Zack Parrish, Summer ’14 Game Jam, Hearthstone – August 10th, 2014 Meetup

Meetings, Presentations

Zack Parrish Video Game Composer

Our next meetup will be led by guest speaker Zack Parrish, a video game music composer with a strong focus on producing music for independent video games.  Long time members will know his work from XBLIG games such as Antipole and Cute Things Dying Violently as well as the Indie Games Uprising.   Recently he worked on the soundtrack for Valdis Story: Abyssal City and won an Outstanding Contribution – Independent Composer award by the Annual Game Music Awards 2013.  Come with your questions on creating music for videos games and working with a professional composer.  You can check out Zack’s work on Soundcloud and Bandcamp.

Knoxville Hearthstone Group

A while back I announced a Hearthstone Open tournament and we’ve now held a second and plan to hold them monthly.  If you are interested in  announcements of future tournaments or to just hang out with some local Hearthstone players check out the KnoxHS facebook group.  Unless it’s some really big news, there won’t be anymore Hearthstone announcements to this list.

Summer ’14 Game Jam – August 22nd – 25th, 2014

We will again take part in the game jam this month.  If you’ve been to a jam in the past, it will be very similar.  Some Notes:

Your game does not need to be complex and you don’t need to spend every hour of the jam devoted to making the game.  Simple is better, and seeing friends and family is a good break to keep you fresh.  The goal is to finish, and the reward is having completed a game!  You can enter solo or as a team and parents, this is a great activity to do together with your kids.

We will meet Friday August 22nd @7PM at the Technology Cooperative – The game jam officially kicks off at 9PM when the game theme is announced.  This will be a good time for any last minute questions on the jam, software, or process you have for making your game.

From Friday until Sunday work on your game.  We won’t be keeping the Techco open the whole weekend for the jam (and there is a group that will be using the space Saturday morning).

We will meet again Sunday August 24th @7PM at the Technology Cooperative – The game jam “compo” ends at 9PM on Sunday, and the “jam” at 9PM on Monday.  Your game must be submitted by then, so if you need to skip / come late to finish your game, by all means do.  The game jam servers are notorious for being overloaded in the last moments so do not wait too long to submit your game.  We’ll meetup to share our games, war stories of success and failure, and check out other entries.

What you should do before the jam:

  • Read over the rules of the game jam and decide if you’ll be doing the “compo” or “jam” version.
  • Get your development system ready to go – figure out what software you’ll be using and make sure it’s ready to go.
    A list of common tools others have used in game jam is listed on the Tools page, and links from previous meetups can be found on our site.
  • Make an account on the game jam website
  • The week leading up to the Jam, check the game jam site daily to vote on topics
  • It’s common to live stream your game development – if you plan to do this then:
    • Setup a Twitch.tv account
    • Install Open Broadcaster Software – a free, open source app for live streaming
    • Test out Twitch and OBS (don’t wait to the jam to start learning about live streaming!)
  • It’s also common to make a timelapse video of your development, and there are some tools to help with this too.  Again, test this out on your system before the jam beings.