In game development, "Do It Yourself" has turned into "Do It Ourselves." Very few games are made by one solo creator, and the best games all have multiple participants, and sometimes teams of hundreds. How do you join such a team or even form one yourself? Join our experienced panel of game designers as they share their stories, insights and lessons. Most important, learn how to avoid the mistakes they once made.

Panelists:

Abby Joslin is an Atlanta business coach who specializes in working with creative and tech startups in their first few years of business. She helps to organize and run the annual SIEGE conference, has run the SIEGE business track for several years, and is the former Atlanta chapter president for the Georgia Game Developers Association. She offers business strategy services as well as skills coaching in pricing, business promotion through events, and negotiation theory and practice. She has an MBA from Georgia State University and gets weirdly enthusiastic when talking about business.

Sarah Massagee is a fan of anything and everything involving games. She started getting into game design while she was at Kennesaw State University. She was part of the CGDD program and was an Alpha Xi Delta. She has worked on Ears the Astronaut (at Trick3D), Hanako (by +Mpact Games,) and currently Killing Floor 2 (at Tripwire Interactive) and an unnamed VR game (personal project.) She is the former Atlanta Chapter president of the GGDA and Advancement of Women in Gaming. She has a strange passion for User Experience (UX Design) and will talk to you about it for hours and will often give advice about it in exchange for tacos.. She spends her free time doing yoga, hiking, and UX studies. She also spends a lot of time eating tacos.

Gabriel Mughelli graduated from University of Richmond and landed his first game industry job in 2008 working for Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment in Arizona. In 2011 he moved to Atlanta to work for Hi-Rez Studios as a PR Specialist. In his time at Hi-Rez Gabe has built relationships and made connections to aid in the promotion of multiple online games including SMITE which now has over 20 million players worldwide. Gabe has had the pleasure of interacting with gamers at various industry events such as PAX Prime, E3, RTX, Gamescom, and SIEGE.

Darren O'Neal graduated from Kennesaw State University in May, earning his degree in Computer Game Design & Development. During his final year at KSU, he participated in two game jams in which both of his teams won. This summer he worked at Virtually Better, Inc. where he developed new applications and refactored existing VR applications using Unity3D. With this experience, he will conduct research in VR while he earns his Masters in Computer Science at KSU this Fall. Darren also writes software professionally as an independent contractor. He is developing an educational fitness game for Standard Fitness Studios, and an informational engineering application for CLC Engineering. When he finds the time, he co-hosts an educational YouTube channel known as Renaissance Coders which offers over 80 Unity tutorials, or he maintains his published plugins on the Unity3D Asset Store.

 
When: Tuesday, August 9

Where: Kennesaw State University - Marietta Campus, J Building, Room J161

1100 South Marietta Parkway
Marietta, Georgia 30060

6 - 7 pm: Networking

7 - 8 pm: Networking and Team Building Panel

8 - 9 pm: Networking

Free to GGDA members and KSU students. Free parking in visitor lots.

Unable to attend? You can also stream the meeting at https://www.youtube.com/c/GgdaOrganic