Hey everyone. A couple of fairly interesting things happened in the games industry in the two weeks since our last “official” meeting.

But first, here’s an upcoming event you might be interested in.

Unity Camp Edmonton

Unity Camp Edmonton is an event that is being held jointly by Unity and Microsoft. It’s free to participate.

It’s an all-day event happening on March 22nd starting at 8:30 am and ending at 5:00 pm. It seems to be mainly for those who have a Unity project on the go or want to develop for Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8. However, there will be beginner sessions in the morning for both 2D and 3D games by lead Unity personnel.

I’ll go over this more in-depth at the meeting. If you plan to go, you will have to register for the event.

The News

• Irrational Games, the studio behind BioShock and BioShock Infinite, lays off about 180 people. Ken Levine takes the remaining 15 or so employees to continue doing smaller digital titles.
• Coincidentally or not, in an interview with Gamasutra, Cliff Bleszinski makes the claim that he will “never make another disc-based game for the rest of [his] career.”
• Stephen Elop, the guy who had a clause in his contract to facilitate the sale of Nokia to Microsoft, is now in control of the division of Microsoft in charge of Xbox. This is the same guy who said that he would consider selling the Xbox portion of Microsoft altogether when he was still in the running for CEO of Microsoft (Before they landed on Satya Nadella).

Those are the topics we’ll be covering in our moderated chat.

The VGAD GitHub Organization

GitHub recently gave VGAD a free organization account with 10 free private repositories. We’re going to go over how we expect these to be used, and what the ground rules will be for collaborating and committing. There will be these ground rules:

• If you are hosting your project on a VGAD repository and are using VGAD resources, you should allow VGAD members to contribute to your project.
• Contributing is not the same as collaborating. VGAD will operate on the Contributor-Collaborator model. Each project will have one lead, plus collaborators who will have more of a say in design matters.
• All VGAD members will have read access to all VGAD projects, but only Collaborators will have write access. Contributors will be able to make changes by forking a repository and then making a Pull Request.
• Collaborators should also be using Pull Requests, but this is up to the discretion of the individual project lead.

I’ll go over this more in-depth and I’ll do a step-by-step walkthrough of getting your game project onto the GitHub and using issues.