Monthly Rust Gamedev Meetup

[AngelOnFira]

I think it would be cool to have a monthly meetup 📆 This would be a place for people to meet others in the community, see some other projects, and learn about other cool initiatives.

For the format, I imagine it would probably run for around 1-2 hours, depending on attendance. The schedule might look like this:

• 10 mins: Welcome / Announcements
• 1 hour: Lightning talks / showcase / long-form talk
• 30 mins (until the official ending, could go longer): breakout rooms for questions to presenters, breakout rooms for chatting, general discussion

People could sign up for a slot at the beginning of each meeting by just messaging the organizer, and then the organizer can assign timeslots accordingly. I don't think there should be too much overhead on prep if it works like this.

I think it would be best to run it on a weekend day so that as many people as possible can attend. Likely sometime around 16:00 - 18:00 GMT would be nice, as it should provide a good buffer for other timezones around the world. I like the idea of "every second Saturday of the month", as we should have the newsletter done by then, and we can discuss any large items from it. It will also give us a deadline for it 😅

I'd love to hear any other thoughts, recommendations, and name ideas 🤔 !

[ozkriff]

Btw, for the last two months, @Eliah-Lakhin organizes Russian-speaking weekly (Sun, 16:00 MSK) Rust gamedev calls in Discord: https://youtube.com/channel/UCTTBX7KieuTsGyWxSCsv-Dw/videos

In general, they're for weekly updates and structured like this:

1. During the first section (that is streamed and recorded) participants showcase their weekly progress and answer some short questions.
2. After that, there's a section for free discussions about anything related to updates or just Rust gamedev in general.

[AlexEne]

I like @ozkriff's meetup description as it's a bit like a stand-up session and chat. Might help boost people's motivation these days. Now, if anyone wants to do a 20-45 minute presentation on a subject, we should absolutely go for it, but being a bit more relaxed may help attendence. (also talks are a pain to prepare :D)

[mrDIMAS]

Really good idea! Where will the meetup take place? Discord?

[AlexEne]

That's a great question. I'd vote Discord, but right now we don't have a voice discord room, just the text one in the rust programming language discord. Let's see if we can set some room up if we choose to go with discord.
The official rust discord may be a bit more strict on room creation, worst case we can requet it in the Game Development in Rust server.

[aclysma]

I'd be up to do a call. The old time slot was 18:00 UTC on Wednesday on google hangouts. (README has link to the call). Should we do it this Wednesday, Dec. 23 18:00 UTC? My schedule is flexible for the next couple weeks so I don't mind a different time/date, just throwing an idea out :)

Possible discussion topics:

• We should probably all introduce ourselves (it's been a while and we may have new people!), mention what we're working on/interested in.
• Other ideas (probably too much for a single meetup):
  • Discuss what we did in 2020
  • Brainstorm ideas for 2021 (we could refer back to prior surveys for ideas)
  • Discuss raw-window-handle maintenance #94 (raw window maintenance status)
  • Review https://github.com/rust-gamedev/wg/blob/master/known_issues.md - potentially add/remove/update things on the list?
  • Something else?

I like the idea of keeping it light and social. :)

[AngelOnFira]

I'd be up to do a call. The old time slot was 18:00 UTC on Wednesday on google hangouts. (README has link to the call). Should we do it this Wednesday, Dec. 23 18:00 UTC? My schedule is flexible for the next couple weeks so I don't mind a different time/date, just throwing an idea out :)

I think doing a call would be good, but this meetup wouldn't be as much for administration purposes as it would be for the community to hang out. I still think the Saturday timeslot would be the best for the meetup. It might be worth making a new issue for reviving the weekly meeting, or maybe using Github Discussions for it? (@ozkriff you might need to set up discussions on the repo, I don't see it there)

That's a great question. I'd vote Discord, but right now we don't have a voice discord room, just the text one in the rust programming language discord. Let's see if we can set some room up if we choose to go with discord.
The official rust discord may be a bit more strict on room creation, worst case we can requet it in the Game Development in Rust server.

I think making this meetup a Discord call on the Rust Gamedev server would be ideal, as it would pull people to it. It also seems a bit out of scope of general Rust, although we can definitely advertise it there. Also, it could have a section set up for it, with text channels, voice channels, and whatever perms are needed.

[Lokathor]

It's always awkward trying to sync Europe and North America, but doing it on a Saturday would at least help quite a bit towards getting a good attendence.

[AngelOnFira]

I think 18:00 GMT might even allow for some Asia that's up later, which would be good. I'm thinking that even 16:00 GMT would be nice, as morning for NA isn't the worst. That would make it even more accessible for Asia/Australia.

[Eliah-Lakhin]

@AngelOnFira Hi Forest! Any updates on the first meetup? I would love to join :)

[AngelOnFira]

I think I've gotten some really good insight here, so I'll try to move forward with it. We'll see how the first iteration goes, and then revise the implementation if we need to 😄

The details that I'm planning now are:

Date: Second Saturday of the month (January 9th 2021)
Time: 16:00 GMT
Location: Rust Gamedev Discord (https://discord.gg/yNtPTb2)
^ Sidenote; is this an official Rust Gamedev server? If not it would be good to work with them to make it so

Simple "form" for lightning talks:

If you want to show off a quick demo of your game or work, please message @AngelOnFira to get put on the list :100:

[AngelOnFira]

Oh no, it's already almost the second Saturday 😅 we'll give it a try, and see how it goes. I'm going to reach out to some different outlets and see who shows up. My current gameplan is as follows:

• Make a simple poster
• Prepare Twitter post for @rust_gamedev (@ozkriff will this be ok?)
• Make an announcement on the Discord
• Prepare a simple schedule, and format for people who want to show off some work

If there are any more steps that people think I should take, or outlets to reach out to, feel free to mention them 😃 but I think word of mouth will do pretty ok for getting a pretty good attendance.

[ozkriff]

This can be closed now, right?