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[Guert]

Original post by Craig Stern
Indie City Meetup Round-up

Today was the inauguration of Indie City Meetup. The brainchild of Scott Roberts and Erin Robinson, Indie City Meetup is a new bimonthly get-together of Chicago-area indie game developers. There was a good turnout at today's event, with close to 30 people in attendance. The format was straightforward, with devs getting up and showing off their games, talking about how they developed them, and answering questions from the audience.

I started things off by presenting Telepath RPG: Servants of God, a strategy RPG I've been making in Flash for the past two-and-a-half years.

Next up was Erik Spitzer presenting the side-scrolling 3D platformer Project Stormos. Jay Pecho then presented IGF Student Showcase winner Devil's Tuning Fork, followed by Kevin Geisler and Kevin Zuhn presenting a physics/time-manipulation platformer called Witch When.

Christian Arca of Toy Studio presented Pet Rescue, a Facebook social game which sparked some interesting discussion about the psychology underlying the (apparent) appeal of apps like Farmville.

Next, Patrick Curry of Wideload Games gave a talk about how he became an indie, and gave advice on how to remain relevant as a designer.

Joe Hocking then presented his iPhone puzzle RPG Chronicles of Aerth, still early in development.

Finally, capping off the afternoon was Erin Robinson, presenting her recently-released AGS game Puzzle Bots and talking about the value of IGF judge feedback.

In theory, I videotaped the whole event, but due to some poor camerawork on my part and some technical snafus (e.g. my camera shutting itself off randomly, and then later running out of batteries), I only have a few isolated snippets worth showing. So, uh, yeah. I'll try to do better at that next time.

[Craig Stern]

Indie City Meetup had its second meeting yesterday!

We began with an hour of mingling and letting each other play our games. I had the latest build of Telepath RPG: Servants of God on offer; Erin Robinson showed off a shmup she's been working on in Unity; The Men Who Wear Many Hats let us play The Name Game and Zero Flip; Double Cluepon Software showed off their map editing tools (developed entirely in Flash!) for their upcoming Flash MMO, Emerald Kingdom; and there were a few others, including a neat-looking iPad game prototype that involved moving around a helicopter with a giant magnet on the bottom, trying to lift giant metal items without crashing. (Sadly, I didn't manage to get to see all of the games in time, so I probably missed a couple.)

After the mingle-and-play ended, a guest from Columbia College got up and spoke to us about the upcoming 3G Summit. She passed out flyers and invited us all to come show off our games for the expected 150-200 attendees at the public expo.

Then it was time for the toolset presentations. Erin got up and gave a presentation on Unity using her in-progress shmup to illustrate what the engine is capable of. Jake Elliott then got up and gave a presentation on the workings of flixel, using his "drowning game" (his words) I Can Hold My Breath Forever to illustrate how it's structured. Finally, Ryan Wiemeyer came up and gave a fairly long presentation about Game Maker and its usefulness in quickly mocking up larger games.

We then ended the meetup, voting to have another in mid-August in the form of a game jam.

[ADDatWork23]

An Indie Game Meetup in Chicago?!?  Holy S***, I wanna go!  Is there a place you meet up?  Is this a weekly thing?  Let me know when you get a chance!

[Craig Stern]

Yeah! We usually meet up at DePaul University once every month or two. Check out the group's page on Facebook here for more info.

[aeiowu]

Hey, i don't want to hijack the thread here but I am planning a trip to chicago sometime in August. I'll be there for about a week and a half and I was wondering if anyone wanted to co-work at a cafe while I'm there. Even if it's just for a day, it'd be cool to meet up.

I'm thinking August 4th-14th or something but that may change, right now I'm just gauging general interest/feasability.

I should note that I'll probably be working during the day since everyone I'm staying with has real jobs and so on.

[Craig Stern]

We had another meeting yesterday. (Our fifth? Not sure. Probably the fifth.) Anyway, it was awesome. The theme of this one was "Abandonware!" People came by to share games that they had either abandoned or put on hold and solicit feedback and help from the audience.

I showed off the latest build of my multiplayer turn-based-tactics game (currently on hold while I continue developing TSoG). I also showed a Zelda-style procedurally generated dungeon exploration game, also on hold for the time being.

Andy Saia showed off three of his earliest abandoned projects, including a Flash platformer called Scribble Scrabble where the protagonist can transform into a pterodactyl, a unicorn, and a woodchuck(!) to solve puzzles.

Ryan Wiemeyer showed off Clean Kill, an abandoned but nonetheless pretty awesome-looking minigame collection/hidden object game themed around a serial killer who feels compelled to clean up spotlessly after every murder (fixing broken furniture, getting blood stains out of the carpeting, rehanging disturbed wall hangings, etc.)

Jake Elliot showed off a neat-looking platformer-in-progress featuring some sweet pixel art by pgil (I forget the game's name, but it was--perhaps, still is--to be a sequel to Beulah and the Hundred Birds).

Bredon Clay, also known as Switchbreak, showed off a moody single screen puzzle-platformer he'd abandoned called Nepenthe, in which the protagonist slowly goes insane the longer he remains on each screen.

Robert Lockhart (a.k.a. bobbylox) showed off an early work-in-progress where you play the killer rabbit of...well,

.

We also got to see an Arkanoid-alike completed in 2001(!) in which the player has to manipulate a pair of dwarves holding a trampoline to keep the developer's head from touching the ground while it bounces around the screen devouring birds.

Finally, Steve Swink of Blurst infamy showed off a bunch of really cool-looking projects he'd started in Unity, perhaps the most impressive of which was a 24-hour game jam project called Scale. (He was also cool enough to break out the latest build of Shadow Physics for a few of us who hung around after the meeting, letting us play a bit and have a look at the level editor.)

tldr version: it was pretty awesome.

The next meeting is planned for mid-December, to accommodate all those student types who like to show up at these things.

[ADDatWork23]

Grrrr...I really wanted to make it that week but my car decided "Oh, you wanna go somewhere?  Enjoy my oil spills!"     Sounded like a kick-ass meeting.