Posted By John Bubriski, 10, February, 2015, in social
We started a meetup!
Last Tuesday (February 3rd, 2015) was the first meeting of the Worcester Indie Game Dev Meetup!
Why did we start a meetup?
Boston’s indie game development community is awesome. However, even though Jared and I both live in Massachusetts we’re over an hour away from Boston. With day jobs, family, and actually trying to make games, a 2 hour+ round trip starts to look less attractive.
We looked around the area, and while there are some tech groups, there isn’t anything focused specifically on indie game development. We figured there must be other’s in the area looking for a game development related meetup too. People say that if your community doesn’t exist (locally), make your own!
Take the easy way out/Get help
We are not going this alone at all. As we started to brainstorm about how we could start the meetup and where we would host it, we remembered that I (John) went to WPI, an engineering school in Worcester. WPI even has a Game Development Club so we reached out to them to see if they would be willing to band together with us to make something awesome.
The WPI GDC, specifically John Guerra, was great about joining with us to create the meetup by gathering their people together and hosting the meetup!
The first meeting
I’ll admit, we didn’t expect much from the first meeting. We didn’t know how many people from WPI were going to show up, and none of our friends were going to be able to make the first meeting. However, upon our (very) late arrival, there were about 20 students eagerly waiting to talk shop.
We didn’t have a format planned for the first meeting because we didn’t know what people really wanted. However, once we started people began throwing ideas around and we ended up doing a few things. Jared ended up talking about Impact JS, his 1GAM submission, and Rock Kickass. Then, a bunch of students got up and started demoing the work they had done (which was really amazing).
What’s next?
Early in the meeting we came up with a short list of people to contact that might want to join the group, or potentially talk about game development. We also brainstormed some ideas for future meetings: talks, lightning talks, demo nights, and more.
While we are just getting started, I have really high hopes that this meetup group will become the goto place for Worcester area game devs to come together and network, learn and grow! The meetup group is already up to 17 members!