I’ve already made the post on the forums, but much is afoot after the month long hiatus of the GGDA/IGDA in Athens. So lets do this!

So this month is demo-reel, portfolio, resume review night. Sound like fun? This is your chance to present your stuff and talk about how awesome you are. If you’re interested in coming and doing a short show-n-tell, then getting a critique, reply to this thread so that I can include you in the schedule. If not you’ll just listen to folks like me talk about what you already know you should be doing but haven’t ponied up and done yet.

I’ve also set up the calendar for the whole next year! Can you believe that pro-active sh*t? Here is the low-down:

• 11/10/2009 – Your Resume, Portfolio, and the Game Industry Interview
• 12/08/2009 – Developing for the iPhone, The Case of Studio App: Hayden Kramer and Wesley Miller
• 01/29/2010 through 01/31/2010 – Global Game Jam 2, the Best Selling Sequel – NMI at UGA
• 02/09/2010 – The Game Pitch: 2 Strikes, 3 Balls, Bottom of the 9th
• 04/13/2010 – Post GDC Wrapup
• 05/11/2010 – Audio Production for Games: Chris Rickwood
• 06/08/2010 – Developing for the DS: Blue Heat Games
• 07/13/2010 – Making Something Unreal: Tripwire Interactive
• 08/10/2010 – Gaming for Good: Good Egg Studios

All meetings are at 6:30PM unless otherwise noted. All meetings will be at The Pub at Gameday unless otherwise noted.

Wish something or someone was on here? Have a venue you really wish was on the list? Help out the chapter by doing some networking and booking them for us!

You all know budgets SUCK this year at UGA. But, we have a chance to get UGA a free booth at SIEGE. If you are planning to go to SIEGE, make sure you put “Athens”, “UGA”, or “University of Georgia” as your “Company”. If you have a company you are affiliated with, put: “Company Name, Athens.”

It is my plan to showcase local game development work. That includes art, sound, engineering, design, etc. That means that the UGA booth will be a chance to demonstrate local talent in addition to what UGA is trying to build relating to games.

If we can get just 20 people to register with the above information, we get a free booth! Please reply to the forum thread if you register this way, so I can pester the SIEGE people once I believe we have enough registrants to warrant this.

Student Registration:
$45.00
or
GGDA Membership + SIEGE Registration:
$35.00 + $15.00

Thanks for your help.

OK folks! It is now official. The Athens Summer Game Jam, featuring Unity 3D has been scheduled. Put it on your calendars and clear the date. August 14 – 16th, 2009 at the New Media Institute in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.

This event will be a bit different from the Global Game Jam (GGJ), which was earlier this year. We’re putting some time limits on ourselves in the interest of keeping everyone fresh. The lab will be open the following hours:

• Friday, August 14 – 5PM – 10PM
• Saturday, August 15 – 10AM – 10PM
• Sunday, August 16 – 9AM – 1PM

This will NOT be a catered/sponsored event like the GGJ was. We have also settled on the use of the Unity 3D game engine for the event. This of course does not mean that you must make a 3D game. As was demonstrated at the most recent GGDA meeting here in Athens, you can just as easily create 2D games using the engine.

If you’re planning to attend, hop on over to the Athens GGDA Forums. Not a forum member? Then you should be coming to the GGDA meetings! I only add people as members if they’re willing to take time out of their busy lives to be part of our burgeoning developer community. If you really don’t care about the IGDA and GGDA but are desperate to jam, send me an email.

Also keep this in mind. If you can’t make this game jam, there will be others. Athens, UGA, and the NMI will be hosting the GGJ yet again in 2010. I’ll post more information about that as the time draws closer.

GGDA Event URL
Date: July 14, 2009
Time: 6:30PM
Place: The Pub at Gameday

This meeting of the Athens GGDA Chapter will focus on the upcoming Summer Game Jam. The Summer Game Jam is standardizing on the use of the Unity 3D game engine and several Athens game developers will be demonstrating how games can be quickly and easily prototyped using this engine. The presentation and subsequent discussion will focus on three primary areas:

1. Art and Unity 3D – This section of the presentation will be lead by Jared Jackson the art lead on an upcoming game project using Unity 3D and funded by the NIH. He will talk about the Unity Art Asset Pipeline.
2. Engineering and Unity 3D - B.J. Wimpey, a computer science graduate student at UGA has served as the engineering lead for the project mentioned above. He will demonstrate how Java Script and C# code can be incorporated into Unity 3D as well as how to create designer friendly objects in the engine.
3. Design and Unity 3D - Casey O’Donnell will lead this segment of the presentation focusing on how combined with teams of artists and engineers, designers can create compelling experiences using Unity 3D.

This meeting will provide attendees with a basic understanding of how Unity 3D functions as a game development platform and how to create 2D and 3D projects using the engine. This meeting will provide technical background for those people hoping to participate in the Summer Game Jam or simply interested in the Unity 3D engine.

Our 04/14/2009 Meeting was one of our best yet, with 20 members on hand to pick the brain of veteran media executive Al Meyers. The meeting started with Al Meyers TED video, which can be seen after the break along with the slides from the meeting. The conversation ranged across numerous topics associated with Al’s experiences from Gametap to his recent ReinventED efforts. The issue of diversity amongst game developers came up at one point as well, as all involved discussed some of those aspects of the videogame industry that tends to keep certain demographics away. The event also managed to bring in five new attendees in addition to the usual group of developers.

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Our speaker is:
Al Meyer, formerly a Turner Senior Strategy Executive, one of the founding members of Gametap, and now the CEO and Co-Founder of ReinventED Technologies. Al is also President of Saisei Consulting, which provides strategy and business development advisory services to digital media companies. Saisei’s objectives are to help early-stage and established digital media companies develop successful strategies within the United States and around the world. This includes: video games, virtual worlds, social networks, and other digital media applications. Al will begin by showing a video clip talking about his most recent ventures with ReinventED, but is interested in chatting about any of his previous work as well. In helping lead the video game strategy at Turner Broadcasting, Al spent a great deal of time working in Asia with online game publishers and developers, and became deeply immersed in the video game industry. As a strategist at Turner, Meyers was one of a team of senior executives that were responsible for identifying, evaluating and developing strategic business opportunities related to existing businesses and proposed ventures across the company’s domestic and international entertainment, animation, news and sports portfolio.

Remember, the meeting time will be at 6:30PM, Tuesday 04/14, The Pub at Gameday.

We’re back at The Pub at Gameday next week for a GGDA/IGDA Athens Chapter meeting. If you have yet to attend a GGDA meeting, The Pub at Gameday is located at: 251 West Clayton St, Athens, GA 30601. Why back at the pub? Because I’m hoping to have a guest speaker for us and though the NMI is conducive to working, they’re interested in chatting. If you have agenda items for the meeting, let me know at casey.odonnell@ggda.org.

The event will commence at 6:30PM, Tuesday, April 14.

I’ll post more info on our speaker once I have full confirmation.

Hey everyone. We’re having our first post-GGJ meeting! I’d like for us to talk about what the next steps for Ursula and Olly are. The meeting will take place in Room 412 of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Com. This is the New Media Institute Lab/Meeting room (you GGJers know it well). See you there!

The Athens Site for the Global Game Jam went off superbly. It was 48 hours of craziness. The majority of the event was captured on video, which you can watch in its near entirety from ustream.tv if you’re into that kind of thing. I don’t recommend it. The event was, as expected, 90% boring for viewers and likely 10% sheer terror/chaos. The game that was created was ultimately broken due to time and engineering limitations, but if you look more closely at what was developed, it is exceptional for 48 hours. “Escape from Ralph’s Seafooditorium with Ursula and Olly,” contains a significant amount of work that was just shy of playable. Even as it stands, things like automatic level loading, sound, music, and art are all exceptional. With a little time and love from the part of those involved, I have no doubt that we will see more of Ursula and Olly. I know that the developers are already intent on flushing out an actual version 1.0 of the game, a process I will certainly also participate in.

Over the next several weeks and months, those participants at the Athens GGJ plan to continue development, moving meetings from The Pub at Gameday to the New Media Institute at UGA, where they can continue development. In the mean time I need to get to updating the SVN repository so our start/end and new beginnings are marked. Design work continues over at the UGA Gamelab Wiki. Game on Jammers!

The next Athens Chapter GGDA Meeting will be 01/27/2009 at The Pub at Gameday at 6PM. For those that have not yet attended a meeting, The Pub at Gameday is located at: 251 West Clayton St, Athens, GA 30601.

The primary goal is to ensure that any late-comers interesting in the GGJ can get registered and into the loop. Any engineers interested in talking about engine stuff, I would like to do that this meeting as well. We can also do any last minute brainstorming we like. If you feel like you are ready to go and happy to show up at 4PM on Friday 01/30, then don’t feel like you have to be at this meeting. Of course you can have a beer with everyone that does show up.