April Meetup - Featuring award-winning game designer Saam Pahlavan

This month, we'll feature Saam Pahlavan, who served as level designer on the award-winning indie game Disorder. Saam will discuss the emotional nature of what it's like to release a personal game that you've worked on for two years and the experiences encountered upon launch.

http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/8/5/9/f/600_436354207.jpeg

Despite being somewhat new to the game industry, Saam has an impressive resume. In 2013, he graduated from the Savannah College of Art & Design with a BFA in Game Development. In 2012, he moved to Austin and worked as a UI Design Intern at KingsIsle Entertainment, contributing to their popular title Pirate101 (https://www.pirate101.com/). For the past year, he's worked at Spacetime Studios, as a designer on the successful mobile MMO Arcane Legends (http://www.arcane-legends.com/).

During his time in school and in the years after, Saam worked on a number of personal game projects and participated in many game jams. Most notably, he did the art and level design for Secret Formula (http://saampahlavan.com/secretformula.html), winner of the 2013 Indie Speed Run (http://www.indiespeedrun.com/2013-winners.html). Saam is also creator and host of the Loading Screen Podcast (http://loadingscreenpodcast.com/), a monthly show where he interviews various indie game developers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXTs3rgPxB0

In late 2012, Saam began working with two friends from school (who were soon joined by a talented sound designer) on a student project called Disorder (http://www.disordergame.com/). The game is a psychological 2D puzzle platformer whose main mechanic revolves around the player switching between dark and light, positive and negative, hope and despair. The player traverses across surreal landscapes of memory to discover the protagonist's mysterious relationship with his brother.

In October 2013, Disorder won the Student Competition at Austin's Captivate Conference (http://www.captivateconference.com/). This led to the team officially forming as a company called Swagabyte Games (http://www.disordergame.com/press/). After showcasing Disorder at SXSW 2014 as a Gamer's Voice nominee, Swagabyte caught the attention of ScrewAttack Entertainment (http://www.screwattack.com/). They offered to publish Disorder, and the game was released on Steam in January 2015.

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/8/e/7/a/600_436356474.jpeg

Saam's talk will cover a brief history of the development of Disorder. However, this won't be a typical post-mortem. Instead, he'll focus on the emotional aspects of releasing such a long-in-development indie game project. The talk won't be about "what went wrong and what went right", but the struggle of what it's like on a personal level to release a game you've put blood, sweat, and tears into. This promises to be a fascinating discussion, so don't miss it!

Schedule for this event:
• 6:30pm - Arrival and socializing
• 7:00pm - Intro and announcements
• 7:10pm - Saam Pahlavan talk
• 8:00pm - Q&A
• 8:20pm - More socializing