November Meetup - Featuring Shay Pierce on game design & prototyping

Our event this month will feature Shay Pierce, a local game designer and engineer with a long history in console, social, and mobile game development. Shay will give a postmortem of his difficult multi-year prototyping process on a spare time experimental game project. He'll walk the audience through his freeform process of exploratory game design; relate the mistakes he made and lessons learned; and show off playable versions of different incarnations of his still-unfinished game.

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Shay got his start in game development in 2003, as Tools Programmer at TimeGate Studios (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimeGate_Studios) in Houston (working on PC and console RTS titles). In 2005, he moved to Austin to work at Midway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_Austin) where he helped with development of the company's modified version of UnrealEngine3, and eventually moved into a Gameplay/UI Programmer role.

In 2008, Shay moved to California to work at Blizzard as Principal Prototype Programmer on the CCG Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/). This experience gave him a better understanding of prototyping, thanks to Blizzard's famously rigorous design process. In 2009, he moved back to Austin and spent time at Sony Online followed by Electric Bat Interactive (http://www.linkedin.com/company/electric-bat-interactive-llc) (building an unreleased Facebook game). Electric Bat shut down before the game was finished, but this marked a turning point in Shay's career and inspired a new focus on social and mobile games.

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Shay subsequently spent some time as a contract iOS programmer for NewToy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zynga_with_Friends) (creators of Words With Friends). In 2011, he joined OMGPOP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMGPop) as the first employee of its Austin studio, where he worked on a Facebook game called "The Street". When Zynga acquired OMGPOP (http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/21/done-deal-zynga-gets-draw-something-phenom-by-acquiring-omgpop-were-hearing-210m/), Shay became the sole employee not to accept a position with Zynga. This sparked much press coverage, leading to an editorial in Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/167244/) where he explained his decision.

While pursuing these paid gigs, Shay also found time to create an iOS puzzle game in his spare time called Connectrode (http://www.deep-plaid.com/connectrode/Site/Connectrode.html). It received wide critical praise (http://toucharcade.com/2011/07/18/connectrode-review/), was featured by Apple, and was the #9 Puzzle game in the U.S. App Store for several weeks. Currently, Shay works as a contract programmer for various companies, while building his own titles on the side (under the name Deep Plaid Games (http://www.deep-plaid.com/)).

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For the past 2 years, Shay has been iterating on the design of a game he calls "Uncanny Alchemist Battle 1934". This project has been through several variations, but it's always had one common theme: action gameplay which allows the player(s) to use special powers together to create unexpected and emergent results. In its current form, it's a 2-player platformer fighting game in which Nikola Tesla battles M.C. Escher to the death, by possessing objects and combining special attacks.

Shay's goal is to eventually release the title on Ouya or other micro-consoles. His long, sometimes-obsessive process of prototyping this game will be the subject of his talk. He'll discuss how this experience has forced him to re-evaluate his approach to developing games, his attitude toward creative work, and his definitions of success and of game design itself.

Schedule for this event:
• 6:30pm - Arrival and socializing
• 7:00pm - Shay Pierce talk begins
• 7:45pm - Audience questions
• 8:15pm - More socializing