Announcing: Game Maker Party
If there's anything that helped me in my 20-year-long career in video game development, it's my luck in collaboration with other phenomenally talented developers. My recent foray into analogue game development has me feeling a bit lost. I don't have the same regular check-in that I get from peers at my day job. The openness of the game-dev communities on twitter and G+ is fantastic, but I found myself wanting that real-time group experience. So many times in digital game development, the core of my idea combines with another and together we build something amazing and lasting. Having a regular event that allows for that kind of mash-up culture and serendipity seems very nearly essential for creativity.
To that end, after some idle twitter chatting wherein I realized this is actually a Good Idea™, I'm creating Game Maker Party (website to be available soon at gmparty.com). It's a periodic analog-only game dev remote workshop and support system. Participants will join a video chat and talk about what they've been working on since the last Party and raise issues and concerns and half-ideas that might need some more brainpower. Very casual, very much a gathering of friends and peers. GMParty will also stream the game dev chats for people to watch live, for fans of the individual developers, or just people interested in behind-the-scenes, or breaking into game development.
Analog game devs interested in this should contact me either here or email or G+ (+AndyBerdan) or twitter (@andyberdan). Once I get a better idea of interest, we'll figure out timing and event size and duration.