The first meeting of the Portland Area XNA User Group was a complete success! We had a great turnout for our first meeting with just over ten people showing up (for as inexperience we are at running a user group, we were THRILLED with this turnout). I apparently love the sound of my own voice and managed to talk about XNA for over an hour. I wasn't really planning on talking that long, it kind of just happened. I didn't see anyone sleeping and I got some great feedback afterwards so hopefully I wasn't too horrible as a speaker. I just really have a lot to say about game development, the XNA framework and what a great community has been built around XNA. Sometimes it's hard to keep quiet about it all.
We had the same great luck getting the hardware setup just like we did in the dry run so that helped out a lot. The laptop and the XBox 360 performed wonderfully and all the samples I showed on each went well. I had planned originally on coding a 2D space shooter during the talk, but I scaled that back some when I realized I had already spent over 30 minutes on just introducing the XNA framework and XNA Game Studio. I did do a quick little demo of getting a sprite drawing on the screen and moving it around with the keyboard. I think just how quickly you can put something like that together using the XNA framework always does a nice job of impressing people.
So with the first meeting under our belt, it's time to move on to the next castle and find our princess! Yep, that's right, time to schedule the second meeting of PAXNAUG! The date is April 23rd and the place and time remain the same. We're still looking for a speaker, so if you're interested drop us (or me) a line. More details for the second meeting will be going up on the PAXNAUG site soon!
Thanks again to our sponsors Coaxis, O'Reilly, Apress and Wrox. We really appreciate all that you've done for us and look forward in continuing to work with you. Also, we're still drumming up more sponsors so if you can provide swag of any kind or help out with the food and snacks please get in touch!
I also want to thank everyone that took the time to come to the meeting. This group is going to continue to grow, so congratulations for getting in on the ground floor! Looking forward to seeing everyone again and watching what kind of progress people are making with XNA and with game development.
Mark April 23rd at 6:30 on your calendars and hope to see you there!