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It's been a while

and we are chugging along, slowly but surely, forward.

Yadu Rajiv

May 10, 2023

Hello Everyone. Hope y'all are having a good week. This is not really an announcement of any kind, but wanted to remind all the folks who are here especially if you are new, about all the things we (try) to do. 😊 As I write this post, I realise that this is in a way, me taking stock too.

I keep telling everyone I meet that gamedev.in is a culmination of all the stuff that we as a group of volunteers have been doing over the past ~15 years. Back in 2014, I wrote a similar post on the IGDABangalore blog just so that I didn’t forget all the stuff we did 🙈. If you like a walk down memory lane with me, as well as get some pretext to this post, do have a look at that blogpost as well - https://www.igdabangalore.org/2014/04/a-bit-of-history.html

The gamedev.in Discord Server

This discord community server was setup on Wed May 09 2018 15:18:01 GMT+0530 (India Standard Time) 😅 and is now 5 years old. It now has about ~3320 people in it. Since it is a community server, you can find it via discord discovery as well as has its own page on the discord website.

Happy Birthday to our tiny discord 🥳

Most of the links I'm going to share, you can find on gamedev.in, so even if you don't remember all of them, you can still remember that one and should be good to go 😁

Pre-discord, we had our existence split between a facebook group, a google group (where we started, I think), a discourse and maybe a whatsapp group too (not entirely sure though). Facebook was and is horrible if you didn’t live in the moment. It was terrible at search and finding any valuable information that may have been posted before. Whatsapp, for a chat app, was terrible with having structured meaningful conversations and was held together primarily by FOMO and being just available on your phone and having access to groups without any extra effort. We did setup an oldschool phpbb forum, a vanilla forum and a discourse (the demise of which I wrote about briefly), which all died mostly due to inactivity. A large part of my early internet years has been on forums/groups and irc/chats; in many cases, you used forums to find help (among other things), but there was a deliberate slowness which forced you to try and solve problems while you waited for help; and if you did solve the problem, you go back and tell people about how you solved it too. Even bigger indie forums like TIGSource haven’t seen numbers like it has since 2013, so I didn’t expect much when we saw our activity slowly decline. We did although run a Slack in 2017 which was great, although the one thing that we really wanted, the ability to search through your conversations was missing beyond a point if you didn’t buy licenses for all your users. Since we were never a non profit, we couldn’t even apply for any benefits back then. Enter discord, which seems to have worked to an extent, but maybe not to Whatsapp level instant adoption 😅 A lot of changes and work happened primarily post the discord coming alive.

An invite link to our discord can be found here

BYOG

If I’m going chronologically with the links, our oldest initiative is probably the BYOG. The first one happened in July of 2010, which wasn’t more than a small group of devs meeting up and doing random things. The BYOG in its current incarnation is an annual jam that we do with the IndiaGDC conference.

The BYOG is run by Chirag Chopra and Vivek Jha along with the IndiaGDC conference.

You can find out more about the BYOG here - https://byog.in

Demo Day

The Demo Day goes back to our IGDABangalore days. Since all the folks who ran the IGDABangalore chapter (including me) got busy with things (and also gamedev.in) it made sense to try to revive it under the gamedev.in banner. We did an online Demo Day back in 2020 (dd8) and the latest edition (dd9) took place last Saturday in Bangalore.

The last Demo Day was hosted by Rishikanth Somayaji and Xigma Games

To know more and keep up to date about DemoDays please visit - <being updated>

The Blog & Podcast

This blog and subsequent podcast came out the necessity to document what was happening in the scene, interesting people and their work. I know that we are not the most consistent publication, but we do try 🙈

The contributors to the blog and podcast are Arjun Nair, Bharath M. Palavalli, Binigya Dahal, Chirag Chopra, Joel Johnson, Kinshuk Sunil, Rishikanth Somayaji, Shagun Shah, Vivek Jha, Yadu Rajiv

The blog can be found here - https://gamedev.in &
the podcast here - https://gamedev.in/podcast

The Directory

I think it was Shruti Verma (of Epic Games) who compiled a list of game companies in India as a Google sheet way back when. I eventually set out to update that list and then make it into a portal where people could add their own companies. The latest incarnation of that project lives on as an Appsheet 🤷 Every now and then someone (mostly students) would ask me about finding a job or finding people to work with etc and this has been invaluable. The new version of the directory tries to keep things simpler and useful.

The directory is maintained by Yadu Rajiv

The game company’s directory can be found here

The People Page

It has always been very difficult to find people in the games industry. One of the biggest reasons for us to focus on community building activities was this. I still think that the amount of people who are visible or part of the discord etc are a fraction of the people working in games in India. The LinkedIn page for my current employer says that it has close to 300 people in the company and I know for a fact that out of that 300, less than 10 are on the discord. The people page was an attempt to make gamedevs visible to others, potential employers, collaborators and folks new to the industry. The people page also fascilitate mentorship oppurtunites via people’s profiles.

The people page was developed and maintained by Yadu Rajiv

The Indian games industry people page is here - https://people.gamedev.in &
a list of mentors can be viewed here - https://people.gamedev.in/#mentor

Campfire & Coffee House

During the pandemic and the lockdowns we saw so many groups on with family, friends from work, college etc. Campfire was fashioned after the GIG as a way for gamedevs in India to catch up, have a chat, relax and not be super lonely during their daily grind. You’ll see folks on the discord hounding Vivek Jha (who runs Campire) for info about when the next Campfire is.

While the Campifre happens maybe once a month, the Coffee House is Chirag Chopra’s brainchild which is a weekly casual catchup later in the night every wednesdays, where pretty much everything goes 🙈

For more details on Campfire check here - <being updated> &
for our late night Coffee House, drop by our discord any Wednesday at 10PM

Steam Curator Page

We also try to maintain a Steam Curator page where we try to list down games from Indian creators. If you know of a game that is not listed there, drop by the discord and let us know! 💖

The Steam Curator page is maintained with the help of many others by Yadu Rajiv

You can find it here

Gamedev.in on social media

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/gamedev-in
Twitter - https://twitter.com/gamedev_india
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/gamedev_india/
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/Gamedevin
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/gamedev.ind

If you have any suggestions regarding all the things we do and anything you think we should be doing, please let us know. If you think any of these things will help you or your friends in their gamedev journey, please do share it with them and do drop by the discord and say hello 🌸

Gamedev.in