Tucson Game Developers Blog

Next meeting: August 4, 2021

After a long year and a half, it’s time to resume in-person meetings! Due to the higher preference for a central location, we’ve coordinated with Bookmans to return to using their midtown location as we did at our last few in-person meetings. James, their Engagement Coordinator, has been very supportive and excited to have us. Thanks a ton, James! Discord has been great for keeping us together and active all these months, so we’d like to continue to provide a way for people to continue attending meetings online, but we’re also eager to gather and hang out like the old...

Our April Meeting….is Cursed!

TGD is back once again for our monthly meeting! As always we love doing different things and mixing it up. We are going international and have a special Q&A with Cracklewock games, creators of Cursed Crew! Cracklewock games is a group of Rimworld modders in the Netherlands making their first game. We will be talking with Roel Heirman aka ‘Roolo’, one of the developers behind the game. BUT due to the time zone differences, we will be doing something slightly different in that we will be pre-recording and editing a Q&A with Roolo before-hand, and playing it at the meeting....

Wed March 2nd Meeting: Game Demos Done Right w/ Chris Zukowski

Last month’s meeting was, let’s just say…it went off the rails a bit! 😀 After an impromptu presentation by Chris Zukowski wielding a gold microphone we went into an extended Global Game Jam play session, ending with complete nonsense as we played Yonder Quail for about 45m. It was SO fun so I hope you come join us again this month! This Month: Zukalous Returns! Oh btw did you know that the Game Developers Conference is coming up? Chris Zukowski will be using us as guinea pigs for his latest GDC talk and we guarantee you will love it! In...

Wed Feb 2nd Meeting: Global Game Jam Play Time!

Next Meeting is this Wednesday February 2nd at 7pm in our Discord channel! We’ll be playing the submissions to the Global Game Jam! Update: The jam has end and you can see our games here! Our Global Game Jam site has exceeded our expectations this year! As I write this we have several teams hard at work on polishing their games before submission! We have had a great turnout, some of the highlights so far: With the switch to virtual we’ve created voice and text channels for teams to work in. This has really allowed the teams to see what...

January 5th: Q&A with Z from Serenity Forge!

We hope you are all enjoying your December festivities! We are kicking off 2022 with a bang! Z, CEO of Serenity Forge Zhenghua Yang aka ‘Z’, the CEO of Serenity Forge will be joining us virtually to chat about his company. Z has publishes and develops unique and amazing titles such as the horror title Doki Doki Literature Club. We’ll talk about his company’s unique approach to game development. When: January 5th @ 7pm Virtually: Our Discord Server In-Person: CANCELLED. This meeting will be VIRTUAL ONLY. Covid note: Pima County is still regarded by the CDC as having the highest...

Dec 9 meeting: The Game Awards

The last monthly meeting of 2021 won’t be on the first Wednesday of the month as usual – instead, we’ll be working with Aleshia Howell at FORGE to hold a screening of The Game Awards! The show starts at 5:30pm MST on Thursday, December 9. Join us on Discord or in downtown Tucson at the FORGE office in the Roy Place building to hang out, see who wins this year’s awards, and talk about making games! Covid note: Pima County is still regarded by the CDC as having the highest level of covid transmission on their Community Transmission Levels scale....

Nov 3 meeting: FORGE and Jean Leggett

When: Nov 3, 2021 from 7pm to 9pm MST Where: online via Discord and in-person at 44 N Stone Ave with FORGE Speaker: Jean Leggett on game dev careers The November TGD meeting is next week! Join us not only for the usual review of our members’ awesome work over the past month, but also to hear from this month’s speaker: Jean Leggett: game dev coach! Jean has more than a decade of experience helping people with their game development projects, studios, and careers. She’s run workshops and delivered speeches on those topics, and is joining us this month to...

July 7th Meeting: Refactoring Your Game w/ Branden Conley

Have you ever written code and felt it could be better? Maybe you looked at some older code and wanted to improve it? Maybe you have some bugs you need to fix, but the code is a mess. How can you untangle it? This month’s meeting we’ll be talking about ways you can refactor your game’s code to be 👌👌👌 When/Where/What When: July 7th, 7pm Where: The TGD Discord Special Note: This will be a pretty Programmer Heavy meeting! We will be providing more art-friendly content in future meetings. This Month’s Speaker: Branden Conley Branden is an Engineering Manager at Wizards...

June 2nd Meeting: Let’s add millions of polygons in Unreal 5!

When: June 2nd, 7pm Where: The TGD Discord Epic games is pushing game development in new and exciting directions with their latest version of Unreal. Unreal 5 contains a host of fantastic technologies, but chief among them are Nanite and Lumen. Nanite provides artists the ability to use cinematic quality assets in-game without the time-consuming process of optimizing them into game-ready assets. Lumen provides dynamic global illumination as well, without the need for, again, the time-consuming process of light baking. For a great breakdown of the latest features, you can watch the below video, OR why not join us in...

May Meeting: Ludum Dare Retrospective!

Coming up this Cinco De Mayo! We are celebrating this May by presenting and playtesting our latest games created during the last Ludum Dare game jam. This will be a more interactive meeting, where we’ll be doing a couple different activities such as downloading each other’s games, rating them, and also doing a quick retrospective. We hope to see you there! When: Wednesday May 5th @ 7PM Where: Our Discord Server’s General Voice Channel