Vermont Digital Arts will be represented at PAX East 2014. As you may or may not be aware of, VTDA is a member of the Indie Game Collective in Cambridge, MA. To learn what VTDA and the rest of the collective are speaking about, games they are showing off and booth information, check out this handy IGC PAX East Schedule.
Beers For Indies!
We are often asked “What game developer meetups do you regularly attend?”. Unfortunately for us in Southern Vermont, most of the “local” meetups are in the Boston, MA area with the exception of a couple non-game specific events in Western MA. Fortunately for Vermont Digital Arts, we also work in Cambridge, MA at the Indie Game Collective and thus attend a lot of game development events out there.
Our personal top 5 Boston area game developer meetups are (in alphabetical order):
| Boston Post Mortem | http://www.bostonpostmortem.org/ |
| Boston Indies | http://www.bostonindies.com/ |
| Boston Unity Group | http://www.meetup.com/B-U-G-Boston-Unity-Group/ |
| New England Game Circle | http://gamescircle.org/ |
| Mass DiGI | http://www.massdigi.org/category/events/ |
Our general top 25 Boston area game developer meetups are (in alphabetical order):
Please let us know if you have any favorite game developer meetups in the Boston area that we may have missed. I’d be great to have a giant comprehensive list to share online perhaps as a wiki.
We hope there will be more going on in the Vermont / Western MA area to populate a list half this long in a few years! VERMONT / Western MA -> Let’s make it happen!
Valve’s first Steam Developer’s Conference, Steam Dev Days, is set to kick off January 15 in Seattle, WA. Vermont Digital Arts is very excited to be attending this historic game developer event! We just happen to be developing a few games for Steam and Steam + Oculus Rift and Unity for the win. What is particularly amazing is Valve’s decision to launch SteamVR Beta one day ahead of Steam Dev Days! This is going to be good!
Hope to see you at Steam Dev Days! Tweet to Elliott Mitchell, our Co-Founder, on Twitter @mrt3d if you’d like to connect at the conference.
Check out all the session videos by members of the Boston Indie Game Collective at Unite 2013! Michael over at the IGC put together a page with the talks by Disco Pixel, Owlchemy Labs, Popcannibal and Vermont Digital Arts! Check it out here!
Do you make 3D art, animation and or use Unity to make multiplatform Games? Anyone can download or make 3D art assets and anyone can make games in Unity. It is another story when it comes to creating an art pipeline that accounts for efficiency, flexibility, multiple resolutions for multiplatform optimizations. Art optimization begin in the tools one chooses to uses for content creation. Optimization is also dependent on the way tools are utilized and how they export assets for Unity. Finally, art optimization happen within the Unity editor, which varies for individual targeted platforms, with best art practices and smart coding.
Elliott Mitchell, co-founder of Vermont Digital Arts and the Boston Unity User Group, gave a Unite 2013 (Unity Developer’s Conference) talk on this topic last August in Vancouver, BC. Check out the video of his talk and check back here to see a series of blog posts on topics covered as well as the plethora of areas he didn’t have to touch upon in his talk at Unite.
[youtube url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HwsJiLtyw&feature=youtu.be” width=”640″ height=”355″ autohide=”0″ fs=”1″ rel=”0″]
Special thanks goes to Anzovin Studio for providing The Setup Machine for Games to Elliott and Vermont Digital Arts. In addition, Anzovin provided their expertise by rigging the Elliott’s 3D Samsquanch character as well as animating an Idle and Walk cycle for this demo!
Remember, there is no optimized game without good coding even if your art is exceptional. Make friends with talented engineers or learn to code yourself! It takes both sides of the brain to make great games!