

Apparently it involves massive quantities of energy drinks... and a soul full of rage!

This is a reminder of the monthly meeting for April taking place on this coming Monday evening. This month’s meeting features a talk by Andy Moore of Radial Games. From the Meetup description:

“Rapid prototyping, high-speed development, pivoting, and best of all… working examples of how I’ve executed a few dozen games since new years, experimented with new tech, and making some breakthrough design decisions. I’ll talk about the tools I use to deliver prototypes so quickly, from the IDE down to the project-management and collaboration tools. If you want to learn how to make things quicker, come on down and take a listen!”

As always, everyone is welcome to bring any projects along that they’ve been working on to share with the rest of the group, and there will be lots of discussion about local goings on in the Victoria game development community.

Details:

Monday, April 2nd

The Collard Room – Swans Hotel and Brewpub

506 Pandora Avenue, Victoria, BC

Doors open at 4:30pm. Talk should start at about 5:15.

RSVP via the Meetup event: Show & Tell @ Swans

Of Game Awards and Elected Boards

By | Chapter News, General, News | No Comments

And the award for the most subtle and least exploding awards show logo goes to...

The Canadian Videogame Awards Finalists have been announced. Along with the usual studio nominees like Ubisoft and EA, there are a number of indie developers who made the finals including:

Not only that, but an indie game is a finalist for the most awards: Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP by Capybara is a finalist in nine categories. The awards take place during Fan Expo Vancouver on Saturday, April 21st, 2012.

In other news, the results are back from the 2012 IGDA Board Election. The two vacancies on the IGDA Board of Directors will now be filled by Sheri Rubin and Ed Fries. You may remember Sheri from an Awesome Talk that she gave to our group back in October of last year. Congratulations to both Sheri and Ed!

Are We Kickstarting a New Era of Game Development?

By | General | No Comments

C'mon kid, this thing ain't gonna start itself!

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Kickstarter projects by well-known game developers on the interwebs lately. It began with Tim Schafer and his old-school “Double Fine Adventure” Kickstarter project which not only reached its funding goal in very little time, but surpassed it to record-setting levels. This got the attention of Brian Fargo of InExile Entertainment who decided to start a Kickstarter project of his own: the much requested sequel to Wasteland. Brian Fargo’s funding goals were a bit more ambitious than Schafer’s: he was aiming for $900,000 to Tim Schafer’s $400,000. Regardless, he soon attained that goal and left it behind. Last time I checked, they were at over $1.6 million in funding.

So what does this all mean? Both of these projects are ones that the game publishing companies had no interest in backing, most likely because the projects were determined to be too niche, with a limited audience, and therefore too risky to invest any money into. Kickstarter, and crowd-funding websites like it such as Indiegogo are providing an alternative to the traditional game publishing model. Game developers can now go directly to gamers to get the funding they need to make the game that both groups want to be made. As Brian Fargo and In-Exile noted on their Kickstarter page:

“This is a paradigm shift that is way bigger than Wasteland 2. This is the beginning of a new era in gaming where the developer gets to work directly with the fans to build the type of product that the fans want. No focus groups, no pitches to the marketing team, no trying to get an executive committee to group-think their way to a project green-light. Now we just have a developer with a creative idea that resonates and a group of dedicated fans who are willing to lay down their money to buy it.”

It’s an exciting time for indie developers. And it is made more exciting by the announcement of a new initiative: Kicking It Forward. Not content to rest on his laurels with the success of the Wasteland 2 campaign, Mr. Fargo has instead proposed that successful campaigns donate 5% of their profits back into the Kickstarter community to help fund other indie projects. Whether this initiative takes off or not remains to be seen, but as of this writing eleven projects have already adopted the idea and can be found listed on the new website: kickingitforward.org.

Mid-March Pub Social This Saturday

By | General, Meetings | No Comments

I'm not sure it's such a good idea to lead the lion to that tasty, tasty lamb.

Mid-March: half lion, half lamb. Would that be a liomb or a laon?

Anyway, this is a reminder of the Mid-Month Brewpub Social coming this Saturday. Come on out, be geeky, and talk games with the rest of the Victoria Game development community. Hope to see you there!

Note: Don’t worry if the meetup event is full, there should still be room for you. If not, grab a table in another part of the pub and start your own satellite Game Dev meeting! We’ll send delegates over to discuss strategic alliances.

When:

Saturday, March 17, 2012, 2:30 PM

Where:

350-B Bay Street

Victoria, BC

Phone: 250 380 0706

Website: http://www.moonunderwater.ca

RSVP:

Level Up meetup event