If you happen to be in the Green Bay, Wisconsin area on Friday, I highly recommend that you make an effort to stop by ITT Tech Green Bay. Ben Geisler (formerly from Raven himself) tells me that they are hosting a live chat session with three Raven employees, one artist from Prey and at least two other professional developers. They will answer questions after talking about what goes on during the development of high profile games.

The event is this Friday (short notice, I know) and will run from 10am - 6pm. And, to top it off... the fair is free to attend.

Click "read more" to see the press release.

The Green Bay campus ITT Technical Institute is quickly becoming apowerhouse for game developer education. The creation of games softwareis a multi billion dollar industry which now surpasses the earnings ofthe film industry. Because of the vast employment opportunities in thisfield, game developer schools have begun popping up all over the nation.

ITT Tech Green Bay has secured a games industry veteran, Ben Geisler.Ben is an industry veteran who has worked on many titles which haveeach sold over two million units. His past titles include the wellknown Quake 4, Hulk Ultimate Destruction, Jedi Knight 2 and XMenLegends.

For the past five months, the green bay campus has been involved in"AAA Game Development", the state of the art of video games. The ITTTech program in game development teaches students the skills they needto create their own games and enter this lucrative field. Our industryexperienced professionals are pushing the program to new heights andnow our only competition is in Seattle, Florida and California. Inaddition to regular classes led by a programmer from RadicalEntertainment (Geisler), the campus brings guest speakers from the westcoast every other month. A few months ago, lead designer Eric Holmescame to speak to an audience of sixty game development students.

At the end of February our program will be expanding its influence yetagain as we host the first annual Digital Entertainment and Game DesignRegional Competition. Our campus has been chosen to host seven otherMidwest schools. Students have been working on games for the last fivemonths and their work will be shown in competition form.

Additionally, the competition is co-located with the very first GameDevelopment Fair in this area. We have sponsorship from theInternational Game Developers association (as a student chapter), RavenSoftware, Human Head, Radical Entertainment and EA Games. These aresome of the biggest companies in the industry and we are pleased to behosting judges from the field. Our judges have a cumulative total offifty years experience in creating games. The game fair will include aguest talk by the lead technical designer of Quake 4 (Fred Hooper). Thefair will also include a professional game developers panel which willbe used as a Q/A session for the students. The panel will includedmembers of Human Head, Radical and Raven Software.

Events of this magnitude usually have a fee associated. However, ourevent is absolutely free and we invite anyone interested in gamedevelopment or currently involved in game development.

The Game Development Fair starts at 10:30 with a keynote by Raven'sFred Hooper. The talks, panels and judging will continue throughout theday.

A detailed scheduled and more information on the event can be found at: http://www.gbgamedev.org/

PS: At the end of the month, you can attend their game development competition. There will be seven other Midwest schools in the competition and some high profile judges from the game industry.

**uhm.. I meant Wisconsin and not Michigan.

edited on Feb. 22, 2006 07:08 am by foyleman

OH MY GOD he left ravensoft??? no wonder he didnt ever answer my email

hehe. see... it wasn't personal.

If there's anybody who can hook us up with some audio, video, or even a transcript excerpt from this, please, please, please toss us a line here! I know Raven doesn't exactly have the greatest track record but I would still kill to know about the future of Soldier of Fortune and the Jedi Knight series. Thanks a bunch guys!