Our regulars‘ table in March had two visitors from Italy, so today’s summary will be in English for a change. With Stefan2, Patrick, Dennis and Lionel as the regulars, Michael as someone who once was a regular but hasn’t been present for a long time, Alex as someone who’s been there once or twice a few years ago and Giovanni, Davide and Ulrich as first time visitors, our meeting had a decent size of 9 people.
Lionel talked about an upcoming Star Wars LARP he’s going to participate in. He recounted how he’s getting ready for it, where he sources and how he creates his costumes. He also told us about Stellaris modding as he’s dissatisfied with the way it’s currently being developed, being turned into a more streamlined game where all races start the same way and the different races don’t feel so different anymore. On another note, he plans to join the next Ludum Dare in April.
Michael did a short reintroduction, because it’s been so long since he’d last been with us. He’s currently working with Unity and developing a side scrolling game. He wanted to do a Metroidvania initially, but the scope for this was too big for a hobby project.
Alex showed us the game Industree he and his team are working on at the moment. He talked about the many iterations it has gone through, starting from a stressful real-time deck builder towards a more casual and cozy turn based game.
Stefan2 published a new version of Gems n Slimes which now supports saving so you can take a break between sessions and additionally introduced a new game mode which only uses the traditional Tetris blocks.
There was also a bit of general talk about development of games with engines like Unity, Unreal, Godot, or a library like LibGDX, custom engines or no library or engine at all. Some talk about the pros and cons of planning in game development was had as well.
Ulrich introduced himself as having studied architecture and now wanting to enter the game development scene by building connections and finding a job in the area. There was some talk about the developers of Control having an architect in their team (not the software one). He showed us a video he made in Unreal using existing assets which looked quite good.
Giovanni and Davide are our two participants from Italy. As the game developers scene isn’t as active in Italy as it is in Germany they moved to Nuremberg to found their company Abduct Media and are working on a grant for their VR game.
Alex and Giovanni said a few things about their experiences with the various types of VR and AR systems.
Giovanni also talked a bit about modding, how he started as a little kid, modifying files to translate a game from English to Italian and then moved on from there to more complex projects. Nowadays he’s a contributor to the multiplayer game Space Station 14.
Davide talked about the Game Engine Black Book: Doom and techniques described therein.
Finally we were talking about the games that we first remembered playing and Giovanni and Davide brought something new to the table. The game Life and Death. They didn’t understand English at all when they played it, so they were completely clueless as to what they did wrong when they failed a surgery and wish for a game in the same (serious) vein but modern. Sadly Markus wasn’t there to talk about that VR surgeon simulation for the Charité Berlin he talked about in January.