April Meeting Recap

In her first post for IGDA Scotland, volunteer Emma Droy summarises our recent meeting in Edinburgh and shares a few of the excellent pictures she took during the event.

Wednesday saw us descending upon Edinburgh for the April meeting of IGDA Scotland. The main topic of discussion was, of course, the Game Developers Conference, which took place in San Francisco last month. We want to say a huge thank you to our panellists, Kate Ho, Jonathan Brodsky and Luke Dicken for taking the time to share their experiences from GDC and have their brains picked by those who weren’t fortunate enough to attend! Also thanks to everyone who was able to come along, it was cosy but we think it was a great success!

The evening kicked off with a short presentation from Brian McDonald, who gave a review of what IGDA is for the new faces in the crowd, and what the Scottish chapter are hoping to do in the future. He touched on the topic of IGDA Scholarships (don’t forget the deadline for applications is April 27th – why not attend our workshop explaining the Scholarships in detail) and gave us a quick introduction to GDC. You can find a video of Brian’s session embedded below.

After a quick break our panellists took to the stage. They each spent some time introducing themselves and explaining to us what they’re doing at the moment, then proceeded to get a grilling on what they got up to at GDC. Kate told us about her time on the Scottish Development International Booth with her company Interface3, giving an entrepreneurial insight to the benefits of attending GDC. Jon from Lucky Frame recounted the gruelling conference experience of an IGF nominated developer, and Luke, who attended GDC through the IGDA Scholarship programme as this year’s Eric Dybsand Memorial AI Scholar gave us all the details on what future IGDA Scholars can expect.

Another break for refreshments was followed with open questions from the audience. The panel (and some audience members) shared tips with the youngsters in the audience, including information on the Conference Associates programmes that allow those interested, particularly students, to get involved at conferences through volunteering.

We’re in the process of editing the video from the panel together now and we will publish it as quickly as possible so that you can see the details of what was said for yourself, so keep an eye out for that!

Thanks again to everyone that came along, we hope you all had a good night!