#11 - Virtual Reality / Monogame Game Jams

Please come and join as at the JUST EAT office for an evening of cross-platform mobile development chit chat.

Doors open at 6:30pm.

Talks start at 7:00pm.

Pizza and drinks are kindly supplied by JUST EAT.

1 - A VR Mind Map, Deniz Opal

Deniz will be talking on his experience developing VR games and videos, particularly for the Samsung Gear VR, an Android phone based VR system.

Deniz is currently the CTO of Hologram Software (www.hologramsoft.com (http://www.hologramsoft.com/)) and a lecturer of game development and mobile development at Istanbul Kultur University. This year he will also be lecturing at Bahcesehir University.

You can cyberstalk his LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=AAMAAADmBqsBWzKQewOwPj8HaXDFabs5HpzMyDk&trkI) page for more.

2 - Monogame Game Jams, Jason Farmer and Dean Ellis

Game development can offer a fantastic playground to train developers in important skills - skills which they might not obtain during regular application development..

We'll talk about how we use Game Jams to focus our attention with goals and a deadline to keep us from straying and to minimize scope creep - one of the biggest challenges for a independent developer. This is especially important when working on a blue sky project as keeping the scope under control while getting something playable as quickly as possible is critical.

Jason Farmer (@thecactus),C# Developer and owner of Songbird Creations Ltd. http://www.songbird-creations.com (http://www.songbird-creations.com/). I've fulfilled many roles from Developer, Project Manager, through to Director of Product engineering. Now I keep myself busy writing games - among other things. Dean and I released our first mobile game in the spring this year on Android, iOS and OUYA using Monogame and Xamarin - following one of our game jams; We're working on two more titles currently with a third in the design stage - ready to be developed early next year - Two of which have been incubated using a Game Jam.

Dean Ellis (@infspacestudios), C# Hacker at Xamarin on the Xamarin.Android product, which oddly means I know very little about writing android apps... weird eh. A regular contributor to the open source MonoGame project which aims to bring the XNA API to all the platforms in the world! Part-time Game developer, full-time father and all round nice guy (honest).