IGDA San Francisco

I’ve definitely gravitated toward the indie game community a lot in the past year. Honestly, it was something that I was barely even aware of before I started working on a game with Matt, but once I got invested in it, I was hooked. I mentioned the Full Indie Summit last week, which is part of the Vancouver scene and made my time there awesome. This time I want to mention the IGDA here in San Francisco.

For the record, IGDA is a large organization. It’s essentially a guild that you can join and get health benefits and support with your game dev… options which I have not yet been able to convince myself to spend the money on. But aside from the core association, there are often sponsored events which will take place around the world. You should look into how you might fit into your local branch.

It took me a while to get around to finding a community here in San Francisco. Part of that was that there was nothing that stood out to me as being directly comparable to Vancouver’s Full Indie which seems to be equal parts social and professional. The other part was simply that I felt that it was harder for me to to get invested in a new community while I was getting increasingly involved in getting out of concept stage of development and into the production stage.

But after a few months of living here, I finally felt the itch to get out there and be a part of the community. Last month I discovered the IGDA branch in San Francisco on meetup and went to a great discussion by Chris Hecker and  Jonathan Blow that was held at Dolby Labs. It was refreshing to listen to these two talk candidly about their opinions of the industry and what it’s like for them to be indie devs. The video’s worth checking out if you’ve got 100 minutes to kill.

At one point of their discussion, they mention Chris’ GDC 2013 Rant. It made the rounds shortly after GDC, so you may have already seen it; but here it is, just in case.