vector 2017 | Vector

03 Apr 2017

Sticky Post By Amanda Wallace Posted in Bronze Sponsor, Sponsor, Vector 2017 Permalink

Sponsorship Announcement: I Need Diverse Games

Sticky Post By Amanda Wallace On April 3, 2017

We are super excited to announce returning event sponsor I Need Diverse Games! With their help, we’ll be offering a diversity scholarship for our 2-Day badges. We’re excited to sponsor diverse individuals in the community and to bring their voices to the conference.

Don’t Know I Need Diverse Games? You should.

Their info:

We are dedicated to helping those that want to bring more diversity to the art of gaming. We will do this by sponsoring attendance at diverse gaming conventions, promoting those that are making diverse games, indie projects and presenting on the topics of diversity in gaming at conventions. One of our goals is to have more articles, to pay people for their contributions, and to do more tangible things for the community.

We also want to help others get to conventions, share their work if funding is an issue. We would love your support to send aspiring game devs to conventions like GDC, IGDA events in their city, GeekGirlCon, HavenCon, GaymerX, and other places where gaming and diversity are parts of the conversation. We want to do this by highlighting work by marginalized, underrepresented people in the industry, getting their voices heard and their work seen be it a game, articles, etc.

Find out more about I Need Diverse Games at their website or follow them on Twitter!

A smiling woman, African American, bouncing excitedly. She's wearing a white shirt with red text that reads "girl power"

Haven’t grabbed your ticket yet? Go ahead and grab your ticket at our EventBrite here. If you want to apply for one of the diversity scholarships, just email us at vector@runjumpdev.org, or contact us through the contact form at the bottom of the page.

27 Mar 2017

Sticky Post By Amanda Wallace Posted in Speaker Announcements, Vector 2017 Permalink

Speaker Announcement 2017: Kurt Vincent & the Lost Arcade

Sticky Post By Amanda Wallace On March 27, 2017

A black and white still of a man resting on an arcade cabinet. This years event will feature a showing of the 26 Ares film The Lost Arcade.

Written and produced by Irene Chin and directed by Kurt Vincent, The Lost Arcade is an intimate story of a once-ubiquitous cultural phenomenon on the edge of extinction, especially in New York City, which one had video arcades by the dozen. These arcades were as much social hubs to meet up and hang out as they were public arenas for gamers to demonstrate their skills. But by 2011, only a handful remained, most of them corporate affairs, leaving the legendary Chinatown Fair on Mott Street as the last hold-out of old-school arcade culture. Opened in the early 1940’s, Chinatown Fair, famous for its dancing and tic tac toe playing chickens, survived turf wars between rival gangs, increases in rent, and the rise of the home gaming system to become an institution and a haven for kids from all five boroughs. A documentary portrait of the Chinatown Fair and its denizens, the Lost Arcade is a eulogy for and a celebration of the arcade gaming community, tenacity, and the Dance Dance Revolutionary spirit.

The movie will be shown at the Planetarium next door to the Carl D. Perkins building, and admission is free with your ticket Saturday night as a closing event. A Q&A with director Kurt Vincent will follow.

still from The Lost Arcade, showing a man and a woman sitting next to each other in an arcade cockpit, faces focused on action off screen

Kurt Vincent is a Brooklyn based filmmaker. His film projects include OUT OF PLACE, a documentary about the unlikely surfing community in Cleveland, Ohio. He shot and produced THE BACHELORETTE PARTY, a short experimental film directed by Irene Chin, which premiered at Anthology Film Archives in 2014. Kurt co-founded the distribution company 26 Aries in 2016.

If you haven’t had a chance to purchase your ticket to Vector yet, you still can! All pass holders for Vector will get admission to the film showing.

10 Mar 2017

Sticky Post By Amanda Wallace Posted in Vector 2017 Permalink

Vector Offering Unity Certified Developers Exam

Sticky Post By Amanda Wallace On March 10, 2017

Vector is offering the Unity Certified Developers Exam, Friday, April 21, 2017. This exam is offered at a discount for Vector conference attendees, $200 including a 2-Day pass to the conference itself.

The Unity Developers exam is a way to show employers that you have the knowledge and skills in this common games engine. Eastern Kentucky University Gaming Institute will be proctoring the examination.

To find out more about the Unity Certified Developers Exam, be sure to read the FAQ. If you’re interested in participating in our test site at Vector 2017, be sure to buy the tickets in advance. There will be no at the door admissions for the test at the conference. You must pre-register.

20 Feb 2017

Sticky Post By Amanda Wallace Posted in Speaker Announcements, Vector 2017 Permalink

Speaker Announcement 2017 – Aleissia Laidacker

Sticky Post By Amanda Wallace 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.

09 Feb 2017

Sticky Post By Amanda Wallace Posted in Vector 2017 Permalink

Now Accepting Round Table Submissions

Sticky Post By Amanda Wallace 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 Amanda Wallace Posted in Vector 2017 Permalink

Speaker Announcement 2017 – Mark Mandel

Sticky Post By Amanda Wallace On February 9, 2017

a picture of a man, Caucasian, smiling at the camera. He is Mark Mandel We 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 Amanda Wallace Posted in Vector 2017 Permalink

Speaker Announcement 2017 – Lisa Brown

Sticky Post By Amanda Wallace On February 7, 2017

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!