At our next meetup we’ll talk about two simple yet powerful frameworks you can use to make games.  Both of these are great options for your first game, or useful as a rapid prototyping tool for experienced developers.

Levi D. Smith will share his knowledge and experience in Project Spark.  Project Spark is a “game maker video game” for Microsoft Windows 8.1 and Xbox One, with Xbox 360 support planned.  All game building is done while playing the game, and creations can be shared online.  Levi will demo Project Spark on an Xbox One.

Michael C. Neel will introduce the basics of App Inventor.   App Inventor for Android is an open-source web application originally provided by Google, and now maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  It uses a graphical interface and system of blocks, very similar to Scratch, which let’s users drag-and-drop to games and applications that run on Android devices.  Michael will demo App Inventor on an Android tablet.

Spring ’14 Game Jam – April 25th – 28th, 2014

We will again take part in the game jam this month.  We’ll do this very similar to the game jam in December.  Some notes:

Your game does not need to be complex and you don’t need to spend every hour of the jam devoted to making the game.  Simple is better, and seeing friends and family is a good break to keep you fresh.  The goal is to finish, and the reward is having completed a game!  You can enter solo or as a team and parents, this is a great activity to do together with your kids.

We will meet Friday April 25th @7PM at the Technology Cooperative – The game jam officially kicks off at 9PM when the game theme is announced.  This will be a good time for any last minute questions on the jam, software, or process you have for making your game.

From Friday until Sunday work on your game.  We won’t be keeping the Techco open the whole weekend for the jam (and there is a group that will be using the space Saturday morning).

We will meet again Sunday 27th @7PM at the Technology Cooperative – The game jam “compo” ends at 9PM on Sunday, and the “jam” at 9PM on Monday.  Your game must be submitted by then, so if you need to skip / come late to finish your game, by all means do.  The game jam servers are notorious for being overloaded in the last moments so do not wait too long to submit your game.  We’ll meetup to share our games, war stories of success and failure, and check out other entries.

What you should do before the jam:

• Read over the rules of the game jam and decide if you’ll be doing the “compo” or “jam” version.
• Get your development system ready to go – figure out what software you’ll be using and make sure it’s ready to go.
  A list of common tools others have used in the game jam is listed on the Tools page, and links from previous meetups can be found on our site.
• Make an account on the game jam website
• The week leading up to the Jam, check the game jam site daily to vote on topics
• It’s common to live stream your game development – if you plan to do this then:
  • Setup a Twitch.tv account
  • Install Open Broadcaster Software – a free, open source app for live streaming
  • Test out Twitch and OBS (don’t wait to the jam to start learning about live streaming!)
• It’s also common to make a timelapse video of your development, and there are some tools to help with this too.  Again, test this out on your system before the jam beings.

Important News! The Technology Cooperative has moved – read below for details!

Some cool news from members this month:

• Chaosoft has released EvilQuest on Steam
• Levi D. Smith completed the game Cyber Ninja for the Mini LD 49 and created a timelapse video of the development.

This month’s topic will be led by Dylan Wolf of FuncWorks, and cover his experience using the in-app purchase framework OpenIAB in Unity:

Setting up in-app payments in Unity can be confusing if you’re new to mobile app stores, even with a cross-platform, open-source plugin like OpenIAB. We’ll cover the basic concepts of in-app payments on Android and iOS, an example of configuring apps and products in an app store, and setting up OpenIAB in Unity.

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative located at 13 Emory Place, Knoxville TN.  Parking is available in front of the Technology Cooperative.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with a Show ‘n 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.

Next month our normal meetup will be replaced by the game jam, scheduled for the weekend of April 25th – 28th.  More details to come!

Our next meetup will be a roundtable discussion on creating audio (sound and music) for video games and also touch on video production for game trailers.

Levi D. Smith will share his knowledge and experience in Garage Band, PxTone, Bxfr, and Audacity.  Michael C. Neel will cover Reaper, FL Studio, Levelator, Audacity, and also bring some gear to show and discuss from microphones to video capture hardware.

Everyone is encouraged to participate and if there is a tool or device you find helpful please bring it or bring it up in the discussion!

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative located in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with a Show ‘n 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.

The first meetup of the year will be lead by Michael C. Neel covering extending Unity with custom editors and file format support:

Over the holiday break I worked on a TMX map importer for Unity, called UTiled.  This session will cover the basics of extending Unity to add support for a custom file format, creating specialized editors for native and custom components, and some general tips on dealing with serialization issues in Unity.

I’ll also go into UTiled and the basics of rendering a tile map in Unity, both as a collection of 2D sprites and as a 3D mesh, and the pros / cons of each approach.

UTiled is available as an open source project, and can be downloaded from the Bitbucket UTiled Project page.  There isn’t much documentation yet, but Mike and Dylan created an overview video on using UTiled with Unity:

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative located in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with a Show ‘n 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.

Next Meetup Dylan Wolf will give us a tour of how he’s working with Unity for 2D games:

We’ll cover the 2D Toolkit and 2D Platform Controller from the Unity Asset Store, look at some demos, and see how they can be combined to create a side-scrolling platformer.

(Rephrase this however you need to fit it in the post.)

Admin Note: Let this be a notice to all future speakers I’m probably not going to rephrase your abstract and publish it as is! =)

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative located in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with a Show ‘n 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.

Special Location Note: The meetup make take place in suite 105 instead of the normal suite (same building).  The Technology Cooperative is growing into a bigger spot but the move may not be completed by Sunday.  If we are in the new spot there will be a note on the door to direct you to the new location.

At our next meetup, Adam Byram will bring an Oculus Rift dev kit:

The Oculus Rift is an upcoming virtual reality headset designed to deliver immersive 3D gaming experiences to the mass market.  The best way to get a feel for what this means to the future of gaming is to experience it first hand.  At this month’s meeting, we’ll have an Oculus Rift Dev Kit loaded up with some of the popular tech demos and games for attendees to try.  We’ll also take a brief look at the Oculus SDK, in particular, the drop in components for Unity 4 Pro integration.

If you want to bring your own project made with the Rift’s SDK to try out you can download the SDK from developer.oculusvr.com.  Adam has passed on that the SDK requires a Unity Pro 4.2+ license due to the use of external DLLs.

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative located in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with a Show ‘n 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.

This month Josh Ferguson will lead a tour of Sculprtis, a free digital sculpting tool by the makers of ZBrush.

Sculptris provides an excellent gateway into the exciting world of 3D. It’s features are easy to learn, even for someone with no experience in digital art, yet robust enough for creating base models that can then be refined in other applications, such as ZBrush, 3D Studio Max, or Blender.

There will be 2 parts to the demo – first, how to use Sculptris in a general sense for sculpting and painting in 3D. Second, how to incorporate Sculptris into a game art pipeline by using it to create hi-poly models for the generation of Normal Bump maps and Ambient Occlusion textures.

Josh Ferguson is the lead artist of local indie game studio Chaosoft Games and an instructor in graphic design, game design, and 3D animation.

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative locating in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with a Show ‘n 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.

Our next meetup will cover various things you can do with Unity including working with Unity and Blender, using the 2D Toolkit to create 2D games with Unity, and scratching the surface of the state based “Mecanim” animation system.  We’ll also show introduction to Unity itself including how to build you game for multiple platforms, work with source control, and basic project structure.  The format will be an open discussion led by local game developers Levi D. Smith, Dylan Wolf, and Michael C. Neel so be sure to bring your questions and we’ll do our best to answer them!

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative locating in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with a Show ‘n 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.

Special XNA Meetup July 12th at 8PM

CodeStock is this weekend and XNA MVP Chris Gardner will be in town to join us for an evening of remembering the framework we love that was brutally struck down in it’s youth by a faceless, evil, greedy, mega-corporation who shall remain nameless.  Expect an evening of swapping XNA and XBLIG stories, how many of us started making games because of XNA, and complaining that MonoGame still doesn’t have a content pipeline replacement.

This meetup will also be held at the Technology Cooperative locating in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.

Our next meetup will be lead by local artist Justin A Dickerman of Ashers Art:

2D art with Photoshop, a digital painting overview

In this presentation we will be learning about Photoshops painting tools, and basics of digital painting. My process for taking an initial concept to illustration, and a few tips and tricks.

Justin is an alumni of the Art Institute, and has worked in the games industry before residing to freelance work as a digital artist.

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative locating in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with a Show ‘n 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.

If you would like email reminders of the meetups, please sign up for the mailing list on the homepage sidebar.

The topic for our next meetup will be using Kickstarter to fund your game presented by Michael C. Neel:

Since the launch of Kickstarter, many projects have raised millions of dollars in funding. Beneath the headlines though lives a vibrant community of smaller projects getting the funds they need every day. Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing approach has unlocked a source of crowdfunding that anyone can use. Over 40,000 projects have been funded and the project success rate is above 40%. The question isn’t “can” I raise money on Kickstarter, but “how.”

Since February of 2011 I have been watching, tracking, and supporting projects on Kickstarter. I’ve noticed patterns in both successful and unsuccessful projects. In this session we’ll look at the lessons to be learned from previous projects, and cover:

• Figuring out if a project is a good Kickstarter fit
• Creating a welcoming pitch video
• Choosing the right pledge levels and rewards
• Raising awareness of your project
• A deeper look at Kickstarter statistics

About Michael C. Neel

Michael is a passionate developer who has written code for web, desktop, mobile, and games. With his co-founders at FuncWorks he hosts GameMarx, a weekly podcast for indie and hobby level game developers and operates XboxIndies.com – a central source for XBLIG news and reviews from more than 10 gaming websites and a full database of all XBLIG games. FuncWorks is currently working on games targeting the Xbox and PC platforms.

Michael is a regular speaker at developer conferences and has been awarded Microsoft MVP twice. He is the founder of CodeStock, an annual developers conference in Knoxville,TN and a co-founder of the Technology Cooperative to create a technology-focused community providing technology access and awareness to all. Proud father of three amazing daughters, Rachel, Hannah, and Jasmine. Loving husband to Cicelie who inflates and pops his ego as necessary.  You can reach Michael through his person blog at ViNull.com or on twitter as @ViNull.