[Event] Johannesburg Community Evening - 10 October 2017

edited in Events
This event happens monthly, is free to attend and anyone may speak at the meetup - just comment in the thread below to let us know!

Test games! Talk games! Make games!

When: 18:30 until around 21:30, Tuesday 10 October
Where: Microsoft Campus Bryanston, 3012 William Nicol Drive, Bryanston, Johannesburg. Auditorium 3

Content
- 6:30 - 7:00 Grab food elsewhere + bonding time
- Introductions
- Community News (5 min)

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- @Thelangfordian - Build Pipelines in Unity (15 min)

- AMA with Paul Hellier and Scott Susslin

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- Demo Slot 1 (10 min)

- Demo Slot 2 (10 min)
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- Playtest Pitchathon (if you're playtesting a game, we ask that you give a 30 second pitch to the room about what the game is, before we all break off and play things).

Bring your games and set them up inside the auditorium before and after the meetup!

Board game prototypes can and will be played so bring along your prototypes!

If you intend to attend, please indicate so on the Facebook event (Not mandatory, so don't worry if you don't have/use Facebook)

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If you are interested in giving a talk or demo for a meetup, drop a reply in the thread with what you'd like to do or send me a PM :)
Thanked by 1critic

Comments

  • Waiting for confirmation early next week, but I might be brining 2 Internationals by for an AMA style chat. I'll know more next week and can give details then :)
  • @AngryMoose sounds great :D
    Thanked by 1AngryMoose
  • Ok, so I can confirm that both Paul Hellier and Scott Susslin from NCSOFT West will be coming through for an informal AMA on Tuesday night.

    Scott is their Lead Server Engineer and Paul is their Head of Mobile Core Engineering, with a background of programming in the industry since 1987, including holding such posts as Director of Technology at both Disney and Atari.

    It will be very informal with no prepped agenda, and they'll sort of give you a background of their history in game dev and open the floor for any questions that attendees may have regarding any topic that they may be able to answer :)

    Hope to see you all there!
  • So for a change I can also bring someone cool :)

    Dr. Carolina Sedano is a senior researcher at the University of Eastern Finland as well as the founder of Ubium:
    http://www.ubium.net/site/index.php
    http://www.uef.fi/en/web/edtech/people/research-staff
    Her focus is on serious games, hypercontextualisation of games and immersive technologies.

    Prof. Marko Tukiainen is a professor in the school of computing in the University of Eastern Finland with a focus on technology in Education as a whole.
    https://www.uef.fi/web/edtech/people/faculty-appointed

    They are visiting as researchers here at the North West University and I figured it would be great for them to also see the developer community here in SA.

    See you all there tonight!
  • Just wanted to quickly apologize for dashing so quickly with Paul and Scott after the meetup ended last night. The AMA went on like an hour longer than I expected and we were late for dinner!

    If anyone has anything that they wanted to ask them in person afterwards, just send me an email / DM and I'll pass it along :)

    Big thanks to everyone there who made the AMA so engaging and interesting too! I hope it also showed some people that just because you work on banking backends it doesn't mean that you can't use those those skills specifically in the games industry!
    Thanked by 2critic Tuism
  • This was a great event, thanks to everyone that brought along their fascinating foreign contacts :)

    There was also a really interesting talk at the DevUG group (also MS but at 4:30) from some guys that built a hardware controller and used it to control Kerbal Space Program. I'd think the talk would be interesting for MGSA because I know there's interest in alternate controllers. Are there any objections to asking them to repeat the talk at next month's meetup?
    Thanked by 1Tuism
  • Cool controller tech is always damn fun, I really want to be able to make something in a fool-proof way, I made one way back in AMAZE 2013 or 2014 or something in a workshop and I have next to no idea how to make one right now. I'm ALL for FOOLPROOF! :D (Cos I'm a fool, duh)
    Thanked by 1mattbenic
  • To reiterate (yes, I just threw that amazing techie word in there to sound smart) the sentiments above, thank you so much to everyone for last night - the discussions were really interesting and my Finnish colleagues were really impressed at the level of conversation our local community has! They even brought up in today's workshop how happy they were to see that people are willing to build plugins and tools and share them so freely - It is a sign of a really healthy and collaborative group.

    Good show old beans!
    Thanked by 1mattbenic
  • I did a talk at the DevUG before this meetup and was really looking forward to coming to the meetup but there was a dinner thing afterwards.
    Hope to come to one of the future ones!
  • @roguecode I wondered what happened to you :) Looking forward to you visiting for another one of the meetups
  • edited
    This was an awesome meetup, having industry veterans there and the Q&A session was really great. Thanks @AngryMoose and @japiegreeff

    Thread related to talk as promised.
    Thanked by 2critic AngryMoose
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