Rad Magpie’s Summer Newsletter

RAD MAGPIE

HEY THERE :)

How’s your summer? | 08.26.2022

Hello friends, and welcome to the summer newsletter!

It’s hard to believe that autumn’s chill is on the way; I’m typing this on a sunny August day but I can almost see the trees blushing orange at the edges. It feels like summertime absolutely flew by, but then again, doesn’t it always? The semester is beginning for many of our student & educator friends, and we hope you can soak up a little bit more summer before the days start getting shorter.

This is a bittersweet August for us — we didn’t host a Rad Studio cohort this year, and we’re in the midst of a radical shift in our organizational structure. Read on to see what we’ve been up to!

WINDING DOWN

Rad Magpie is entering Slow Mode | 08.26.2022

As the summer winds down, it’s time for Dana, Megan, and Maggie to wrap up our full-time employment here at Rad Magpie and transition into Volunteer Mode.

Going forward, it may take us slightly longer than usual to reply to emails or social media activity, but we’ll still be here! We look forward to working with fellow volunteers on our ongoing projects, like our Rad Studio blog series and our upcoming Ethical Game Development Resource Library. And I will do my best to keep you updated via these seasonal newsletters, too :)

Keep in touch with Rad Magpie throughout this transition by following us on social media (@RadMagpie on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook) or joining our Community Discord Server.

The Rad Magpie Community Server is a space for game devs in our orbit to share upcoming events & opportunities, favorite games, current projects, and more. Join at discord.gg/xArrfgc — all are welcome.

Join our Discord

HISTORY OF RAD MAGPIE

A look back | 07.22.2022

You can learn more about our decision to shift from paid employment to community-driven volunteer work in our new “History of Rad Magpie” blog post.

This heartfelt retrospective from Executive Director Dana Steinhoff explores the history of our organization from its inception to today, diving into our many transitions along the way.

The story of Rad Magpie is the story of an organization that began with a big question and an explosion of energy, then iterated and evolved every year until it became something that is perhaps now unrecognizable. It is about following a thread to places unknown. It is about excitement, heartbreak, grief, hard decisions, and easy ones. It is about money. Flexible schedules and sleepless nights. Impact in the right and wrong places. It is about failure, success, and reinvention. Read it here.

To the Blog!

CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS

Projects and committees | 08.10.2022

Things are changing here at Rad Magpie, and we want YOU to be part of the process!

Rad Magpie is looking to increase participation in our Board of Directors. We’d especially love folks with legal experience, event experience, and folks working in games right now who want to help make the industry a better place — but everyone is encouraged to apply.

Additionally, we like to invite our community members to join Board meetings and have a say, so if you would rather be on the community side of a board meeting, please email Megan at megan@radmagpie.org and let them know! We’re planning our next Board meeting for October, and we’d love to have you there.

If you want to volunteer with Rad Magpie but can’t commit to a seat on the Board, we have opportunities for you too! We’re currently forming volunteer committees for several projects, like assisting with the creation and editing of our new resources and cultivating safer spaces in local events, so please reach out if you’d like to get involved! These committees are open to all community members — we’d love to connect with you.

We especially need volunteers for our next exciting project: a library of resources that discuss ethical game development. As we begin building the framework for this collection, we're actively searching for materials (GDC talks, blog posts, postmortems, newspaper articles and more!) that are suitable for inclusion.

That's where you come in: we're calling on our community to volunteer any amount of time to review and submit content to our growing resource library. All you need to do is watch a video, read an article, or otherwise preview a resource — then fill out a short form letting us know whether it meets our criteria.

Have we piqued your interest? Have you created a presentation or written an article on this topic that you'd love to share with the broader games industry? Drop us a line or check out more information here: https://bit.ly/3bLUqjB

FROM THE BLOG

New posts and articles | 05.27.2022

With the shift to volunteer work on the horizon, we set one big goal for 2022: making all of our Rad Studio content free and accessible on our blog.

We’re aiming to post all of our recorded remote workshops and lectures from Rad Studios’ past as blog posts and YouTube videos. We believe this information should be readily available online, and that more programs like Rad Studio should exist to support collegiate game developers — this lack of support is a serious gap in game industry advocacy work. If you are working on a program like this, please feel free to utilize these resources or reach out!

A significant portion of these resources is already complete and available on the Rad Magpie website! Take a look at the previews below and visit radmagpie.org/blog for the full library of posts.

Fri, May 27

What is Rad Studio?

Rad Studio was an incubator program unlike any other. It focused on interpersonal relationships between team members alongside crucial social justice learning that prepared students for a more intenti

Fri, Jul 08

Communication in Small Groups

This workshop about the fundamentals of team communication was taught during Rad Studio; Rad Magpie’s 11-week games incubator program.

Tue, Aug 09

Lessons on Production & Scope

Rad Magpie invited Shannon Mitchell, COO at Gametheory to discuss Project Management and Scope with our 2020 and 2021 cohorts. This blog makes the lessons learned in those visits available to all who

GAME WE LOVE

Cartomancy Anthology | 08.27.2022

Look, we’re suckers for anything tarot-themed here at Rad Magpie. But the Cartomancy Anthology is so much more than a tarot-flavored game: it’s a virtual deck of 22 games, each based on one of the Major Arcana. This incredible effort brought together over 70 game developers, including some of our very own Rad Studio alumni and mentors!

You can learn more about each game and its developers here, and the full anthology is available on both itch.io and Steam.