The Windows 8 Game Dev Fest

Games. You know you want to write them and seek fame & glory, so give yourself an excuse to jump in by joining in the Windows 8 Game Dev Fest.

This just in! John Pile at Champlain College has 16 laptops ready to go with Windows 8 for attendees!

The launch of Windows 8 is right around the corner (October 26th!), and there’s a big opportunity for games in the Windows Store. You can make games in ways you might expect (C#, VB, C++, XAML, DirectX), but HTML5 and JavaScript can now be used as well, and other tools and frameworks are available to make things easy.

We’ll kick things off with a tour around game development for Windows 8, looking at the various options. Then, it’s all about hands-on coding. Join up with others to form a team or bravely run as solo game dev champion. Near the end of the Fest you can demo your game (in whatever state of readiness it’s in) and have a chance to earn prizes for your coding, design, and creative prowess!

NEED WINDOWS 8 FOR THIS EVENT?? Here's a link to downloading an evaluation copy. Look for a link on that page that says how to run Win8 in a virtual environment if you aren't ready to commit your laptop to Win8 yet)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/jj554510.aspx?wt.mc_id=MEC_132_1_4 .

This fest will be led by Chris Bowen, Principal Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, focused on Windows 8. Chris is a fantastic presenter, teacher and all around awesome guy. We're always thrilled to have him and his equally awesome cohorts come visit Vermont. Chris tweets at @ChrisBowen and blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cbowen/).