Ack, looks like I haven’t fully developed the instinct to post relevant stuff to my blog yet Time for an update!

You’ll probably read a lot about IGDA Phoenix on this blog ’cause I’m the chair!

Since moving to AZ a couple years ago, there’s been a stir to jumpstart our local IGDA chapter. The effort was started last year by Pete Jones of Retro Affect, and I hopped onboard as vice and now (as of this past May) chair of IGDA Phoenix.

We hold regular meetings every first Wednesday of the month, currently held at Claim Jumper in Tempe, along with game jams at UAT every few months. If you’re a game developer in the area, come check us out!

You don’t need an official membership, it doesn’t cost anything, and the atmosphere is surprisingly refreshing and inspiring. Don’t take my word: just check out this awesome video about the Phoenix Global Game Jam put together by the talented local Ryan Luibrand!

Recently, our Phoenix chapter has gotten a couple shoutouts in the IGDA newsletter. Back in June, I got featured in a Member Spotlight article to highlight “superlative IGDA member[s],” which I consider a HUGE honor.

Even more recently, they published an article I wrote about the local game dev scene! Phoenix: Desert Devs details some of the highs and lows of making games out here, and features comments from local studios like Broken Bulb and Flashbang, as well as local devs Dave Koontz, Kyle Pulver and Ara Shirinian.

It’s a pretty solid depiction of game development out here in the Valley, and a lot of other regions in the newsletter provide interesting reads as well. A huge thanks to Ryan Arndt and Cat Wendt for putting it all together!

Regarding my own personal projects, I’ve been working a LOT on Growing, a game I started at a Game Jam in May and have been filling most of my nights and weekends with. You can expect a beta version up on my projects page soon! For now, here’s a small preview of my work-in-progress:

Hey everyone!

My blog is officially up and running! I’m using the WordPress infrastructure, but the frontend is a custom theme. This is kinda my first “real” web development experience. Well… it was my first time touching PHP, anyway. It’s been an adventure!

I owe a lot to this incredibly handy WordPress Theme tutorial. If you want a quick-and-painless runthrough of the WordPress API, this is your link. This stuff is the Johnson’s baby shampoo of tutorials.

A few nifty things I learned along the way:

• If you’re making a custom theme for WordPress for the first time, I’d strongly recommend starting with an existing one, stripping it to the bare bones and adding your code. My theme worked locally, but the php wouldn’t execute when I uploaded it. Finally, out of desperation I tried placing it over an existing theme. Worked like a charm. Gooo figure.
• CSS Sliding doors are awesome! This is what all the buttons on my site are made out of.
• Similarly awesome, 960 Grid System is a CSS framework that’s easy-to-use and FREE! Oh baby. I am never again leaving home without it.
• It seems best to test your stuff in Mozilla first, because if you can get it working on Firefox, you can get it working anywhere! Well, except IE I guess… are people still using that thing?

So anyway, the focus of this blog is game development! Posts will be anything from showcasing things I’m learning or working on, to linking to cool game-dev content, to just collecting and writing out my thoughts on topics.

Right now, I’m practicing the basics of pixel art! I started with a character I sketched out a little while ago. I started off using this very excellent tutorial by Derek Yu, and I highly recommend it.

We’ll see what happens! I don’t know if I’d ever have the patience to make a whole game in pixel art, and clearly I still have lots to learn. It was fun, though! Something about the process feel strangely scientific, much different from regular art. I kinda like that.