Moonlight Games, Brain&Brain, and the Tesseract Center are putting Northwest Arkansas on the map for game development.
Seeking talented game developer for a position in Bentonville, AR
Moonlight Games, founded by software engineer and game designer Andy Martin, is currently seeking to hire a software engineer. Moonlight is located at the Exchange co-working space in Bentonville and specializes in developing the front end and back end for mobile apps. Martin has captured the attention of game designers near and far with his development of Consortya, a unique genre-bending hybrid that combines live music with MMORPGs. Interested in making video games for a living in Northwest Arkansas? Learn more below to apply.
Meet the brains behind Brain&Brain
Brain&Brain is an Ozark game development company founded by the husband-and-wife team, Brooke and David Condolora (featured in the cover photo). The couple was recently featured by Arkansas Money and Politics. Like Martin, the Condoloras arrived in Northwest Arkansas by way of the West Coast. In California, David spent time working with Disney and Pixar and Brooke studied graphic design and became a freelance designer and web developer.
Learn more about why they decided to bring their indie-game outfit to an old mill in the Ozarks of Northwest Arkansas in their Patreon video below.
Futuristic partnership developing between UA, Crystal Bridges
This was the headline by Talk Business and Politics that recently caught our eye. The article highlights various different collaboration between Crystal Bridges Museum for American Art and the University of Arkansas—each of them pretty radical. One of the featured collabs is with students at the University of Arkansas’ Tesseract Center, a game development and visualization studio. The students are designing a game-based virtual reality app to teach American history using “Winter Scene in Brooklyn,” an 1820 oil painting by Francis Guy, from the museum’s collection.
This is exactly type of work where Tesseract has decided to stake its flag—the core mission of Tesseract is the creation of immersive/game-based content for courses and research, with undergraduate and graduate student developers playing an integral part. Through the interdisciplinary, project-based process of game design. Learn more about the Tesseract Center and their programs at tesseract.uark.edu or watch the video below.
The NWA Unity User Group exists to bring together like-minded individuals with an interest in using Unity3D for game development or 3D visualization.
Unity3D is a fantastic 3D creation software that has changed the face of the gaming industry. It hits that sweet spot for software tools –it’s easy and accessible for beginners to get started in game development, yet robust enough that experts can use it to create professional content. If you are looking to connect with a community of game developers, the Northwest Arkansas Unity User Group has 313 members and organizes meetups through the year. You are interested in connecting, see below.
Let us not forget the kiddos.
Both Nerdies and Code Ninja actively recruit kids interested in learning how to program and develop their own video games. Nerdies offers camps focused on video game development each summer, while Code Ninja in Bentonville offers ongoing, year-round opportunities where gaming is celebrated as kids gain confidence in coding, math, logic, and problem-solving. Both enable kids to learn by building video games at an early age, cultivating the game designers and game developers of the future.
