Good May Meeting!

Hey folks,

I was glad to see such a great turnout at the meeting last week! I think that we have a nucleus of one – or even many – good things. Next time I would like us to organize some projects that we can work on as a team to “build our chops” for those people who are new to the industry.

For those of you who have not done so, please send me your name, any links to companies or portfolios you have, and a quick list of your skill set that you think is relevant to the group. With the group getting bigger, it probably wouldn’t hurt to have a small photo of you. I can crop some of them out of the pictures we took the other night. I will post the information up on the members page so that everyone knows how to contact everyone else in case they need (or want to offer) assistance.

If you don’t have a Blogger account (or one that can be used as one), and would like to be able to contribute to the OGDA news feed, please create one. Let me know and I can approve you as an author.

As we spoke of, I’m going to register a new domain just for the group. I would like a bit of approval before I do so. “OGDA” is kind of obscure for a domain name so I figured “OmahaGameDev.org” would work. Thoughts?

Once we do that up nice, I will tap a few contacts over at the IGDA and get us official as a chapter. That tends to attract attention in its own right.

Not now, but one thing we may want to consider is having a small “dues” setup. I mean really small. Something that would cover stuff like the hosting. Also, once we have an official logo, putting together nifty stuff like shirts is no big deal. I did it for the AI Game Programmers Guild that I am a co-founder of.

Speaking of logos, I would be open to seeing what some of you artists could come up with. Can you find us something technical but that involves Omaha somehow? If we get more than one good one, we can put it to a vote of the members.

Anyway, we have scheduled our next meeting for June 13th if that is OK with the majority. Please see if you can arrange to be there.

Government Incentives

Texas is the latest state to try to lure industry folks to the state (and they already have plenty of studios down there). Once the OGDA is a little more established, we should approach the Nebraska Legislature… or even the Omaha City Council… and tell them that they are seriously falling behind on this.

Many new members for May 2 meeting!

I have been getting quite a few emails from new people who are going to be joining us for the May 2nd meeting. These are folks who have either found us through the web or were told about the group by a friend. From the looks of it, we are going to have at least twice if not three times as many people at this meeting than we have had even listed as members of the group before. It should make for a good group! (I hope Scooter's can hold us all!)

If you are a new member and you have a personal site that you would like to have listed on the OGDA members page, please email me the link.

New Meeting Date - 1 year later!

Ok folks, as we all know, we kinda let the OGDA slide. This should be an exciting time to get back together, however. There are a number of new members that have contacted me since the last meeting. Additionally, we are going to be inviting any and all of the members of the University of Nebraska Game Development Club (NDev) to join us as guests and potential members. We don't know how many that will entail, but they are an enthusiastic group!

The next meeting is scheduled for Saturday May 2nd, 2009 at 6PM. We will meet at Scooter's again due to the quiet atmosphere, cushy chairs and free wireless internet. For those of you who haven't joined us there before, you can find the address and map on this page.

Among the things to discuss are a potential small group project that will allow everyone to get involved to some extent or another. We can decide on the style and scope after we see who shows up at the meeting.

Additionally, there is a local paid project here in Omaha that I have been approached about. It is primarily a web-based flash game platform so there are some specialized skills necessary. However, there may also be work for simple, children's genre art and animation. If we can find a flash programmer -- either in the OGDA or externally, we can likely put together a small team to handle this project. Again, this is a paid gig!

Please take a moment to subscribe to the RSS feed. I will also be arranging it so that any OGDA member can post on this blog. Use it to announce your work, updates to a portfolio, etc. Anything you want the group and the world to know.

Speaking of the world, according to my Google Analytics stats, we do get people stumbling into the OGDA site looking for local game studios, programmers, and artists. If the right person comes looking, it may pay off for you to be associated with the OGDA!

April Meeting Reminder

Remember folks, we are getting together on the 19th at 7PM at Scooter's again. BTW, I got an RSVP of sorts from Michaela - she will be attending this time! I hope the rest of you have been looking for interested people to invite into the group. Remember, no experience necessary... just enthusiasm!

Also, please take the time to follow Jared's example and post a little intro about yourself.

Also, if you have ideas on things that you would like discussed, either create a new post on the Blog (email me if you don't know how... it's simple) or simply comment on this post.

See you all on the 19th!

Need something to work on

I got back from Chicago a few days ago for work, so I've been a little out of it. Anyway, I need to start working on something new, old, different, whatever, I'm losing direction in my game development. If you have anything you want to work on together, let me know. Otherwise I might ping our artists and see if they want to express some of there work through a game, or demo of something.

Another idea I've been working on is to get some developers to create reusable game components. The simple definition of a component is something reusable, and easily placed in an engine, or game logic. This idea is a little hard to explain to people over the Internet. My last group was focused on that, we have 50+ members, but only a few understood the purpose of the group. Everyone else wanted to work on complete games, and all of course failed. Maybe this is something we should take off line, and discuss in our next meeting, but I don't have a lot of patients, so I just wanted to bounce that idea to the rest of the group.

Example of a component: a project I was thinking of starting is a layer you could add between your engine, and the game logic that would read datasets that came from DB, XML, flat file, binary, ect, and parsed it for the logic to read. This would be useful sense all modern engines are either or will be data driven. The same can be done to art, models, and other assets.

Thoughts?

March Report & Tentative April Date

I have just posted the meeting report for March 8th. It sure was good to have more people there!

Also, I have penciled in April 19th for the next meeting. Unless anyone else has a better suggestion, we will keep it at Scooter's.