Just realize there was a working link on the construction page!
We may be close enough to travel there on the weekends, but not sure where you are in Connecticut. There is a small game guild in NJ that meets on Saturdays but it is really struggling and has not yet found a steady place to meet. They meet at a clubhouse at a apartment complex but are constantly kicked out for unexpected parties that they did not know about. lol Until things change, I do not suggest driving all the way here. I am trying to help, but feel like I might step on toes, especially since some of them are young folks.
You can send me a PM with your group meeting times and place. I could try. If nothing else, my son lives in Connecticut and might be interested!
Thanks and very nice to meet you! Hope that Unite is on the east coast next year so I can meet other people in the area.
Edit: You are about 2 hours from us so might be a bit far but maybe we can make it out there sometime. Still getting used to driving in the snow again so might be a while. Thank you so much for the invite.
I’m from Croatia, and im 3D character artist, not developing games by myself (yet), instead working for others as freelancer… It’s small country, but there are few games and studios from here that reached global fame. Latest such game is Scum made by Gamepires studio. Just released two months ago or so. It was top selling game on Steam in first few days after release… It’s still in alpha, but it got more then one million sales in first two weeks or so… Then there is our veteran studio Croteam, with their Serious Sam classics and Talos Principle. Then there is mobile game development studio called Nanobit… Other then those big shots, there are quite a few indies. I don’t know exact numbers. But many of them are gathering at one of biggest game convention events in Europe “Reboot infogamer” which is hosted in Croatia every year. Homepage - Reboot InfoGamer
Given the small population of this country and many bureaucratic obstacles (worst of which is non exsistance of tax agreement with United States so you get taxed double unless you open company in US or some other country which have agreement), our game dev scene is much better then one could expect.
Oh the site is under construction but the links to our social media accounts are still there in the meantime. Just click on the Twitter icon to find our Twitter Info for our next meetup should be in the currently pinned Tweet.
And yeah it sounds like that meetup wouldn’t be worth the 1-2 hour drive for me. If you wanna help them, I would recommend talking to public libraries about meeting spaces. That’s what we did and the people we talked to were very receptive to the idea of a game development meetup happening at their library. It could provide your group with a consistent meeting space and give them more visibility.
I also hope that Unite comes back to the east coast. When it was in Boston, that was when I was first getting into game development and it was the first time I heard of the event, so I assumed it was always in Boston. I missed my chance to go
Tiny town in Missouri, USA. I know of one other person into game dev somewhat and that is because I inspired him to get into it. He uses GMS. Used to talk a young fella that worked at the local deli a year or so ago and it came up at one point that he is interested in learning to make games and I asked what are you thinking of using, Unity? He said yeah how did you know?! Ha ha. He left many months later and just ran into him in town a few months ago. He got a much better job more money etc and didn’t seem as interested in getting into game dev now. Lol
Other than those two I know nobody into it. I think here people generally see such things as foolishness “get a real job” kind of thing. Maybe not but I think most would see it more for something teens would do. Just my impression but this is a small sort of country town people make their livings with their hands mainly doing “real work”.
Now about 100 miles away over in Saint Louis there are several game companies and probably some meetups and such. I used to think about trying to start some local game dev meetings thing but I don’t have time for that. Besides I can come on here and other forums and ramble and listen to other people ramble about game dev.
I’m from Northern Saskatchewan, Canada. As far as I know, there are not many dev houses in my home province, but someone’s gotta start the ball rolling, right!
Thanks!
Don Cathcart
Lead Designer/Programmer/Bottle Washer
Dumb Bunny! Studios
Endnight Games is from Canada. I wouldn’t call those folks an indie studio per se, but their team was of only four people when they developed The Forest (with Unity). A very good game they made, I might add.
Just in case it isn’t clear. In my post, Hollywood North refers to Vancouver. At least that’s a term we use because of all the film production occurring up here.
I’m originally from Poland where game dev is becoming more promising with even government funding for home grown game dev studios like CD-PROJEKT RED.
For about 10 years now I’ve been living in the county of Buckinghamshire, England, not far from London and Oxford. There seem to be a lot of opportunities around here. There are quite a few offices of the big guys like EA, Rockstar, Ubisoft or Square Enix, but there are also some home grown big names like Codemasters, Eidos and Criterion to name a few
So definitely not a bad place to be for game development, especially in the South East which seems to have quite a few events you can attend to as well as a multitude of small to medium game studios hiring developers around London/Oxford.
I’m from Vietnam. There’re some indie dev here, but it seem everyone just exclusively make casual mobile game trying to copy flappy bird success or whatever. It pretty sad.
There also a few big corporation that only do p2w mmorpg, but it seem their gaming development department is dead now, and they just publish foreign games instead.
Feel free to pm me if you have question about Hanoi, place to eat or whatever. Though I wouldn’t recommend the city for tourist, unless you like traditional stuff like old temple or looking at revolution leader corpse. Ho Chi Minh city have a lot more entertainment stuff.
What make you think so? In my experience, in government and government backed company, no one are paid enough to care, including the managers. For private company, they often believe the Japanese idea of more OT == more work done, so I guess there that.
Here in Alaska, there are no computers, no games, and people survive by eating tree bark and drinking whale blood.
Well, that wasn’t until a Russian spy plane carrying advanced computer technologicals mayday’d north of the artic circle where I was living at the time with the Eskimos – busy fighting the whales. All the computers crashed into a polar bears den and I had to fight them bare-handed to recover the payload. I lost half my face but that doesn’t matter.
As soon as I saw the square blocks of technological wonder, I knew they were built for no other purpose than to create silly games so that we would have something to do in the winter besides bang our cousins. So first I had to decipher the Russian, which I accomplished by swimming across the bering sea, capturing Valdimir Putin, forcing him to teach me Russian, and then ransoming him back for a bottle of whiskey and twelve thousand pounds of blubber.
Then… well, none of that is true, I hate to tell you. But I think I might be the only person doing anything game development related here in Alaska. I don’t know, I don’lt leave the house much these days. In another year we’ll be moving somewhere, so hopefully it’s a place I can interact with actual humans doing some modding or something like that from time to time.
I moved here at a very young age; I was only ten years old. It wasn’t necessarily a game dev related move as at the time I wanted to become an astrophysicist (aspirations can take a wild turn on you). I always liked the British culture and the language so it was exciting. Very difficult at first as my English was very basic at that time but I guess because I was so young, I picked it up quite quick. School was a mess, so I went from being the popular kid back at home, to that kind of ok dude from another country who hangs out with his weird polish friend and doesn’t understand much so let’s ignore or bully him.
So yeah, school was a bit tough at first but it can be for any kid no matter whether you’re abroad or not. That did however make me very contained and attached to my computer and that’s where it all started, modding games, graphic design, making private MMORPG game servers and my interest in programming. But it was only in College, that I got into game development, from a little unit we had where we had to make our own game in Construct 2. It was so fun that I decided that that’s for me.
After College I went to work in IT, firstly in a low paid IT Support MSP, met some awesome people but the workload was horrible and very reminiscent of a call centre… There was no way of balancing the long hours and stress with working on games at home. This year however I joined an IT team for a global book publishing company with less hours. Also the workflow here is much nicer which gives me the chance to tinker around in Unity here and there This should help realise my hobbyist dream while retaining a good, low stress source of income. It is still very much the early days for me.
Anyways… back to the point.
As for the whole challenge of moving to England, it’s tough. I suppose I was lucky to come here at such a young age, as I absorbed the language very well and managed to acquire a good accent and blend in. But it has its challenges. If you wanted to move here strictly for the Game Dev opportunities, well, it’s a good mature market with a lot of potential for devs to grow. But of course, it’s still a tricky environment with some fierce competition. If where you are at the moment is a bit dead in terms of game dev, then perhaps that’s exactly what you’re looking for
Also, Brexit is just around the corner, so there may be some disruption in terms of the market but I doubt it will be as apocalyptic as the media portrays, so I wouldn’t let that put me off if I was you.
This should help realise my hobbyist dream while retaining a good, low stress source of income. It is still very much the early days for me.