PIGDA needs a logo!
Pittsburgh Game Community-
The Pittsburgh IGDA chapter is seeking an official logo. We're hoping all the talented artists in the area can help us out. We want to see YOUR ideas for the Logo Chapter so we’ve decided to hold a contest! During the months of April and May we'll take submissions. We will select our favorites the first week of June and then let YOU decide on the winner.
The logo winner will receive the following prizes: Fame, Glory, a free PIGDA t-shirt featuring our new logo and free IGDA membership in 2009!
The PIGDA logo should:
- Represent Pittsburgh
- Represent the games industry
- Convert cleanly to a monochrome format
- Work well with the IGDA national logo
- Be original artwork that you have created and that you agree can be used freely and without restriction by PIGDA
Jason, a PIGDA planning board member has created a concept that we've been tossing around internally. Check it out! 
Start with this or create your own entirely! Post your entries here or email sabrina(AT)schellgames.com and we'll post it for you! Each person can submit 100 entries, so get those creative juices flowing! We can’t wait to see what you come up with!
Posted by PittsburghIGDA on April 3, 2008 12:22 PM
GDC 2008: Are you ready?
If you're attending GDC 2008, you're not alone amongst Pittsburgh IGDA members. You'll be seeing a lot of Pittsburgh out in San Francisco, here's just a couple of ways:
Local IGDA GDC Scholarship Winner
Lisa Brown, a student at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, is one of 25 2008 GDC scholarship winners. Each year the IGDA awards the GDC scholarship to outstanding and promising students in game related programs. Here's what Lisa has to say:
"I'm extremely excited about the scholarship and attending GDC! I'll be hitting up the Worlds in Motion summit with my ETC project-mates (Bandology) to absorb what I can about massively multiplayer online worlds. Beyond investigating the game design and production tracks at the conference, I'm also really looking forward to the mentor program they have set up for the GDC scholars. "
Independent Games Festival
This year be sure to check out IGF Showcase to see three games that got their beginnings right here in Pittsburgh: World of Goo by 2D boy, Skyrates by Airship Studios, and Polarity by the Carnegie Mellon ETC. (Actually, all three of these games were conceived by ETC students.) All three games have also been nominated for the newly created Gleemie Award from Wizards of the Coast. The IGD Awards Ceremony will be 6:30pm Wednesday, February 20th, 2008, in the Esplanade Room in the South Hall.
Local Studio CEO Jesse Schell Speaking
Schell Games head, ETC Professor, and former IGDA Chairman Jesse Schell will be participating in a couple of events at GDC:
1. IGDA Educational Summit Tutorial (Monday-Tuesday)
2. Small Studio Survival Stories Roundtable (Wednesday-Friday)
If you know any other Pittsburgh ties to this year's GDC, please let us know by posting in the forum. Don't forget to drop by the IGDA booth to get your free tshirt, and of course, we hope you RSVP'ed for the IGDA party Tuesday night. See you in San Fran!
Posted by PittsburghIGDA on February 17, 2008 11:34 AM
IGDA Members participate in ETC XO Game Jam
At the end of November several IGDA members participated in a Game Jam held by the Entertainment Technology Center XO Laptop team. The goal of the weekend long jam was to create games for XO Laptop and to get the game community of Pittsburgh familiar with development on the laptop.
Here's a look at the some of games that had PIGDA members on their teams:
Team Peru, including IGDA Members Brandon Bittner, Richard Colvin, Mark Tomczak, & Aaran Vanderbeek, created a physics based game called "Star Catcher" that challenges players to shoot down stars (and avoid danger) by bouncing their projectiles off various obstacles. In some situations, players must place additional obstacles on the map to reach more difficult stars. The game is intended to encourage an interest in physics and allow players to create their own levels and puzzles to share with friends. Team Peru also built the controls to feature the XO's hand held mode too, taking advantage of the d-pad and four button cluster.
Team Argentina, with IGDA member Lisa Brown, created a point-and-click puzzle game called "CakeTown" where clicking on various elements in the given scenes trigger events. The timing and order in which events are clicked solve puzzles and advance the story. The goal is to make the devouring of cake occur. Lisa and her team are continuing to develop this game, having completed two levels at the actual Jam.
IGDA member Ian Schreiber and his team (Libya) created a game called "Ride the Wind", a side-scrolling game where you guide a paper airplane around the world as fast as possible while trying to avoid obstacles. Ian wrote up a post mortem of his game jam experience.
IGDA members Sabrina Haskell, Shawn Patton, and Jason Pratt with their Team Thailand created "XO Maze", a collaborative maze game. XO Maze is a four player maze game where players must work together to help each other find their avatar's head hidden somewhere in the maze and then reach the exit as quickly as possible. XO Maze was honored to be voted the favorite game of the jam by the kid judges!
Congratulations all participants of the jam! We hope to see more events like this in the Pittsburgh area.
Posted by PittsburghIGDA on December 15, 2007 11:20 PM
Last few months recap!
The blog has been pretty quiet for the past couple months but PIGDA has been having regular meetings.
In March, Justin Truman of Pandemic Studios wowed 35 PIGDA attendees with his talk on Pandemic's upcoming 'Saboteur' game. Justin was kind enough to bring along his 360 dev kit to give us an early first taste of the game. He answered a lot of member questions about technical achievements in the game including animation techniques and streaming world methodology.
In April PIGDA held its first downtown Pittsburgh studio crawl. The downtown crawl included two locations- Etcetera Edutainment, a company spun off from Carnegie Mellon's ETC, and The Art Institute of Pittsburgh. Though the event was sparsely attended compared to last fall's South Side crawl, the content was classy. Both Etcetera & AIP gave strong showings- the Pittsburgh entertainment industry is young but growing!
Posted by PittsburghIGDA on May 21, 2007 11:29 AM | Comments (0)
PIGDA Photo Album
Pictures from PIGDA events can now be found at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/pittsburghigda/
Currently our only photos are from the January 2007 board game night.
If anyone has photos from past events, please contact igda@schellgames.com
Posted by PittsburghIGDA on February 18, 2007 07:30 PM | Comments (0)
PIGDA 2007 Kickoff Game Night
Welcome to 2007.
To start off the new year we'd like to invite everyone to take a break from their PC's and Wii's and Xbox's and PS3's and join us for a night of BG's- that's Board Games.
This coming Friday, January 26th, Schell Games will be hosting the revival of PIGDA Board Game night. Games begin at 7 and will run till 10 . There will be board games of all types and calibers. Bring your own if you like. We'll be ordering pizza during the first half hour so also bring a few dollars for the pizza pot.
The location is Schell's new space (above Shootz) at 2313 E. Carson St. Look for the "Pittsburgh Business Times" sign.
Posted by PittsburghIGDA on January 20, 2007 11:18 PM | Comments (0)