All posts by Amanda Wallace

21 Feb 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Vector 2017 Permalink

Coming from a Distance? Why Not Stay at a Holiday Inn Express?

Sticky Post By On February 21, 2017

Hey folks! Coming from a distance to our games conference? Why not stay at the Holiday Inn Express in Richmond, KY?

We have blocked off a group of rooms at the Holiday Inn Express at a lower, group rate. This means you can stay for a little bit less, and other traveling game developers are bound to be staying there as well. All you have to do to get this lower group rate is to call the hotel directly at 859-624-4055 and mention that you are with “Vector Video Game Design Conference” when you set up your reservations.

HolidayInnExpress

Holiday Inn Express in Richmond is located at:

1990 Colby Taylor Dr

Richmond, KY 40475

 

celebration

Haven’t purchased your ticket yet? There’s still time (til March 1) to get that Early Bird discount. Check out our Eventbrite for more information.

20 Feb 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Speaker Announcements, Vector 2017 Permalink

Speaker Announcement 2017 – Aleissia Laidacker

Sticky Post By On February 20, 2017

a picture of a woman, aleissia laidacker, standing with her hair dyed a sort of cotton candy grey and wearing a dress with tattoo illustrations on it

We’re pleased to announce our next keynote speaker, Aleissia Laidacker!

Aleissia is a game programmer-designer-director who has been working as a programmer for 16 years and developing games at Ubisoft for 10 of them. She was Lead AI on multiple Assassin’s Creed games. Her passion for design has pushed her teams to think about why we are developing our games rather than just how we develop them. She empowers her teams to think outside of the box through game jams and experimentation. As part of the Diversity Committee at Ubisoft, she mentors kids and gives talks at schools to inspire young girls to pursue careers in tech and games.

We’re super pleased that Aleissia will be joining us this year!

a gif of skeletor, from the he-man television series, pumping his hands in the air in excitement

You can still buy tickets for Vector ’17 at discounted, early bird pricing. You can find out all the ticket prices at our Eventbrite.

16 Feb 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Speaker Announcements, Vector 2017 Permalink

Speaker Announcement 2017 – Daniel “C418” Rosenfeld

Sticky Post By On February 16, 2017

A photo of DJ Daniel C418 Rosenfeld performing in front of a screen ad holding multiple tablets and macbooks.A photo of DJ Daniel C418 Rosenfeld performing in front of a screen ad holding multiple tablets and macbooks. He is youthful and smiling at one of the macbooksWe are very pleased to announce speaker and performer Daniel “C418” Rosenfeld.

Daniel Rosenfeld is a composer, game designer and consultant. In 2008 he teamed up with Markus “Notch” Persson to become the sound designer and composer for Minecraft. He’s currently working hard releasing the third and biggest Minecraft soundtrack, while also developing his own games with a heavy focus on sound design. He’s also a big dumb nerd.

In addition to leading  a talk at Vector 2017, Daniel will be performing at a concert on Friday April 21 at Eastern Kentucky University. Tickets to the concert are going to be considered a part of admission when you purchase tickets for the event as a whole.

giphy (1)

You can purchase Early Bird tickets for the event through March 1 on Eventbrite.

09 Feb 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Vector 2017 Permalink

Now Accepting Round Table Submissions

Sticky Post By On February 9, 2017

We are super excited to announce our round table and talk submissions portal for Vector 2017. We use roundtables both as traditional round table discussions as well as openings for people to talk about information.

Vector is a game conference held at Eastern Kentucky University on April 21-22, 2017 in collaboration with the EKU Gaming Institute, the Richmond office of the Kentucky Innovation Network, RunJumpDev, and TechBase 10. Vector is a celebration of local developers, a well as a chance to network with leaders and peers in the field of game design and development.

Vector features networking, talks from industry leaders, workshops and round table discussions.

via GIPHY

For this upcoming event we are issuing a call for round table discussions. These will be informal discussions where the person submitting the talk would lead a discussion about the submitted topic. Topics can be diverse; specific or highly general. We will look over the submitted talks and make a decision in the coming year depending on submissions and interest.
Read more

09 Feb 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Vector 2017 Permalink

Speaker Announcement 2017 – Mark Mandel

Sticky Post By On February 9, 2017

a picture of a man, Caucasian, smiling at the camera. He is Mark MandelWe are super excited to have Mark Mandel back for Vector 2017.

Mark Mandel is a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud Platform and one half of the Google Cloud Platform Podcast. Hailing from Australia, Mark built his career developing backend systems for over 15 years and authoring and contributing to several widely adopted open source projects. When he’s not building infrastructure in the cloud for games, he’s constantly looking for new and interesting things he can do with Docker containers, playing with his dog and reading too much fantasy literature.

This year, Mark will be leading a talk on Scaling Multiplayer Games with Open Source.

“Awesome! You’ve built the next Overwatch! You have your game client and your dedicated game server ready to power game sessions as your players duke it out in your new amazing PvP tournament or MOBA death match.

Now you’ve just got to write code to spin up a game server for each match, power up machines to run those game servers, autoscale them based on server load, handle log aggregation, health checking, deploying new versions of your game servers, and…

Wow. That’s a lot.

In this talk we will look at open source projects we will use to automate scaling both our game servers and their supporting infrastructure, with relatively low effort compared to coding this infrastructure by hand. Finally we will run a Unity based multiplayer game on our newly built infrastructure, so you can see it all in action!”

a group of characters from Bobs Burgers excitedly raising their arms together. Jean is wearing a very strange green jacket

We are incredibly excited to have Mark again this year! You can still purchase your Early Bird tickets on Eventbrite now.

07 Feb 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Vector 2017 Permalink

Speaker Announcement 2017 – Lisa Brown

Sticky Post By On February 7, 2017

Lisa

Lisa Brown is an independent developer, formerly a game designer at Insomniac Games and a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. Since going indie, she has released several experimental personal games (Imaginal, Lisa vs. the Tornado) and livestreams game development and game design analysis to help others get better at making games. Lisa loves advising students, participating in game jams, and exploring alternative control schemes for games.

Lisa has a pretty awesome website, where you can check out her games and Patreon and see all of the cool stuff that she’s into.

We’re super excited that Lisa is joining us for the second year! She was a fantastic speaker last year and we’re very excited that she will be joining us again.

 

You can pick up tickets at Early Bird pricing now!

15 Sep 2016
Sticky Post By Posted in Vector 2016 Permalink

Vector Keynote Talks Now on YouTube

Sticky Post By On September 15, 2016

Hey folks!

We are pleased to announce that the Vector 2016 Keynote talks are now live! That includes most of the talks (except for the last one) that were featured in the main conference room. The talks are all included in a single playlist for your viewing convenience, which you can see here.

via GIPHY

The talks included in the video playlist are as follows:

We are also pleased to announce the dates for our upcoming convention, April 14-15, 2017. 

20 May 2016
Sticky Post By Posted in Vector 2016 Permalink

John Meister Intro to Unity Slides Now Available

Sticky Post By On May 20, 2016

The slides from John Meisters workshop presentation Intro to Unity are now live. Always wanted to see this Unity thing that everyone has been talking about? Super interested in making games, and want to see more about Unity? Here’s a great starting point.

John has 15 yrs of experience as a software engineer, developer and project leader. Before co-founding Super Soul, he spent 9 yrs as a software architect. John is also Founder and President of RunJumpDev, a non-profit that promotes game development in Lexington, KY.

Intro to Unity slide

You can see the full slideshow here. And you can also check out more about John Meister through his company Super Soul.

20 May 2016
Sticky Post By Posted in Vector 2016 Permalink

AJ Ryan Game Accessibility Slides Now Available

Sticky Post By On May 20, 2016

AJ Ryan was one of our speakers at Vector 16, and while we weren’t able to capture the audio in his room, he has been kind enough to offer us his presentation slides for his discussion on Game Accessibility.

AJ started Inclusive Games so that gamers that require accessibility options, like himself, can be represented in the industry while having fun experiences one can expect with any great video game. When he was younger, games without accessibility options frustrated him. As we move into a new era of video games, he’s going to make sure accessible gaming is a part of it.

gameaccessibility

You can see and download the PDF version of his slides here. You can also find more about AJ on twitter at @ONLYUSEmeFEET.

20 May 2016
Sticky Post By Posted in Vector 2016 Permalink

Wrap-Up Video for Vector 2016

Sticky Post By On May 20, 2016

Vector ’16, a collaborative game development show put together with the folks from TechBase 10, the Richmond office of the Kentucky Innovation network, and EKU Gaming Institute. This is our thank you/wrap up video of our 2016 event. We were blown away by the attendance, the speakers, the students who showed off their games at the Showcase and every one of our sponsors. Thank you for coming out to the event and making it such a success, and if you weren’t able to attend this year, be sure to come out to Vector 17!

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