IGDA Meet April 24th - Report [April 26th, 2009 – 10:22 pm]

We started roughly around 8.15pm, where the first group of crows were Adam and Kuching (correct me if I got your nickname wrongly) - both of them are the receiver of MDeC's Pre-Seed Fund under their new company doing education games, Lim - ex-concept artist from Gamebrains, and also EdyKajang who introduce himself as a low profile non-conformist idealistic full-time independent solo game developer. We start talking randomly about game development news and topics before I inform them about the agenda of the meet. We started of discussing the result of the IGDA Malaysia Chapter Survey where I noted that we have a large crowd of students and hobbyist compared to full time game developer. A situation that is pretty much different with most IGDA chapters, as most of them have a large enough crowd of professional game developers to serve that they try not to cater too much on students and hobbyist interests. From there we talk about what can we improve and what the audience expect from IGDA Malaysia Chapter themselves (too bad, I couldn't recall the suggestions precisely, so, please kindly post it in the forum to share your opinion with others). While having a heated discussion spawned from the first item in the agenda, Mohan Low from Leet Games arrives and join in the discussion. He brought up an interesting point about the disconnection between game developers and game publishers in Malaysia. Coming from publishing background, he shared several interesting facts and statistics about game publishing business in Malaysia especially on multiplayer online games. Some of it was covered in his talk at Video Games Symposium in November 2008.

While the session was still running strong, others that arrived at different point of time were Kenny Chan - game designer in Mygo Solutions, Lih Wuei and Chin Foo - engine and tool programmer from Codemasters, Aznan Falzi and Hafiz - game designer and programmer from Titoonic Asia and lastly Ezzy - game programmer from Activate Play. We continue to talk about various games development topics including gossips and news of the local games industry until 11.50pm covering topics like XNA, iPhone, Google Android and WiiWare development. That was the time the pictures being taken, sorry for the lousy quality.

Because of the lively session, I forgot to bring the other 3 topics on the agenda for the meeting. I'm very sorry for that and I'll make it up on the next one.

Few things that IGDA Malaysia Chapter should work on from the meeting's discussion :

- Active games company list and made in Malaysia shipped titles

- Up to date reference for funding resources