Here is a short summary of last night’s Mount Royal Game Society Indie Game Developer meetup, at l’Amère à Boire.

This was their 4th monthly meetup, and even with the high Montreal heat, the 3rd floor was packed. Good thing we had beer!

Thanks to Nick and Stephen for planning the event!

Stephen demonstrated a few game creation tools for people wanted to create games but aren’t programmers. The first one was a Windows 3.1 application called Klik & Play (running under the DOSBox emulator). The point and click interface is pretty intuitive and even comes with stock images to play with. He created a test game “awkward diner” involving an animated man and a woman and some tables.

Stephen then showed us a similar and more recent tool, Construct which is open-source. It doesn’t have included images to play with, but it does have some built-it sprite behaviors and special effects (shaders, blending). He easily made a happy face move across the screen and have it loop around the screen when it reaches the edge, with no programming required.

The rest of the evening was a mix of indie game demos that people wanted to share and discussing with other aspiring developers.

The first game showed was called Non-Human, a 2D side scroller, based on an old NES cartridge Action-52. It seems to have been built using the Game Maker tool (correct me if I’m wrong).

From then on, discussion was loud that I couldn’t hear the other game titles. There was an space-retro-RTS that looked pretty cool, and a 3D Tron light cycle kind of game.

A few indie developer friends, Jonathan and Jean-Francois:

Well that’s it for this month’s meeting. I’m looking forward to the next one! We’ll let you know when we have more details of when and where it will take place.

(Also posted on NextMontreal.com)

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2. Interview: Erin Robinson talks Puzzle Bots (Montreal indie developer)
3. Game Developer Announces Salary Survey Call, Now Including Indies
4. Mount Royal Game Society : September 2010 Meetup
5. Crankshaft Games – Indie Game Success in Montreal

Tags: indie, meetup, montreal