PAGDIG: Portland Area Game Developer Interest Group

Hi everyone!

Sorry for the short notice, but the this month’s PAGDIG Meeting will an informal gathering. It will be held back at the west side Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. on 6/25 at 7pm.

Come by and share pizza and drinks with like minded people. Maybe we can discuss last month’s presentation some more, and I know at least one of us released a game this past month! Cause for celebration!

Hopefully next month we’ll maybe be able to get a speaker arranged for another presentation at Ai.

Thanks!

Hello PAGDIGers. This month we’ll be starting to structure our meetings a little differently. Every other month, starting this month, we will hold presentations on various subjects of interest to the local game community, or at least until we run out of presentations to present ;D. The Art Institute of Portland has graciously offered a conference room for us to use for these presentations. Thank you, AI! Next month will be back to pizza and beer, etc.

The meeting will be on Thu., 5/28 at 7pm
The school’s address is 1122 NW Davis St. in the Pearl District, kitty-corner from the new Deschutes Brewery.

The month’s presenter will be Corvus Elrod on Networking, a subject that is useful to us all. A short blurb :
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Networking can be very intimidating whether you’re trying to break into an industry, or expand your connections within your field. It’s easy to find concrete tips on how to network but how, and when, do you start preparing to do it?

Corvus Elrod, semionaut and narrative design consultant with Zakelro! A Story Studio, will share proven techniques for ensuring you’re ready to be an important part of your professional community. By breaking the process down into three easy steps–Story, Play, and Community–Corvus shows how to take charge of your networking experience and that it’s not “Who You Know” that’s important, but “Who Knows You.”
—-

The meeting will be held on the 2nd floor in the Open Space. From the front door, take the elevator to the 2nd floor. There will be signage leading to the space.
There will be pizza provided!

Hope to see you all there!

Hello peoples! The next PAGDIG Meeting will be at the same location
as last time, the west side Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. on 4/16 at
7pm.

I’m sure there will be a lot of post-GDC discussion from those of us
who attended, and the usual drinks and pizza too.

See everyone there!

Hello everybody! The next PAGDIG Meeting will be at the same location as last time, the west side Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. on 3/12 at 7pm

The location worked out really well last time, with plenty of room and lots of discussion.

Stop on by

Hi everyone. Hope you all had a good holiday season and new year.

The next PAGDIG Meeting will be tried out at another new location, the west side Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. on 1/22 at 7pm

One topic of conversation will be the OMSI Teen Game Tournament and Game Careers Fair. OMSI would like to showcase local developers at the fair to talk to kids about the different roles and jobs there are in the industry. It’d be cool to gauge the level of interest in that from some of our members, especially if we could get a good cross section from all the different disciplines (programming,art,design,sound,writing,etc..).

The other topic will be grabbing food and drinks and hanging out

Hope to see you all there!

So it looks like Stark Naked Pizza wins the poll for the next meeting location. It’s at 2835 SE Stark St.

The next meeting will be there on Thursday, 12/11 at 7pm

See everyone there.

Hello all. The next meeting will be another social get-together at the same place as last time, the Hawthorne Lucky Lab. Last time, some people had trouble finding us amongst the tables, so be sure to look for the table with a poorly-rendered PAGDIG sign in Sharpie and graph paper.

Thursday October 23rd @ 7pm
Lucky Lab
915 SE Hawthorne Blvd

I’ve been kicking around an idea about having a “PAGDIG rapid game building project” for fun. People, by themselves or in teams, would have X weeks from a given start date to make a quick prototype of a game, and then at the meeting afterwards we’d all see what we call came up with and how far we were able to get.

We can talk about interest in that or specifics at the meeting.

Hello all PAGDIGers. The next meeting is a simple social meet up, held on the east side this time.

Thursday September 18th @ 7pm
Lucky Lab
915 SE Hawthorne Blvd

Aside from any other subjects people wish to discuss, those of us who attended PAX can talk about what we saw.
Come on by and grab some food and drinks.

PAGDIG Meeting August 14th, 7pm
Lucky Lab Public House, 7675 SW Capitol Hwy Portland OR

We’re going to try something a little different this time: a “Game Design Workshop”. We’ll break into groups, try out a couple simple boardgames and then talk about which game mechanics worked and what made them fun (or not). The groups can then try to make their own variants of the boardgames and have the other groups try them out. We’ll also talk about how what we learned could be applied to the design of video games.

If you have a fun boardgame with some interesting mechanics you’d like people to try out, you’re welcome to bring it. If people want to stick around afterwards and try them out, that’s cool. If we don’t have time, we can maybe have it as a candidate game for the next workshop. The important thing is to make sure the rules are fairly simple can be explained within 5 minutes, as we want to make sure people spend more time playing than figuring out rules.

This Lucky Lab has pizza and beer. Minors are okay until 10 too.

See ya there!

Thursday June 12th @ 7pm
Hot Lips Pizza
EcoTrust Building
721 NW 9th Ave

It’s a throwback to the old location. While the PSU location is great for when we have outside speakers or more formal issues to discuss in a meeting-type setting. But since we don’t have that at the moment, a setting with more of a “hanging out” vibe with food and drink works best for social meetups.

Also, the OGPC event in Salem was a lot of fun. Greg and I volunteered as judges and I think we’d both agree that we’d volunteer again next year. The kids came up with some great stuff, especially when you take into account that they still had all their homework and activities to do and still find time to put together a game. Chris Brooks and his team did a great job putting the event together, and you can tell the kids loved it.

Hope to see you all at the meetup,
Dmitri