Our next meeting will be held Sunday, Sept 16th from 2-5PM at the Technology Cooperative.

The topic this month is a retrospective on the release of Resistor:

This presentation will cover the lessons learned from Levi Smith after publishing his first XBox Live Indie game.  Learn the pitfalls to avoid and how to more effectively market a game launch using press reviews and social media.  An analysis and discussion of launch sales data will provide insight into the successes and failures of the game launch.

Levi resides in the Knoxville, Tennessee area, where he develops games in his spare time.  He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Tennessee.

We will also try out a small change to our meeting format.  This month we will begin with a “Show and 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.  Its not required to bring something to Show and Tell, but it’s a great way to share with the group!

Last bit of news, EvilQuest is on Greenlight!  Greenlight is Valve’s new community site for helping indie games release on steam.  If a game gets enough fan support it will be considered for release.  Here’s wishing best of luck to one of Knoxville’s own game studios Chaosoft!

For our next meeting the topic will be “What is Fun” presented by Michael C. Neel.  We will be back to normal this month and have an open discussion / lab time after the presentation.

Related news: Michael will also be giving a talk this Friday on Fundraising with Kickstarter.  The talk is not specific to video game Kickstarters, but Michael has been spending month watching video game projects on Kickstarter and will have some advice if there is interest.  If you are planning on attending, please RSVP here.

Sunday at the Technology Cooperative will be a Game Programming with Python session.  This is a introductory level group, no prior programing experience required.  The group will focus on basics and lead to running the games on a Raspberry PI.  Open to all, but if you know someone (of any age) that has been looking at getting started writing games this is the group for them.

What is Fun?

As game designers we spend a great deal of effort laying out levels, creating a consistent art style, and telling a story.  As game developers we focus on smooth gameplay, intuitive controls, and building tools.  We rely on play testing to tell us if the game is fun or not.  While play testing is essential, wouldn’t it be easier if we could design and develop fun?

Before we can create fun, we must understand what fun is.  What are the emotions experienced when the player has fun?  Why is something frustrating to one person fun to someone else?  Most importantly, can we as game designers and developers create fun on command?

This talk will look into the reasons we play games, and how we experience fun.  We will break down the components to fun and see how to use them in our game designs.  Finally, we will look at how players express fun, common complaints in games, and ways to address them.

Our next meeting will be Sunday May 20th at 2PM at the Technology Cooperative.

The topic will be an intro to UDK by Josh Ferguson:

“Intro to Unreal Development Kit (UDK) by Josh Ferguson, local game developer and game design instructor.  Overview of industry-leading game development software UDK covering topics including a look at the toolset, basic level design, implementing custom assets, and an intro to UnrealScript.”

Information, licencing, and download details on UDK can be found at udk.com