Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Hello everyone! 

We will be hosting our first game jam of the year from October 22 to 24, a week and a half from now, in the Gould-Simpson building on campus. There are no major or experience requirements; teams will be formed right at the beginning of the jam, and you will be able to create your very own game over the course of the weekend! Meals will be provided on Saturday and Sunday - snacks will be available the entire time. 

The jam will formally begin at 5:30 on Friday, October 22nd. We hope to see you there!

Join our Discord and keep an eye on the announcements channel for any further updates or changes. 



Saturday, April 24, 2021

It's time. 

(dramatic dark souls music) 

During our second-to-last meeting of the year on Monday April 26th, we'll be holding officer elections for next year! Due to the number of applicants and number of roles available, some have already been predetermined, but there are a few that still need to be voted on - join us on Twitch to do your club-sanctioned civic duty and vote for next year's officers :

We're also starting a new tradition for the last meeting of each year - the officer soapbox! Come attend a series of micro talks on Monday May 3rd from the officers about literally anything. Potential topics include snails and avocado rants. 

Sunday, April 4, 2021

It's the time of year for officer applications again! 
We'll be opening up applications for people interested in joining the club's leadership team for next year. To prepare you all for this, next Monday's meeting (April 5) will consist of a quick overview of how officer applications and elections will work, in addition to a description of the different officer roles. The application form will open right after the meeting, and remain open until April 26th, the day of the officer elections. 

If you are interested in joining the officer team, we encourage you to attend! Please feel free to contact a current officer if you have any questions.

After this quick presentation, the rest of Monday's meeting will be a game night! Join us for a fun, relaxing night of games like Jackbox, Among Us, and Friday Night Funkin. You are free to bring or suggest any other games as well.

PLEASE NOTE: This entire meeting will be on OUR DISCORD, NOT on Twitch.  

We've got one more guest speaker lined up for you this month, so stay tuned :)

Friday, March 5, 2021

Hello, everyone! As you may already know, it's game jam season! 

The Spring 2021 game jam will be taking place from March 12 to March 14. Form a team (or work solo, if that's more your speed) and make a game over the course of a weekend! Get inspiration from a theme revealed at the start! Potentially win an Xbox One X (sponsored by the TEALS Program)! 

This is a great opportunity to learn a lot and have fun, so no experience is needed, just an interest in game development :) 

Sign up on itch.io >>HERE<<

The teambuilding channel on our Discord is also open, so introduce yourself and start contacting people you're interested in working with! 


Monday, February 8, 2021


Hey everyone! In light of the GDC 2020 trip cancellation, and GDC 2021 being smaller and virtual due to continuing COVID-19 complications, we have decided to launch our own event! We're calling it the UA Game Dev GDC Vault Showcase - it's an exclusive, week-long opportunity to view some of the best talks GDC has to offer, including a number of Vault members-only talks.


(The GDC Vault costs $550 per person for a year-long subscription, so this is a great opportunity to view some of the content there, free-of-charge!)



Logistics!

Our Vault Showcase will run from Monday, February 22nd, to Friday, February 26th.


The showcase will begin at 5:30 PM (our normal meeting time) on each day of the week of February 22nd. It will be streamed live in the Voice channel on our Discord server.


Additionally, we will also be hosting a few additional live talks and workshops throughout the vault showcase! These will occur earlier in the day, before we stream the talks, and will be indicated with an asterisk before the scheduled time. 


And that's about it! We think this event is gonna be really fun, and a great opportunity for anyone interested in game development to learn from industry professionals, without the immense costs of going to GDC itself or purchasing a GDC Vault subscription. Be sure to join our Discord server to stay up to date on the event, and if you want to learn about what we have planned so far on each day, read on!



The Schedule!

Monday, February 22nd - Design

5:30 PM - Can You Make a Good Game Without Good Play Mechanics? [30:24]

Prasert "Sun" Prasertvithyakarn

Square Enix Co., Ltd.

6:00 PM - Immersing a Creative World into a Usable UI [30:33]

Steph Chow

Steph Chow Design

6:30 PM - Taking an Axe to 'God of War' Gameplay [1:01:16] 

Jason McDonald 

Sony Santa Monica Studio


Tuesday, February 23rd - Marketing

*12:00 PM - Game Design, Communication, and Q&A with Rami Ismail [1:00:00]

 Rami Ismail

 Vlambeer

5:30 PM - Build Your Own Fan Club: How to Use Your Email List [33:48] 

Chris Zukowski

Return To Adventure Mountain, LLC

6:04 PM - Trailer Made: What Makes a Successful and Memorable Game Trailer [29:23]

Derek Lieu

Independent

6:34 PM'Slay the Spire': Success through Marketability [1:01:25] 

          Casey Yano 

Mega Crit Games


 Wednesday, February 24th - Career

*12:00 PM - Networking 101 [1:00:00]

Jade Marmorstein

UA Game Dev

5:30 PM - Finding Your Place in Games [20:05]

Yaprak DeCarmine

Game Jolt

5:50 PM - A Survival Guide for Game Developers [33:17]

Richard Vogel

Certain Affinity

6:23 PM8 Keys to a Long Career in Games [1:02:59] 

Don Daglow 

4thRing Inc.


 Thursday, February 25th - Art/Audio

*2:00 PM - Beyond Stick Figure: Drawing Basic Human Anatomy [1:00:00]

Jade Marmorstein

UA Game Dev

5:30 PM - Inspiring 249 Million Strangers: Art Direction for a Global Audience [43:17]

Riana McKeith

King

 6:13 PM - 'Moss': Design Before Sound [29:36]

Stephen Hodde

Polyarc

6:43 PM'DOOM': Behind the Music [1:00:57] 

Mick Gordon 

Game Audio Australia


Friday, February 26th - Advocacy

5:30 PM - #1ReasonToBe [48:43]

Rami Ismail, Ehsan Ebrahimzadeh, Lual Mayen, Camila Gormaz, Juan de Urraza, Nourhan ElSherief

Vlambeer, Arkane Studios, Junub Games, BURA, Posibillian Tech, Instinct Games

6:20 PM - Accessibility Best Practices: In-Game Communication [30:56]

 Douglas Pennant

 Creative Assembly

6:51 PM10 Ways to Make Your Game More Diverse [58:09] 

Meg Jayanth

Freelance



TL;DR

Come join our Discord server and get exclusive access to some of the best GDC talks, streamed live at 5:30 PM every night from Monday, February 22nd, to Friday, February 26th.


We'll also have our own workshops and talks throughout the week!

Saturday, January 30, 2021

Welcome to week 2, everyone!

We have an EXTREMELY exciting schedule of guest speakers and events this month! To make everyone's lives easier, we'll be adding a talk and event schedule to the sidebar of the website and in the Discord so you can plan ahead for the meetings and events you're interested in attending. :)

This Monday's meeting (February 1st, 5:30 PM MST/AZ Time), we'll be having our first guest speaker of the semester - Steven Eiselen, a former graduate student and TA with the UA Computer Science department. Some of you in the club may remember him! He'll be giving a talk on his graduate research project, Project Fëa: Simulating Personality, Emotions, Social Relations, and Physical / Mental Needs for autonomous Non-Player Characters within video game / computer simulation worlds. The first half of the talk will briefly introduce and discuss 3 different AI models, then discuss some details on how they would be augmented within the greater Fëa system towards possibly creating unprecedented, truly life-like virtual people. The latter half of the talk will be a Q&A. Join us on Twitch, and bring your questions - he will be more than happy to answer them!

On Sunday February 7th, at 2PM MST/AZ time on our Twitch channel, we will be holding our first workshop in a while! To prepare for the Valentine's Ren'Py mini-jam on February 13th, Jade will be hosting a workshop on the basics of the program. You'll be able to give suggestions and follow along as she equips you with the skills to design and program a fully functional visual novel game. Ren'Py is highly recommended for folks who are interested in creating narrative games and/or are new to programming, and for good reason - it's a super easy engine to learn. 

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Hey everyone! A big thanks to everyone who participated in the Twine jam this weekend - there were some great games! You can view and play the submissions here

We're very excited to have our last guest speaker of the semester at our next meeting on November 16 at 5:30 MST (AZ time). We'll be doing a Q&A with Jeremy Lecus, a developer with quite a few titles under his belt and current technical producer at Cryptic Studios. He's worked on games such as D&D Neverwinter, Magic: Legends, and Star Trek Online. Previously, he has also worked as a producer at Warner Bros on Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, and as a producer and QA lead at Telltale games on titles such as Minecraft Story Mode and The Walking Dead. We don't always get to hear from people with this much experrience, so we hope as many of you as possible will join us on Twitch . Be sure to bring your questions!

If you can't make it to the meeting, feel free to submit questions in advance on our Discord. The meeting will be saved on Twitch and available to view for another 2 weeks. 

We're also coming up on holiday season! In the past, it's been our tradition to end the semester with a white elephant gift exchange. Since we obviously can't do that this year, we are going to have a virtual Steam gift exchange during our last meeting (November 30th) instead! There will be a a bot going live on our Discord server soon, and you can sign up for the exchange through there. 
A few rules:
- Participation is entirely voluntary! You do not need to participate. However, you must give a gift in order to get one.
- The spending limit is $15. Please do not go over this amount when purchasing your gifts.
We will announce more details on how it will work soon!

Lastly, our Officer Intern applications close this Thursday, November 19th!  Fill out this form to applyWe will be contacting applicants shortly to schedule interviews for the weekend of the 20th - 22nd, and interns will be announced at next week's meeting on the 23rd. 

Sunday, November 8, 2020

It's time for the Fall Twine Jam, everyone! 

The Twine Jam is an 8-hour "mini jam" for creating text-based adventure games in Twine. It is scheduled for Saturday, November 14th from 10am-5pm MST (AZ time, with game showcases taking place on our Discord server for the hour afterwards (5-6pm). Twine is super easy to pick up -  it's particularly good for those interested in writing more story-heavy games or with little to no prior programming experience. There will also be an optional theme revealed at the start of the jam. Sign up here!

In preparation for this, for Monday's meeting (November 14th), we'll be joined by the founder of our club's Twine jams himself, former club president Jeremy Deutsch! He'll be giving an interactive demo on how to create a Twine game, so come ready to exercise your writing chops! 

Also another reminder that Officer Intern Applications are now open! We will be taking on around 1-3 interns (depending on the number of applicants) to join the officer team during the spring semester. Interns will join us for weekly officer meetings and help plan club meetings and events. If you're interested in becoming a club officer or just want to see what it's like, we encourage you to apply! 
Here is the Google form application. It will be open until November 19th, after which we will contact applicants to schedule virtual interviews.
Feel free to reach out to any of the officers if you have any questions about the application or officer interns in general


Monday, November 2, 2020

We hope you all had a fantastic Halloween (and remembered to reset your clocks for Daylight Savings if that applies to you)! But if you're craving more spooks, you're in luck because we'll be hearing from the creator of indie horror game "Nevermind"!


On Monday November 2nd at 5:30 pm MST (AZ time), we'll be doing a Q&A with game designer and founder of Flying Mollusk Studios
Erin Reynolds! She's happy to talk about biofeedback, serious game design, founding an indie studio, and anything else game-dev related you can think of, so be sure to bring your questions! If you can't make it, you're welcome to submit questions on our Discord server ahead of time, and the meeting will be saved on Twitch and available to view for at least another two weeks. 

Also, Officer Intern Applications are now open! We will be taking on around 1 - 3 interns (d
epending on the number of applicants) to join the officer team during the spring semester. Interns will join us for weekly officer meetings and help plan club meetings and events. If you're interested in becoming a club officer or just want to see what it's like, we encourage you to apply! 
Here is the Google form application. It will be open until November 19th, after which we will contact applicants to schedule virtual interviews.
Feel free to reach out to any of the officers if you have any questions about the application or officer interns in general

We will also be hosting a Twine Jam on 
Saturday November 14th from 10am-5pm MST (AZ time), with games showcased from 5pm - 6pm. This is a mini one-day jam for creating text-based adventure games in Twine, so mark your calendars!







Friday, October 9, 2020

Hello! We hope you've been enjoying hearing from so many guest speakers at our last few meetings. 
Next Monday, October 12, we'll be returning to something more familiar. Our very own Leo Ratner will be giving a talk on his work as Art Director on Project Borealis, a fan-made continuation of the Half-Life games. If you've been around our club for a while, you may have seen some of his games and 3D models. Leo has done some really amazing work on the project and we're extremely excited to hear from him! 

We will be returning to streaming the meeting on Twitch. (Do give us a follow - you'll be notified when we go live!) 

We're also excited to officially announce the details of our game jam! 

[SIGN UP HERE]


Our next meeting (October 19th) will be Game Jam Survival, where you can bring any questions about how the jam will work, and veteran jammers can also offer advice and stories for how to get through a game jam happy and healthy. (Doing so will definitely be much easier this year, since we no longer have to tell you how cold it is in Gould-Simpson.)

Don't hesitate to reach out to us on our Discord or at gamedev@cs.arizona.edu with any additional questions!


Friday, September 25, 2020

Our Core Jam is this weekend - Saturday, September 26 at 10am MST (Arizona time)! Sign up at the itch.io page here. Since it's a virtual jam, work on it as much as you want over the weekend, but be sure to submit it by 6PM MST (Arizona time) on Sunday. We'll be doing a games showcase at 7PM (one hour later) and vote on favorites. The winners will get Amazon gift cards provided by Manticore Games!*

Monday's meeting (9/28) will feature another guest speaker and UA alumni, Cynthia Shlezar! Cynthia graduated from the computer science program at UA in 2018 and has worked as a software engineer on the Xbox team at Microsoft for the last few years. This is a great opportunity to hear from someone in the industry who started where we are, so definitely come with questions if you have any! We are back to streaming meetings on Twitch

And just as another reminder, our next monthly game night will be next Friday, October 2nd from 6pm - 10pm MST (Arizona time). Hop into our Discord server to join us for fun party games like Among Us, Fall Guys, Jackbox, and more!

*Manticore Games is a prize provider, but not the sponsor or administrator of this UA GameDev Core Jam.

Saturday, September 19, 2020

Core Demo 9/21 + Game Jam and more!

Next Monday's meeting (9/21 at 5:30 pm) will feature Manticore Games giving a talk about their Core platform! It's similar to Roblox and Dreams in that it's a platform for making and playing games that provides a lot of built-in assets, and it's great for beginners. 

PLEASE NOTE: This meeting will most likely NOT be streamed on Twitch due to Manticore Games' preferences; please join us at this Google Meet link at the start of the meeting.

We will also be hosting a Core Jam that weekend to tie in with this talk! It will take place on Saturday, September 26 from 10am to 6pm MST (Arizona time). The itch.io signup link will be sent out in a few days. In the meantime, Core is also hosting a jam with Global Game Jam, so you're welcome to submit your games to that as well. 

Also, a reminder to sign up on RippleMatch if you haven't already - it's a job platform that matches students with jobs and internships they're qualified for, and a club partnership comes with added benefits like more matches, increased visibility to recruiters, and exclusive virtual events. We might even get some funding out of it :)

Finally, our next monthly game night will be on Friday, October 2nd from 6pm - 10pm MST (Arizona time). Hop into our Discord server to join us for fun party games like Among Us, Fall Guys, Jackbox, and more!


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