1st Gamedev Meetup of Southern Santa Catarina
#indie game #game development #meetup

After I released my first game (as I have described HERE) I was really excited about the idea of studying Game Development, that’s when I first thought of promoting a Gamedev meetup. I knew I was going to leave the country in a couple of months, so I had a really short schedule to come up with the venue, the talks and most important, the participants.

Me starting the meetup :)

I would most likely fail if I attempted to organize the whole thing on my own, that’s when I reached out to Wilkinson Darolt for help. I didn’t know him at the time, but he was the organizer of the Game Jam that I developed Imprima for and the Co-Founder of Jamtastic so I assumed he would probably be as much excited as I was.

Let Wilkinson's knowledge be illustrated by this profile pic.

Besides the passion for game development, the fact that there were no meetups about it in the region was a key motivator for us. We were starting something new, we were compelled to make it nothing less than an awesome experience for both participants and speakers. By that time we had approximately 3 weeks until the end of the year, people were going to enter their vacations, travel and become unavailable, we were clearly running out of time.

Special thanks here to all the people at Resultados Digitais that hosted the event and embraced this challenge with us. The venue being the RD Lounge was great, an always-growing tech company at the capital of Santa Catarina was getting involved. That would help us attract the high quality speakers we were looking for, and that was the second step.

All of us at the RD Lounge.

Even though the time was running out we decided to open a Call for Talks “if we want to be taken seriously, we have to at least look serious” and a Call for Talks looks pretty serious to me. We announced the Call for Talks, emailed the invitation to a couple of people that we wanted to submit their presentations and we got ourselves 3 speakers, each one with a 30 minute talk.

The event schedule was the following:

2:30 PM - Gamejam: the good, the bad and the ugly
by Gabriel Pule

Gabriel Pule blowing our minds.

10 minute break

3:10 PM - A Jornada do Artista (The Journey of the Artist)
By Henrique Machado

Henrique Machado blowing our minds.

Coffee break!

4:00 PM - Uso de cores na ambientação de jogos - análise do game Policenauts de Hideo Kojima (The Usage of Colors When Building a Game Atmosphere - Analisys of Policenauts a Hideo Kojima Game)
by Douglas d’Aquino Valente

Douglas d'Aquino Valente blowing our minds.

That was it, we had figured it all out: the event would take place at the RD Lounge and the 3 speakers would give all the participants their perspective on different aspects of game development. Wait! The participants! We still had to fill that room with people!

That’s when things got even better, we reached out to Juliano Cristian the voice of Amazon Lumberyard in Santa Catarina, he got really excited with the idea and wanted to help us to make it happen. We published the event in the Meetup platform so everyone in the Game Tech - Amazon Lumberyard - Sul Brasil community was aware that the event was happening next week.

Juliano Cristian blowing our minds with the power of Amazon Lumberyard.

It was a success. About 20 people were there to both contribute and learn, it was an amazing experience. I really hope there are more meetups to come. Thanks to the infrastructure provided by Resultados Digitais, we were able to record the all the talks. You can check them all out in the video below.