Over 30 strong, the members of the chapter got together once again on November 7, 2004, this time on the campus of the University of Michigan.

The following were on the agenda for the meeting:

Pre-meeting Speaker: Gregg Seelhoff on various aspects of the Game Industry

Gregg Seelhoff, with SophSoft, recounted stories and impressions over his long career in the game industry, including his work at game studios, such as Spectrum HoloByte, Quest Software, and Legend Entertainment, and his work with independents and his own company, based in Michigan. The talk was extremely interesting and brought back a lot of memories of the "early days". Gregg concluded with a Q&A session, were he offered advice to our student developers on potential career paths in and around the game industry.

"The Political Machine: a Postmortem of the 2004 Election (game)" by Brad Wardell

Brad Wardell of Michigan-based StarDock, presented a postmortem on his recent, successful title, the Political Machine (as seen in Time Magazine, MSNBC, etc.), developed by StarDock and published by Ubi Soft for the 2004 political race. The postmortem was very interesting with a lot of good advice to keep in mind for future titles.

Brad also discussed how games are made at StarDock and how his company balances game creation with utility software development.

Pizza Break

After Brad's presentation, the pizza and pop arrived so we grabbed a bite to eat and got on with the show.

Chapter Updates

We discussed a couple changes that are coming down the road with regards to the chapter:

• In the future, the drawing for books and other giveaways at the meeting will be for IGDA members only. Others can attend the meeting, but will not be eligible the drawing. Please bring your IGDA membership card to future meetings!
  
  
• We have chapter expenses each meeting for room reservation and food (pizza and pop usually). In the past some of this expense has been reimbursed by the IGDA. This may be soon changing. Therefore, we are discussing the best model for cover such expenses. We have talked about having a local chapter membership fee, doing a donation/pay as you go approach, finding some local and national sponsors to help out with such expenses, or doing a combination of these approaches.

Book Giveaway

We had our book giveaway, randomly drawing four lucky members names for their choice of books from our library (generously donated by Peachpit Press, Focal Press, and Charles River Media).

Made in Michigan Game Presentations

Wolverine Soft students presented some impressive game demos that they developed during a 48 hour game development contest (available for download via www.umich.edu/~wsoft)

Socialize!

After which many people hung around to discuss informally.