Hi, my name is Yadu. I'm one of the co-founders of the GameDev India community, and I'm here to ask for your help in taking our community to the next phase of its evolution.
Before that, let me tell you a small story about how we got started. Kinshuk, our other co-founder, and I met almost twenty years ago, back in 2006, when I was hired to work on making an autorun-enabled interactive CD in Shockwave/Flash. At the time, I had moved to Delhi all the way from Kerala, and it was nothing short of serendipity to meet someone who also shared a similar interest in music, writing, and making games; heck, we even had deviantArt accounts.
After the project, we stayed in touch and tried to work on some games, which never really took off as we were still figuring out how to even make games. The only thing I knew was Flash and ActionScript, and I was trying to get my head around open-source frameworks and engines like Ogre3D and IRRLICHT. Our work brought us back together again, this time revolving around open-source community building and events.
It was at this point, in 2009, that we realised there was no real community for people making games. We knew virtually no one, nor could we find anyone working on games at that time. With our open-source community-building experience, we set out to create a space for like-minded game developers who wanted to meet, talk about games, share what they were working on, and collaborate on projects. So, we finally got a Google Group going, kicked off our early in-person meetups and the BYOG jam, and the rest, well, is history123.
Since then, we've worked with other like-minded folks across India and beyond to get our initiatives to where they are today. Jams are much more mainstream (heck, at this point, we’re talking about jam fatigue 😅) than they were 15 years ago. There are active local communities that meet up, talk about games, and share their work. There are industry bodies, conferences, and we are more connected than ever.
So, what now? We want to do more, and to plan a course for that journey, we need your help. I humbly request you to take some time to let us know how we can grow and evolve our community through this survey.
Thank you for reading 💖 and please share the survey with your friends in the industry - gamedev.in/cs1 ✨
For a lot of folks who are new to this, maybe this will give you an idea of where we are coming from and the void we were/are trying to fill - https://groups.google.com/g/ingdin/c/fhj_yJXbDBk
Some notes from the past about the people who made up our community and the things we did together - https://www.igdabangalore.org/2014/04/a-bit-of-history.html
Another note on communities that we build side by side - https://www.igdabangalore.org/2015/10/game-development-communities-in-india.html