SAGE Group Overview

Welcome to the start of this SAGE group course! Over this season you and your group will meet to pray for each other, share your project’s progress, and discuss the course homework. Though this experience, our hope is that you are able to be encouraged, supported, and held accountable (and that you’d do the same for the others in your group), and that you would grow as a game developer regardless of your particular discipline.

First Meeting

Introductions

For first-time groups or when bringing on new members for a second season, spend some time introducing yourselves to each other. You could share some things like:

• Your name
• Your favorite game
• What you do for work
• How you got involved with game development
• What your specialties are in game development
• How long you have been a part of the CGDC community

Project Goals

One of the core requirements of being a part of a SAGE group is that every member of the group is actively working on a project that they intend to share, anywhere from only sharing with friends to shipping on a digital storefront. Every member of the group should take some time (5 – 10 minutes, depending on the group size) to share the following about their project:

• An overview of the project
• What their contributions will be to the project (e.g. are they working on it themselves or are they working on a specific part of the project with others?)
• Where they are at with the project so far (“just starting” is a perfectly fine answer!)
• What they hope to achieve with the project by the end of the SAGE group season

Prayer

Take some time asking each other what the group can pray for them about. If the group is comfortable with it, each member can pray for the prayer requests of another member of the group. You can also pray for God to strengthen your relationships in this group and help each member grow in their game development journey.

Assign Homework

Near the end of the meeting discuss the homework for the next meeting. The first homework assignment is the next lesson in this SAGE group course.

Subsequent Meetings

Prayer

Start the group meeting off with praying for each other. If desired, you can alternate praying for everyone’s prayer requests some weeks and praising God for things He’s done other weeks.

Project Updates

Each member of the group should spend some time (5 – 10 minutes, depending on the group size) sharing their project progress since the last meeting. This can be in the form of sharing writing, code, prototypes, gameplay, art, music, etc. that each member worked on, usually by sharing their screen so everyone can see it together. After sharing, the group can provide some positive feedback and impressions of the progress (ideally, constructive feedback should only be given if the member asks for it).

This section tends to unexpectedly eat up a lot of the meeting time, so someone should be the time cop and ensure everyone stays in their time limit. One simple way to do this is to use an online timer such as online-stopwatch.com, especially if someone has the ability to overlay this window on their video with video applications like OBS or Logitech Capture.

Homework Discussion

With the remaining time (minus ~5 minutes for talking about the next meeting at the end), the group should discuss the assigned homework. The discussion questions for each homework assignment can be found in the lessons in this course. Feel free to pick a subset of the questions or do them out of order; the goal is that the group can share what insights they’ve learned from the homework and how it can apply to themselves as game developers or their projects.

Assign Homework

Near the end of the meeting discuss the homework for the next meeting. The homework can be found in the following lesson in the SAGE group course.