Well, actually, it started around the second week of January but we've been a bit busy! Here is a summary of our recent events.
Studio updates:
This session we have 12 Computer Science capstone students and 16 community members (a mix of WVU alumni and current game design students).
We are meeting at least once weekly, on Mondays, with both our student and community members.
We are still able to offer this for free, as a hybrid experience (their choice of remote or in person), for community members. We strongly encourage students to be in person, as much as possible.
We've started featuring graduating student weekly on Facebook and Instagram. We'll have a large blog post containing these at the end of this session.
While the game design and interactive media program at WVU and MonRiverGames have shared a connection since our launch, the studio is also now officially considered as part of the program offerings at the Media Innovation Center. This makes sense, as it has been our home base since the beginning.
Project updates:
We are exploring utilizing a publisher for making our PurpleHouse mobile game public. We could do this on our own as we have full access to development through both the App Store and and Google Play, but we think the project will be more successful if it is with a publisher we trust. We'd also like to be able to localize it and make it more accessible so that everyone can enjoy it as much as we do. No decisions have been made, but we made a pretty neat pitch deck created and playable builds. If you missed our playtesting session, we'll have another very soon. You can also sign up to be one of our playtesters.
We realized we accidentally got too split up (again) on several projects and have paused SpyCats for this session, with the intent to pick it back up once we have cleared out WV Quest and LightRush.
WV Quest Development is in full swing as we attempt to make our goal to have a full, playable, prototype delivered to the WV State Museum for testing by the end of this semester.
LightRush Development is also in full swing, with a notable achievement: the controllers are working! The team is working on tightening play, new maps, and possibly more than 2 characters (our mascots Spark and Berry).
Event updates:
We are preparing for our Regional Indies Showcase, which will be on Saturday, March 23. There is still time to sign up to show your projects as a solo dev, a dev team, or a game-related company (publishers, modders, and vendors welcome!) at our event. If you are interested in setting up a table, but not sure if you fall under the 'game-related' category then send us a message at info@monrivergames.com Time is running out, however, as registration ends on March 1. https://www.monrivergames.com/events/developer-vendor-sign-up-2nd-annual-regional-spring-indies-showcase
We will have updates of all of our active projects available for playtesting at the showcase!
Several of our members and students of the Game Development Club, as well as Game Design and Interactive Media program at WVU, participated in Global Game Jam this year. This Jam is a one week event that happens all over the world each year. During that time, sites facilitate the creation of games based on a topic selected by Global Game Jam.
It was the first year the WVU campus hosted a site and a great way to get everyone back into the semester. See the album below for pictures and links to the games they made.
The new IGDA West Virginia Chapter was a sponsor for this event.
15 different games were created at our site for this year's theme of "Make Me Laugh".
We will be set up at Final Boss Con again this year on May 4 in RioGrande, Ohio. We've applied to be part of a few other conferences and will post those as we hear back.
Overall, we are prepared for another busy session and are looking forward to releasing PurpleHouse for public play and clearing out the projects we are working on! Depending on how things go we may be able to have a new pitch day, in which members and groups can pitch an idea for our next community project, at the start of the summer session. Go team!