The September OGDA meeting from this past Saturday (9/17/2011) proved a couple of interesting theories. First, despite the Husker game that was still being played when the meeting started, we had more people attending than we have had in a while. This proves that the Venn diagram of “football fans” and “game developers” looks somewhat like the Mastercard logo. Second, because we were in a different — and smaller — location this month, we were simply destined to attract more people! The final count was close to 20, I believe.

Photo of the attendees at the Sep 2011 meeting

We also had a number of new people this week who found out about the group and meetings from the web site. It turns out that having a live site with real information on it pays off! We are hoping that this trend continues!

The topics this month bounced around (as usual). Initially we talked about making sure that people were going out to the forums and subscribing to this blog. Interestingly, some of the regulars didn’t even know that we had (finally) put the site up simply because I didn’t have their emails… which is a testament to why we need the site in the first place.

Small room, big group!

Ryan Versaw told us a bit about his trip to the Microsoft Build conference where he learned about some interesting news surrounding Visual Studio and other issues that affect game devs. He also passed around the free Windows 8 tablet that he scored while he was out there. Unfortunately, I believe it will require a bit of cleaning and servicing due to people salivating on it!

We also had some fun tossing around some game ideas as a group. It’s amazing how design can flow when you have a bunch of people in the room. Check the forums for potential ongoing discussion about the main game idea we had fun with! We would like to put together a group project for the new people to work on together so that people can get their hands dirty (in a computer geek sort of way). We are soliciting game ideas in the forums.

For future meetings, we had a discussion about having guest lecturers from the industry via Skype. I will be trying to set that up with some of my colleagues. Look for announcements here!

Given the new school year, the discussion of visiting various programming, art, and game dev classes came up in order to troll for new members. Look for that in the coming weeks. If you would like to be a part of the group going to visit these classes, say so on the forums.

Anyway, the mood of the meeting was positive. The addition of the web site, blog, forums, and a few new people seems to have spurred some enthusiasm. Many of us are quite sure that something great will come out of it!