Let’s Make Games musings

For those that don’t read the Let’s Make Games blog, our monthly social event is on tonight – 7pm at the Velvet Lounge in Mount Lawley.

Tonight’s event is called Let’s Make Beautiful Music, and aside from the usual drinks and social get-together, there’s also a Guitar Hero competition (with a suitably complementary prize).

At the last event, Paul asked me what Let’s Make Games is all about. Fair question, the local game development scene already has: PIGMI for local news aggregation and mailing list conversations, IGDA Perth Chapter for talks and professional development, and GameJam for… well, game jams.

We started Let’s Make Games to “foster the growing game development community and industry“. Game development can be fairly isolating in Perth (it’s not a common profession for someone in a mining state). We wanted to create a warm and supportive social environment for local game developers, and report on their achievements to the wider community.

In order to do that, we decided to produce annual reports and to run regular social events – working with other groups when it makes sense to do so. In our prior experience, there are always different interests and a lot of coordination is required when working with other groups – so we didn’t want to take that on initially, or push that upon others.

Our initial plan was to write biannual reports and run fortnightly themed social (rather than work-related) events. Wow, was that dream! The first report was fairly taxing to produce, and fortnightly events turned out to be far too much effort if we want to keep things interesting. So we decided on monthly events – always on the last Tuesday of the month – amd an Annual Report.

Recently with IGDA Perth Chapter events picking up again (mad props to you guys!) it looks like monthly events from us would just saturate local interest (too many events!). We’re looking forward to running only four to six annual events starting next year.

Thanks to everyone who has supported Let’s Make Games and all the local volunteer run groups over the last few years – it’s what really keeps us going!

2 thoughts on “Let’s Make Games musings”

  1. I think LMG has been a great success: at every event I see smiles on faces and a lot of goodwill and community spirit. I am glad there are people willing to put in work to organise and facilitate these events – I think it is appreciated by many.

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