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posts tagged with: community

Arizona Indie Showcase

Arizona Indie Showcase
This past weekend the Phoenix Art Museum hosted the Arizona Indie Game Showcase along side the Art of Video Games exhibit. Offspring Fling was one of the games in the showcase, along with some other local indie games like Scale, Gravity Ghost, Aztez, and Growing. Offspring Fling is getting up there in age now for a video game, so it's not the most exciting game to demo, but I still had a lot of fun with it. There were a lot of super young kids playing the game which is a pretty unique experience!

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Special thanks to Game CoLab for the photos!

A surprising number of kids were able to make it through a lot of the demo levels, with only some of the harder execution based challenges stopping them. It's always fun to show the game to new people, but it's especially fun and terrifying to show to kids since they're never afraid to just tell you how they feel about your game.

I also had an NES controller hooked up to the game, so it was pretty funny to hand it off to a lot of kids who didn't even know what an NES was. I talked to some high schoolers about game development during the show as well, and one of them said they wanted to make games ever since they got their first console... an Xbox.

Local Game Dev Community Tips

Local Game Dev Community Tips
This past week IGDA Phoenix held another one of its monthly meetings. We had about 60 something people turn up for the meeting to check out a presentation from one of our local game developers, which is pretty awesome. I'm the co-chair of IGDA Phoenix along with Corey, so we are responsible for putting together each of these meetings.

Our meeting turn out is pretty impressive, especially when new people show up and they tell me that they had no idea that Phoenix even had a game development scene. We're one of the few IGDA chapters (from what I hear) that has consistent monthly meetings, and I believe that we've only actually missed 3 monthly meetings in the past 3 or 4 years that we've been running it.

Since we've been running this thing for a couple years now and it feels pretty successful, I thought it would be neato to share some tips that I think are important to maintaining an active community of any kind!