The Youngstown Game Developers had our second annual game jam this past weekend. It was a great time and I learned a ton. It had been several months since doing any game dev stuff so I did spend a fair amount of time relearning Unity.

During the keynote, we were advised to avoid games with common mechanics like jumping. So of course I made a game about... jumping in the dark! Yeah, I know, not …

Couple of quick thoughts on GDEX this year:

• Big shout out to the Fate's Echo team! These guys are awesome and there game looks great! Just happened to meet them on the same day they met each other in person for the first time!
• Of all the games at the show, Collapsis from Wraith Games stood out with its simple, fun gameplay.
• The talk on arcade first development was very interesting. Enjoyed talking with the …

Recently attended Abstractions Conference in Pittsburgh. This was my first software-only conference. A few quick highlights from the convention:

• While I have no particular application in mind yet, Elixir sounds intriguing. For embedded systems, Nerves sound neat but maybe not quite ready for prime time.
• Joe Armstrong's idea of ubiquitous solar powered computing devices is quite interesting.
• Scott Hanselman gave a highly entertaining talk on the Cloud, JavaScript, and the evolution of web technologies. Think …

This past weekend, I participated in my first game jam. It was a lot of fun and a great learning opportunity; I learned more about game development in that 48 hours than in the past year. Here is a screenshot of my game in development:

Pretty sweet, right? Here are a few links related to this event:

• Game Jam Event Page
• GitHub Repo For My Game
• Itch.io Page For My Game

If you are …