Windsor, Ontario is known for a few things. Mostly car manufacturing and gambling at our hotspot city casino. If you live in Windsor, you probably work in one of these sectors. Windsor also has a vibrant comic book community that I hope continues to further define the city. Chances are these things define you if you live in the area for long.

Windsor also has a growing technology sector (well, the entire world does). Game developers still gravitate around Vancouver, Montreal or Vancouver to work in Canada, and living in Windsor I only knew of a couple other like-minded creatives in the area. Thankfully, directory website WEIG (Windsor-Essex Indie Games) and its related weekly meetup at Hackforge is helping bring this secluded community together. I’ll be giving a talk this month in May as its featured developer, the second of many more speakers to come.

Disclaimer: I am not the founder or organizer for WEIG or Hackforge, but I’m absolutely proud of what they are doing. Hackforge has slowly been growing over the last couple years to cover a wide variety of programming and hardware meetups for professionals and hobbyists. WEIG has 11 developers at the time of this writing, and I know that list still isn’t complete. Not bad after less than two active months. And technically, WEIG is a directory website rather than a group name – the official meetup is called “Order of the Indie Game Developers.”

I’ve seen Toronto and Ottawa with similar community groups. These things can be important for growth in the city. If you are a programmer, tech builder, or hacker of any form, please consider checking out Hackforge for their free events, and consider joining as a paid member. If you are remotely interesting in game development, check out our monthly meetups, this month on Monday, May 30, 2016. And please consider adding your game company / name under the WEIG directory at http://weig.ca/ .

And yes, I’ll be presenting my work this time. I like talking about myself, and I have a lot I want to talk about: the ease of game engines like Unity3D, the 2D /3D hybrid animation systems I use in my games, using Steam Greenlight to publish PC games, and exhibiting at public conventions across North America. I could talk about these and a lot more for hours, I’ll have to pick and choose what to include (this is supposed to be a more social event then a lecture).

As for animation… I’m slowly progressing further with new animation advancements for my next project, and hope to be able to talk about that more here soon. I’ll mention it a bit in my talk too.