We need a weekly video chat.

[Jastiv]

I have lately been reading some articles and studying game development as well as how teams are formed. For those who do not know, Runescape was started by three brothers, that is three people who lived together and shared a lot in common. A lot of game developers have also been husband and wife teams such as Ken and Roberta Williams. I've also read stories about teams formed from people who all went to the same development school (they failed at marketing, but that's another issue) Anyway, what I want to say is, I think we can get more and better games developed if we all get to be good friends, by that I mean, get to know people in a more personal and informal way, and not just talk about game development, but other things too. I recently read about how IBM is going to get rid of their remote teams and bring them back in the office, even though, ironically, remote teams are more productive. The thing is, in person teams are better at HIGH QUALITY idea generation. It is why we go to conferences and met people, the problem is, a conference might just be annually;y, and not even that, and it gets hard to stay in touch all the time. So, what we need to do is basically touch base and figure out how to pull this off remotely using as "high touch" communication method as possible, so it goes like this from low touch to high touch, email, irc(text chat) voice chat, video chat, in person.
To that end I think a weekly video chat would help us. If anyone has any more (or even better ideas). We should post them here. We should also use free software for our video chat. I know I used jitsi awhile ago, but I'm open to suggestions.

[c_xong]

Does your local IGDA chapter host any social events such as meetups? https://www.igda.org/page/chaptersprofessional? You should attend those
Get involved in game jams, local ones are best at meeting people to collaborate with, but I've heard stories about teams that started off from online jams too. Stick to the big ones like ludum dare if you're looking for a community.

There are a few other better communities for finding teams. You've probably heard of https://www.gamedev.net/ and https://www.neogaf.com/, but even smaller communities like 4chan's AGDG can be good (Risk of Rain was a regular there), at least for showcasing.

Unfortunately this is where FGD sucks. The community is way too small, the forum software tends to segregate rather than encourage cross-collaboration, and a lot of its members are loner-types. Nothing wrong with that though, everyone is different, and loners can make successful games too - see Minecraft/Notch, Ken Silverman. I definitely agree with you that small, close teams tend to be more successful.

So I don't think a video chat is going to work; it's partly the wrong kind of community and partly the wrong medium. Personally I think something like a single-board forum could work: forums encourage discussion, and single board so that people aren't split off into super-narrow spaces. I was disappointed to see Discourse - which could do something like this - turn out as a very unpopular choice. https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=7780 But I guess most people are happy with the things as they are. So what you're looking for lies elsewhere.

[Julius]

The forum software tends to segregate rather than encourage cross-collaboration, and a lot of its members are loner-types. Nothing wrong with that though, everyone is different, and loners can make successful games too - see Minecraft/Notch, Ken Silverman. I definitely agree with you that small, close teams tend to be more successful.

So I don't think a video chat is going to work; it's partly the wrong kind of community and partly the wrong medium. Personally I think something like a single-board forum could work: forums encourage discussion, and single board so that people aren't split off into super-narrow spaces. I was disappointed to see Discourse - which could do something like this - turn out as a very unpopular choice. https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=7780 But I guess most people are happy with the things as they are. So what you're looking for lies elsewhere.

Yeah, mostly spot on, but please have a look at the new fediverse based system at social.freegamedev.net that allows you to connect to people across many other game development related discussion spaces (mostly on Mastodon). I really need to update it to the latest version though as the new version 3.8 of Hubzilla made it much easy to configure.
Other than that, as soon as the beta8 of Flarum is out (should be very soon), I will put up a new forum as an alternative. Flarum is basically Discourse, just much less annoying to host. I think if there is some take-up we will slowly transition over the general discussion and other non-hosted forums to it and then leave it up to the admins of the hosted projects to decide if they want to move or not. Sadly transitioning of the user database and content of this forum (while theoretically not impossible) is such a high workload that it will likely never happen.

Last but not least there will be an interconnected chat service (XMPP with some nice bridges to other services) when I find the time to complete the setup (suuuper busy with work right now).

I am also thinking about hosting an Etherpad with build in video chat and all the plugins to allow collaborative coding in it. Might be a fun activity to do some coding sprints and gamejams with such an interactive system. I am aware that Jitsi has an Etherpad plugin, but it is otherwise a pain to self-host so I prefer a more simpler setup.