October CGDA Meetup - Keegan Gibson

Welcome to the October 2026 Christchurch Game Developers' Meetup!

Location:
EPIC Innovation, 106 Manchester St, Christchurch 8011

The meetup will also be streamed online at:
[Link to be added on the night!]

Don't forget to check us out at:
Website: chch.gamedev.co.nz
Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/chchgamedev.bsky.social
Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/christchurch-game-developers-new-zealand
Discord: discord.gg/68YqqFZ
If you like our meetups, consider supporting us on Patreon:
patreon.com/CHCHGameDev
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This Month's Speaker: Keegan Gibson
Keegan has been in game development for over 15 years, specialising in Unreal Engine, networking, performance, and AI. Throughout his career, he has worked on a diverse range of projects, including mobile, console, PC, indie, and AAA titles, as well as making some short contributions to film.

5:30 PM - Playtesting
BYO devices and get some hands-on feedback from other game developers!

6:00 PM - Community Micro-Talks
Hear updates from local developers' projects, and casual presentations on topics of interest by the community, in a short format with Q&A.

You can submit your Micro-Talk here:
https://forms.gle/CLeLAc5Ma8J5bx4C9

6:30 PM - Pizza
Enjoy some refreshments (AKA pizza) and catch up with/meet other game dev enthusiasts.

6:45 PM - KICK OFF
Welcome to the Christchurch Game Developers Meetup, with news from around New Zealand!

6:50 PM - Same Game / Different Language: Transitioning to Unreal Engine
You've shipped games. You understand render pipelines, game loops, entity-component systems, and the particular joy of tracking down a one-frame desync at 3am. You don't need someone to explain what a delta time is. What you do need is someone to tell you where Unreal hid everything you already know, and warn you about the places where your hard-won instincts will quietly lead you astray.

This session is an on-ramp for experienced developers making the jump to Unreal Engine. Whether you're coming from Unity, Godot, a proprietary in-house engine, or something with a name that no longer appears on any company's LinkedIn page, the fundamentals you've built your career on absolutely transfer. The vocabulary just got a lot more dramatic. We'll walk through Unreal's core architecture: Actors, Components, the GameFramework hierarchy, and the asset pipeline. Not as a beginner's tour, but as a map for someone who already knows the territory. You'll see where Unreal's abstractions line up with what you already know, where they diverge in interesting ways, and where the engine has strong opinions you'll want to understand before you find yourself arguing with it at compile time.

A big part of transitioning successfully to a new engine isn't learning new things, it's unlearning the assumption that your old patterns will slot straight in. Unreal rewards developers who take the time to understand its grain: how it wants you to structure gameplay logic, where it expects things to live, and when to reach for Blueprints versus C++. Fight that grain and you'll spend your days in a low-level war with a framework that was never going to blink first. Work with it and you'll find a surprisingly coherent system underneath the surface area.

By the end of this session you'll have a mental model for navigating Unreal's architecture with confidence, a practical feel for where to start on a real project, and a shortlist of the exact moments where experienced developers most often get tripped up, so you can skip the three weeks of confusion and get straight to being productive. If you've ever opened an Unreal project, stared at the folder structure, and thought I know what this is supposed to be, I just can't find it, this talk is for you.

This talk was originally given at NZGDC 2026.

Event Photography Notice: The CGDA occasionally takes photos and/or videos at our events for promotional purposes. If you would prefer not to have your image recorded for marketing purposes, please make your wishes known to the photographer, and/or reach out to a committee member, and we will accommodate your request. Thank you!
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Massive thanks to all our supporters for making our meetups possible!
Our Corporate Supporters:
Yoobee College of Creative Innovation - a tertiary institute committed to developing creative and technical talent across New Zealand.
https://www.yoobee.ac.nz/courses/

CerebralFix - a Christchurch-based game development studio specializing in work for hire from some amazing companies.
https://cerebralfix.com/

Screen Canterbury NZ - a Canterbury-based film office helping creatives get their projects delivered to the screens of their choice, providing fantastic resource-sharing & advocacy for our screen production industry.
https://www.christchurchnz.com/screen-canterburynz

And our awesome Patreon Supporters:
Matt Barton
Leigh Beattie
Leith Caldwell
Samantha Cook
Robert Oram
Nik Scarr
Ian Shephard
Alexander Swords
Carl de Visser