July Meetup - Game prototyping in KineticJS

Our last few events have focused on the design and business aspects of game development. So, we thought it was time to present a more tech-oriented talk and that's exactly what we have in store for this month.

Our July event will feature Brandon Wiley, a local developer and PhD student who builds games in his spare time. He'll discuss using KineticJS (http://kineticjs.com/), an HTML5 Canvas Javascript framework, to prototype game ideas. Brandon has been using this approach to quickly experiment with different mechanics and solidify his designs before building native mobile versions of his games.

Obviously, there continues to be a loud debate online (http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/) about HTML5 vs. native development. We feel like Brandon's approach blends the best of both worlds, leveraging the strengths of each environment to his advantage.

Brandon is a seriously talented developer with a diverse background. Back in 2006-2007, he was a Director of Product Management at BitTorrent, where he worked on a peer-accelerated content delivery service. Since 2009, he's been a PhD student at UT's School of Information where he's currently researching cloud computing, video search, communication tech for developing countries, peer-to-peer, anonymization, and censorship resistance.

As for his game dev experience, Brandon recently spent a summer working with the folks at Minicore Studios (https://www.meetup.com/atx-mobile-game-devs/events/112601012/). In addition, he spends much of his free time participating in game jams and initiatives like One Game A Month (http://www.onegameamonth.com/). Our schedule for this event is:

6:30pm - Arrival and socializing 7:00pm - Brandon Wiley talk begins 7:45pm - Audience questions 8:15pm - Head downstairs for more socializing

Special thanks to Robot Swarm Entertainment!

This event will have free pizza and beer thanks to generous sponsorship from Robot Swarm Entertainment. They're opening a new studio in Austin soon and are looking to hire 3-4 engineers and 3-4 artists to build a PC game (with publisher backing). If you're interested or have questions, please email RobotSwarmStudios@gmail.com .