Our first weekly update! (Incorporation, showcase, and website planning)

Unbeknownst to many, the Let’s Make Games team has been working feverishly for 5 hours every Monday for a while. That’s over 25 hours of volunteer work per week! That’s hundreds of hours in total. All for the love of the games development community of Western Australia. 😉

Still, the unbeknownstedness isn’t really a good thing. For a start, it’s a little lonely. Beyond that, nobody else knows what’s going on behind the scenes. Bearing that in mind, we’ve decided to pull back the curtain on what we’re up to. Every Monday.

Incorporation

I wonder if anyone reading this noticed the advertisement above when it appeared in the West Australian in early April… (we’ve pixelated Anthony’s address so that… people don’t see it…)

Yes, we are incorporating. It’s a fairly involved process. Especially so because we’re trying to be super-conscientious about it. We’ve looked through all the model rules and talked a lot about who we are and what we want to be.

Here’s a relevant blurb from our draft constitution:

The objects of the Association are to support the game development community of Western Australia (the “Community”) by seeking: 

• to hold events that engage the Community and the interested public;
• to record and showcase significant activities and achievements of the Community;
• to maintain a website with information relevant to the Community, and the interested public;
• to maintain an online presence to facilitate communication within the Community, and with the interested public; and
• to raise the profile and advocate the interests of the Community.

What else is important?… We’re not planning to become an open membership-based organisation. We don’t want any sort of barrier for people to attend our events or get involved in our online presence (like posting to the PIGMI mailing list). Moreover, we want a small team that works together to keep things going (rather than a large membership that pays fees).

Showcase

Our next event is tentatively called “Let’s Make Games Showcase”. (Although we may change the name if we can come up with a decent pun – suggestions are welcome!)

After our last event, Matthew Dyet contacted us to let us know that ECU were keen to possibly host our next event. (Thanks Matthew and ECU!) We’re following up to see how this could work. Hopefully, we’ll be able to run a day-long event in late August.

The current plan is to run a bunch of co-located activities from 11am to 4pm on Saturday, 27 August. These activities may include:

1. A 2011 showcase (of locally developed games)
2. A retro showcase (locally developed games developed before 2011)
3. A student showcase
4. A playtest room (where you can play games in development)
5. A series of presentations (with a keynote speaker and everything)
6. A BBQ lunch!

Obviously the scope of what we can do will depend on our time commitments and money. We’re currently seeking funding and looking for sponsors. Please contact us if you have money so that we can let you know about sponsorship options. Also contact us if you have the skills to pay the bills and want to get involved as a volunteer.

Web presence

We’re working on a new web presence strategy, and making small changes as we go:

• We’ve setup a facebook page and we’re looking to deprecate the old-style facebook group next week.
• The experimental forums aren’t getting much love, so we’ll be decommissioning them next week. (All the action is still on the PIGMI mailing list.)
• We may setup a new-style facebook group… or we may just stick to a facebook page. (Thoughts?)
• We may introduce an events-only mailing list, so that people interested in events (rather than general discussion) can be easily notified.

Wow. This has been a long post, but we’ve covered a lot. We plan to use these weekly posts to summarise what we’re doing as well as happenings on the twitter feed, Planet PIGMI, and the PIGMI mailing list.

We’ll write again next week!