Event Planning
Game Dev Drinks
Game Dev Drinks is a monthly Game Developer meetup event held in Hamilton at the upstairs of The Pheasant Plucker. It was meant to be a relaxed environment to grab a pint and connect with game developers within the region may that be Hamilton, Niagara or Toronto. Originally started by Bret Measor, I took over in 2017 when Bret moved out of Hamilton for other work. For about 2 and a half years, I ran Game Dev Drinks once a month adding additional guest speakers, chill nights, and demo nights for developers. Within this time I helped grow Game Dev Drinks from mostly Hamilton Developers to expand much more into Toronto and Niagara to have the region become closer and grow the event to a regular group of 35-50 depending on the event, speaker and time of year.
In mid to late 2019, I stopped working in Hamilton as a Game Developer and due to this, it was time to pass Game Dev Drinks to a local developer to continue running the event.
Due to the pandemic, Game Dev Drinks was put on hiatus. I hosted 1 online event in 2020 to help bring people together in the Game Dev during time when. Since then it has returned with more online events and will continue having them once a month.
Facebook Page
Con Bravo Game Dev Talks
In 2018, Game Dev Drinks was asked by the Chair of Con Bravo to run a series of talks of Game Development talks at Con Bravo adding more gaming to the convention. We created a whole 3 day schedule for Con Bravo with previous speakers, new speakers and new panels to focus more on gamers or future game developers.
Some of the talks/panels were Emotional Game Design, Animation and Background Design in Cuphead, How to Prepare Yourself for Making Games: Education & Self discipline, Game Producer Crash Course, etc.
I worked on organization and collaboration with the Con Bravo team, making sure we had volunteers beyond the convention team to not add additional load on them and to let people know of the talks and panels, making sure people were fed and had water for our guest speakers and badges for coming to do the talk and explore the con before or after their talk. We had a great turnout and reception from the attendees and wanted more content from years to come.
Game Jams
Starting in 2016, Niagara College started becoming a site for the Global Game Jam. This Game Jam runs annually and has site organizers across the world participating in the event. This event brings alumni and students together in one of the 3 computer labs at Niagara College for small teams to create a game in under 72 hours. I have been the site organizer since it's inception at the college and help in planning volunteers to help students, keep an eye on the labs and collaborate with on site security. The event normally gathers 50+ students and alumni to participate in the 3 day event.
In additional to the Global Game Jam, Brock University created it's Spooky Shapes Game Jam in October 2017. This Game Jam is run over 2 days and is suppose to focus more on design and mechanics rather than art by limiting models used to only primitives and work is only done during regular business hours to not support crunch culture and support a good working ethic and environment. This was co-organized with myself and with the Project Coordinator of the Centre for Digital Humanities. This included a showcase and judging portion at the end of the event to get feedback from external industry guests and other jammers.
Global Game Jam Page