Reminders and Announcements:
Open Game Labs: The group hosts an Open Game Lab every Tuesday 5:30PM – 8PM and on the 3rd Sunday of the month 2PM – 5PM. These labs are unstructured time for anyone to come to the space, hang out and work on their game. If you are just starting out this is also a great time to come ask questions!
Next Game Jam – August 21st – 24th! The date of the next game jam has been set; mark your calendars!
Call for Topics! If you’ve been to a meetup you know that the group is very informal and you do not need a well timed and polished presentation. A presentation can simply be discussing a topic while showing a demo on a laptop. If you are interested in presenting or have a request for a topic you would like to see covered please contact Michael at michael.neel@gmail.com
Facebook and Twitter: You can also stay up to date with members of the group on Facebook. The group is closed, so you’ll need request access and it make take a day or two to get approved. If you don’t get approved in a few days, send me an email at the address above. There is also a twitter list maintained by Levi. For info on joining the twitter list, contact Levi @gatechgrad.
All this too much to keep up with? The Knox Game Design website has a calendar!
This Month’s Topic: Quest For Fun!
This month’s topic will be led by Mike giving his take on game design and understanding the player:
What is fun? What makes an activity exciting and enjoyable? Can fun be planned? Can you design fun the same way an architect designs a building? These are more than abstract thoughts, but but questions that kept me awake at night. As a game designer I want to know if I’m creating something fun long before the game is in beta test and years of development were wasted.
This session represents the years of research I spent answering the question, and the questions that followed. We will cover why people play games, expectations of the design, decoding feedback, and most importantly the preferences of the player and how they relate to our own.
Ultimately this is a talk about how to be a better developer through the lens of game design, so even if you are not interested in creating games you will come away enlightened!
Location and Time
The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative located at 13 Emory Place, Knoxville TN. Parking is available in front of the Technology Cooperative. We start at 2PM and open with some roundtable discussion and a Show ‘n Tell where everyone can show a bit of their in progress game, favorite tool, mechanic they love in another game, or anything they find helpful and want to share with the group.