Next Meetup Dylan Wolf will give us a tour of how he’s working with Unity for 2D games:

We’ll cover the 2D Toolkit and 2D Platform Controller from the Unity Asset Store, look at some demos, and see how they can be combined to create a side-scrolling platformer.

(Rephrase this however you need to fit it in the post.)

Admin Note: Let this be a notice to all future speakers I’m probably not going to rephrase your abstract and publish it as is! =)

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative located in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with 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.

Special Location Note: The meetup make take place in suite 105 instead of the normal suite (same building).  The Technology Cooperative is growing into a bigger spot but the move may not be completed by Sunday.  If we are in the new spot there will be a note on the door to direct you to the new location.

At our next meetup, Adam Byram will bring an Oculus Rift dev kit:

The Oculus Rift is an upcoming virtual reality headset designed to deliver immersive 3D gaming experiences to the mass market.  The best way to get a feel for what this means to the future of gaming is to experience it first hand.  At this month’s meeting, we’ll have an Oculus Rift Dev Kit loaded up with some of the popular tech demos and games for attendees to try.  We’ll also take a brief look at the Oculus SDK, in particular, the drop in components for Unity 4 Pro integration.

If you want to bring your own project made with the Rift’s SDK to try out you can download the SDK from developer.oculusvr.com.  Adam has passed on that the SDK requires a Unity Pro 4.2+ license due to the use of external DLLs.

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative located in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with 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.

This month Josh Ferguson will lead a tour of Sculprtis, a free digital sculpting tool by the makers of ZBrush.

Sculptris provides an excellent gateway into the exciting world of 3D. It’s features are easy to learn, even for someone with no experience in digital art, yet robust enough for creating base models that can then be refined in other applications, such as ZBrush, 3D Studio Max, or Blender.

There will be 2 parts to the demo – first, how to use Sculptris in a general sense for sculpting and painting in 3D. Second, how to incorporate Sculptris into a game art pipeline by using it to create hi-poly models for the generation of Normal Bump maps and Ambient Occlusion textures.

Josh Ferguson is the lead artist of local indie game studio Chaosoft Games and an instructor in graphic design, game design, and 3D animation.

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative locating in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with 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.

Our next meetup will cover various things you can do with Unity including working with Unity and Blender, using the 2D Toolkit to create 2D games with Unity, and scratching the surface of the state based “Mecanim” animation system.  We’ll also show introduction to Unity itself including how to build you game for multiple platforms, work with source control, and basic project structure.  The format will be an open discussion led by local game developers Levi D. Smith, Dylan Wolf, and Michael C. Neel so be sure to bring your questions and we’ll do our best to answer them!

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative locating in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with 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.

Special XNA Meetup July 12th at 8PM

CodeStock is this weekend and XNA MVP Chris Gardner will be in town to join us for an evening of remembering the framework we love that was brutally struck down in it’s youth by a faceless, evil, greedy, mega-corporation who shall remain nameless.  Expect an evening of swapping XNA and XBLIG stories, how many of us started making games because of XNA, and complaining that MonoGame still doesn’t have a content pipeline replacement.

This meetup will also be held at the Technology Cooperative locating in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.

Our next meetup will be lead by local artist Justin A Dickerman of Ashers Art:

2D art with Photoshop, a digital painting overview

In this presentation we will be learning about Photoshops painting tools, and basics of digital painting. My process for taking an initial concept to illustration, and a few tips and tricks.

Justin is an alumni of the Art Institute, and has worked in the games industry before residing to freelance work as a digital artist.

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative locating in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with 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.

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