January Meetup - Featuring Trent Polack of Team Chaos

After a long break for the holidays, our January event will feature Trent Polack, the Creative Director of Austin mobile game studio Team Chaos (http://teamchaos.com/). Trent will share "Scattered Thoughts on a Fragmented Games Industry." Basically, he'll discuss the various jobs and influences that have helped him transition from being an English major to a Creative Director in charge of five concurrent game projects. Also, he'll cover the ways in which his responsibilities have radically changed since starting in the PC game industry (which led him to AAA console titles and eventually mobile games).

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Trent's background is quite diverse and wide-ranging. For the past year, he's served as Creative Director at Team Chaos, sister company of the Austin-based mobile app development firm Chaotic Moon Studios (http://www.chaoticmoon.com/). Team Chaos is responsible for a number of high quality mobile games, including Dragon Academy (http://dragonacademygame.com/), Elements: Broken Lands (http://teamchaos.com/elements/), and the recently-released Dragon Trials (http://dragontrials.com/).

Prior to that, Trent spent four years as a Senior Game Designer on various AAA projects (primarily Starhawk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starhawk_(2012_video_game))) at LightBox Interactive (http://www.lightboxinteractive.com/) in Austin. From 2007 to 2009, he worked as a game/engine developer at Stardock Entertainment (http://www.stardock.com/games/) on the games Galactic Civilizations 2: Twilight of the Arnor (http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/galactic-civilizations-ii-twilight-of-the-arnor), The Political Machine 2008 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Machine_2008), Demigod (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demigod_(video_game)), and the early days of Elemental: War of Magic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elemental:_War_of_Magic).

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Somewhat unusually for a game developer, Trent received a degree in English (with a focus on Creative Writing, Computer Science, and Secondary Education) from the University of Michigan. Over the years, he's worked odd jobs as a programmer on a satellite monitoring program, a game journalist, a programming book author, a door-to-door salesman, a PR dude, and a grocery bag boy.

In essence, the messy and chaotic arc of Trent's career mirrors the evolution of the game industry. We look forward to hearing him shed some light on the state of the industry by examining his own personal history.

Schedule for this event:
• 6:30pm - Arrival and socializing
• 7:00pm - Brief Maya LT discussion
• 7:10pm - Trent Polack talk begins
• 7:55pm - Audience questions
• 8:25pm - More socializing

Supported by Autodesk
Thanks to generous support from Autodesk, this event will include free pizza and beer. Also, a representative from Autodesk will be on hand to discuss Maya LT, a 3D animation and modeling tool built specifically for indie and mobile game makers. For more info, please visit http://www.autodesk.com/

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