http://www.clickshakegames.com/forum/tags/conference Imaginitive Game Development en-US Mon, 04 Jan 2021 03:34:52 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 q http://www.clickshakegames.com/forum/search.php http://www.clickshakegames.com/forum/topic/ohiogamedevcom-promoting-game-dev-in-ohio-a-personal-story-from-steve#post-5655 Mon, 15 Oct 2012 10:28:29 +0000 SteveCastro 5655@http://www.clickshakegames.com/forum/ <p>I recently started <a href="http://www.ohiogamedev.com/" rel="nofollow">OhioGameDev.com</a>, a site encouraging game developers to come, stay and grow in Ohio, and promoting those who are already making games here. I'll talk more about the site further down the post, but first a personal story...</p> <p>I was born in Ohio and have lived here most of my life. In my senior year of high school I was offered a scholarship at DeVry University in Columbus, Ohio, and was also accepted to DigiPen, Nintendo's school of game development in Washington State. Would I stay in Ohio or dive completely into my gaming dreams, leaving my family and friends a fourth of a world away? It was an important decision that would shape the rest of my life.</p> <p>Ultimately I chose to stay in Ohio and go to DeVry, and have lived in the Columbus area ever since. I studied general programming, but kept developing games on the side. After a stint working with business software, I returned to my dream of making games and began looking for a partner in order to go full-time, which eventually became ClickShake Games in January, 2010.</p> <p>Ohio is a nice state, with much lower cost of living and lots of education opportunities, as well as a decent tax incentive for developing games here. You could move to another state and work for a company already making games, or you can stay local, take some risks to push games as an artform while making the games you want to make, and help the economy by starting up a new small business. </p> <p>For these reasons I've setup <a href="http://www.ohiogamedev.com/" rel="nofollow">OhioGameDev.com</a> to put the spotlight on game dev activity in the Buckeye State and to grow this business in my state. Soon I plan to flesh out the site with a better design and more resources. I'm also working with some other devs locally to put on a game dev conference possibly in 2013, so keep an eye out for that on that site.</p> <p>Please respond to this post or use the Contact Us link at the bottom of the page to let me know if you have any comments or questions about this. Let me know if you or someone you know is doing something game dev related in Ohio that should be linked on the site. </p>