Lexington’s rise as a hub for video game development in recent years is due in no small part to a Lexington-based nonprofit dedicated to fostering a healthy community.
RunJumpDev works to help grow and cultivate the game development community in Kentucky. Meeting every Tuesday night at Awesome Inc. – the East Main Street hub for tech-based startups – group members network and share knowledge, whether it’s a specific bug with a game in development or something completely out of left field.
On April 30 the group is partnering with Eastern Kentucky University’s Gaming Institute to host the inaugural Vector Conference, which will bring experts from diverse fields for keynote speeches and panel discussion on the future of gaming.
The conference brings together two of RunJumpDev’s main threads: education and community.
“In game development, you have communities because indie development is hard,” said Amanda Hudgins, an independent game developer and board member for the local game development organization RunJumpDev. “It’s complicated and poverty-inducing for a lot of people. You have people sleeping on couches. And that causes people to band together, create art together, travel together and stuff like that.”
During one recent meeting, two developers talked about the different kinds of knowledge they are trying to get from the group.
“I’m in the process of starting a company,” said Tim Knowlton, who is also a member of RunJumpDev’s board. “Not the kind of ‘start a company, get employees’ kind of thing, but a legal entity.”
As part of his plan, Knowlton is looking to this community to learn the procedures necessary to license other people’s music for his games.
“Before I started seriously pursuing this stuff , I probably spent full-time thinking about business: marketing and taxes and stuff ,” said Kevin Overall, a regular attendee to the Tuesday night group. “But things that are more basic, like audio, I never would’ve thought of. But there are people here who do those things.”
Leveraging higher education
Aside from helping people with their projects, RunJumpDev President John Meister said, education is a primary focus of the organization. During monthly meetings at Bluegrass Community and Technical College’s Newtown Campus, members teleconference with professionals in the field – including experts in areas ranging from voice acting to architecture.
The pool of higher education experts in the field has grown. In 2014, EKU started its Gaming Institute, which offers the state’s first bachelor’s degree focusing on game design. (Last month, the Princeton Review ranked EKU’s Gaming Institute 50th among 150 similar university programs in the U.S. and Canada.) Kentucky State University also offers a bachelor’s of science in digital gaming, entertainment and simulation, and BCTC now offers an associate’s degree in video game design as part of its information management and design degree. RunJumpDev has worked with all of these programs, from advisory meetings to helping develop conferences and other events.
The group also has been helping the Kentucky Department of Education with secondary education curriculum.
“We’ve been working with Jessamine County,” Meister said. “They tell a great story about how they had eight or 10 kids in their technology curriculum. Then they started offering video game stuff and they grew to like 150.”
He links that growth to the excitement video games engender.
“It’s very creative and very accessible,” he said. “It’s not just programming; it’s writing and graphic design and all those things. You can teach these skills in middle and high school, and then they’re learning about all these new technology skills. And they’re being collaborative and working together with people that have different points of view. Those types of skills are what you need in today’s workforce.”
Conference brings influence
As a major part of its education initiative, RunJumpDev is collaborating with EKU for the upcoming Vector conference, a development-themed conference taking place at EKU’s Richmond campus.
“The most important thing is that our students make games,” said George Landon, director of the EKU Gaming Institute.
He said the program also is working to bring in students from other majors who might see career opportunities related to the video game industry. “What we’re trying to do is give our students electives in other supporting courses, things like audio engineering or film scoring, creative writing, drawing – things that you really need,” Landon added. “We have a student now who’s a music major, and he really wants to score and write for games. He’s working on a team that’s working on a game right now.”
Kentucky-made, with pride
RunJumpDev offers interested parties the chance to meet with developers and find out exactly what it takes to put a game “onto paper,” emphasizing that it doesn’t require a trip to a bigger city.
In recent years, Lexington has become home to noteworthy development companies including Super Soul, FrogDice and Gun Media.
Hudgins said she’s had people in the industry from San Francisco or Chicago “apologize” when they learn she’s based in Kentucky. “Oh, you’re sorry? I’m not,” she said, summarizing her response. “My game dev community’s great.”
In addition to the Vector conference, the organization will host its inaugural gaming convention, LexPlay, in October. Meister described the convention as “a platform for local developers to have an opportunity to show off all their games to thousands of people in the community.”
“Hopefully those people will buy their games and connect with local developers,” Meister said.