IGDA Chapters meet regularly in cities around the world. Developers attend chapter meetings to network, learn from each other, identify upcoming challenges and issues in their work, and help define the characteristics of their professional community. Chapter meetings are open to anyone interested in game development.
In short: Chapter is few hour meeting, sometimes including few short (5-15 minute) speeches from skilled developers and lot of time to socialize. Both Cauldron Ltd. and Mayhem Studios (and I think that many others will agree) said that they see chapter as opportunity to find new employees!

Report: First success!

How it all began...

Few months ago I had no clue what IGDA Chapter might be. Believe me or not, one day I just came home and found march issue of Game Developer in my mailbox. It was first issue I ever saw and touched it. Strangest thing is that I haven't ordered it and I still don't know about anyone who did it for me!

It was IGDA 2002 Annual Report attached to gdmag 5/2003 that gave me the idea about what chapters might be. I watched game development scene for few years now, but I didn't know anything about our local scene. Or, to be exact, I thought there are only two firms developing games in Slovakia - Cauldron and Illusion Softworks, but no community seemed to exist. (My information vacuum was caused by lack of time regular Internet access - try to do something when you're online hour a week from Pentium 166 in some Internet cafe.)

I wanted to help Slovak gd community for ages, but now I had clearer idea how it could be done. I wrote mail to both Illusion Softworks and Cauldron, but they rejected to help and didn't answer, respectively. Few weeks later I finally decided to visit Cauldron personally and met Marián Ferko, lead graphics designer, who helped me a lot with useful tips and moral support since then. And his first hint was that there may be some 8 studios here in Slovakia.

So I had to dig through many broken links, dead sites to find some mail addresses, but no one replied. After another few weeks I found site http://slovakgames.topcities.com, where was updated list of Slovak studios along with contact e-mail addresses. This was the milestone when things began to move. I contacted and invited all studios and most of them promised their presence.

Next problems were to find suitable venue and gather indies, wannabes and everyone else with interest in game development. I originally planned to invite students of computer-related faculty, but problem was that it was still vacation. So I had to ask media for help. I contacted well-known magazine PC-Revue, that, altough doesn't specialise in games, covers broad range of topics including various programming tutorials. They agreed to publish short annoncement about chapter, but the time and venue were still unknown in the time of writing.

I realized that it didn't really matter when the chapter will be, important is to have the date to tell. I didn't want to wait any longer then September, so last Saturday seemed to be OK. Everything seemed to be in right tracks, so the last thing I had to take care of was appropriate venue. After longer search for place where lectures could be held, I gave up this idea in sake of more relaxed circumstances. One day, after wandering the city and wondering if i'll ever find anything, I stumbled upon restaurant Gremium. At that time I expected up to 50 persons to come, so I thought that main hall with videoprojector would be great.

After time, my expectations dropped to more realistic estimate of roughly 25 persons, because some studios just didn't reply to e-mails anymore or couldn't come because of busy schedule, but thanks to PC-Revue, some folks told me they'll come. I came to Gremium and asked for reservation; with this number I had to change plans and accept small room in back of second floor, what seemed as good idea, because it was away from disturbing noises and music. I immediately mailed everyone final info, updated site, provided navigation and link to map.

Let's party!

Half and hour before official beginning I was standing next to stairs wandering if anyone will come. Suddenly, group of four guys came and stopped next to me. After moment they saw my IGDA membership card I had on my breast and introduced themselves as part of Real & Motyca team. We went upstairs and sat down and tried to start conversation. I was curious how they were managed, because from their web was obvious they were scattered and communicated via Inet. They explained that in fact they were in fact 2 smaller groups that joined only recently, every team working on own project. In fact, they saw one member first time on chapter! That made me feel good immediately, because this is IMHO what chapter should look like - put together, if not all teams, at least one's members ;)

After while, two other guys came in and introduced themselves as independent developers. I didn't have time to ask more about them, because only one person talked at a time, and now we were listening to Real & Motyca's discussion of collision detection and shadow rendering. When it was already 4 o'clock, CEO of SoWhat! came, after him more Real&Motyca members, Marián Ferko along with other Cauldron staff and after little navigation problem VoSoft's only developer, Vladimír Repčák arrived from other side of country.

Although we were sitting quiet at times, we switched a bunch of topics, continuing with shadow rendering, switching to Cauldron's bad luck with publishers, SoWhat!'s unlucky choice to publish game via downloading and VoSoft's sad experience from ECTS, where every publisher's first questions were 'How does the game look like? Does it have reflections and particles?'. He later mentioned that he was able to cut his game from 250MB to unbelievable <10MB!! Check it out for yourself on http://avenger.com and download public beta :)

Cauldron was only team present that had experience with motion capture and they shared it with us gladly. They were capturing for their last release Chaser in Hungary and praised it both for good quality and best price. Another thing we were all paying attention to was description of development cycle for PS2 and X-Box. I think that everyone who didn't have to was happy that he doesn't have to code for PS2 and everyone was shaking head at Sony's arrogant treatment to developers. On the other hand, many DirectX coders were happy to hear that developing for X-Box is nearly the same as developing for DirectX under PC.

Especially interesting part was presentation of great demos two indies presented on notebooks. First was FPS with terrain, building and functional collision detection. Altought it didn't work perfectly (what should we expect from some alpha?), we were impressed. Second presentation was exciting - isometric 'emotional RPG' with beautiful pre-rendered graphics and interesting rules, where every action in game modified character's mood and vice versa. Altought only one map existed, everyone agreed that it's very promising project.

There is a lot more we talked about then mentioned here, but my memory is limited (to 4GB;). We talked a lot about publishers, that's for sure. I hope others will help me and post on forum!

Also, I promise to learn from my recent faults and organize 2nd meeting *much* better.

Next [second] Meeting

Date & Time & Place

Estimated date: last Saturday of February???
Estimated time: 16 o'clock
Estimated place: Restaurant Gremium, Bratislava, Slovakia

Attendants:

Nothing's for sure, but here are some of studios that might come:

Cauldron Ltd.

Real & Motyca

VoSoft

SoWhat!

and also maybe Mayhem Studios, Sorudan, Byte, Outsider Development, 3Dpeople, Cypron Studios and maybe even some Czech studios...

Communication & Credits

General media partner:

Thanks to everyone who helped me: IGDA, Liz Wakefield@IGDA, Marián Ferko@Cauldron, PC-Revue for thair medial partnership and everyone who promised to come.
Milan Brezovský, Chapter Coordinator, analytik:at:nopdesign:dot:sk