Hey guys/gals,

I'm putting together a game development "study group" and wanted to see if anyone her is interested. I thought it would be fun and helpful to get together a group of hobbyist/student designers, programmers, artists, and whoever else, to make things together and discuss our goals and progress. We could make projects individually, collaborate on small projects, maybe host our own game jam, or do whatever we find most conducive to deepening our skills. The emphasis of this group is on education, not making commercial products. Depending on how many people we get, we can do this through email or on our own forum.

Post here if you're interested, and write a little about yourself and your gamedev interests.

About me:

I work in film and am looking to transition into game design. I'm interested mostly in level design, game design, and writing, but have decent art and programming skills. I want experience in all aspects of gamedev, so in addition to designing my own projects, I'd love to do art on someone else's game. I COULD program in a pinch, but wouldn't recommend it ;-). I have experience with SDL, Unity, and am learning UDK and 3DSMax.

Ok, lemme know!

I ama bit interested. Not entirely sure what this entails, but if it can help improve my coding skills then I am interested.

I'm not sure exactly what it would entail either. That'd be for us to decide. I just thought it would be helpful to devs trying to learn and improve their skills who don't currently have collaborators to have people to exchange knowledge and work on projects with. For instance, if you are interested in coding, we could put a group of maybe three to make a weekly game - one of us would design, one do art, and you code. We could also switch up the roles if you were interested to do art.

It'd also be nice to have a regular "showcase" where we play each other's games and offer notes.

Really the group is for anyone interested to learn by collaborating WITH other people rather than solo.

I'd defiantly be interested. I have a strong background in Web development and Database Management, and the majority of my experience in games has been implementing server-side scripting for games and modding, but I've been trying to move into C++/C# side of programming. I have some experience with java, but I'm still getting proficient with it(Again, most of my experience is contract-work debugging). Unfortunately, i'm lackluster in the art department, and most of the stuff I make qualifies as "programmer art".

I have a couple of big projects that are always on the go, but it would be nice to sit down with a group weekly, or even daily, and work on something like "one game a month". I'm not really sure that having a game complete every week, even with a team, is possible or feasible without each person putting in 9+ hours daily. How would you want to run it, here on GD or through Skype, or some other chat system? Any specific languages?

I'd be happy to stalk the skype chats or e-mails, and provide helpful input here and there. :)

As for languages/engines, I think we'd have to decide once we get a group together. I've been working with Unity and UDK. Some basic Flash or HTML5 games might be good to start with. I'd be open to whatever though. Maybe once we figure out who our participants are, we can talk about what each person hopes to learn and we can let our "curriculum" evolve from there.

As for where we'd run it, maybe just through a mailing list, but if that isn't sufficient we could work through an IRC or forum. I think it will depend on how large and active of a group we put together. Glad to see there's interest though! I'm definitely interested in a "game a month" type schedule too.

Sounds like an interesting idea, I'm willing to join too send me a PM when you get a chance

Is this still on the table? I'm still quite interested.

I'm interested as I want to be a Game Developer, I'm still learning the basics of programming and I'd love to learn more about it. I'm an art student (GCSE) and will do art for A Level, I have music and sound experience as well. If this does happen I'd love to be apart of it.