Today we held our first meeting of the Spring 2013 semester. Here's a list of some of the announcements that we made during today's meeting:
Mark your calendars! We've decided to hold our game jam four weekends from now. While the officers are busy ironing out the details, getting funding, advertising, and setting up the RSVP system, start planning ahead so that you don't have much homework to do on that weekend. We're still not sure how long the game jam will be, but it'll most likely be a 36-hour game jam.
Zuoming showed some pretty cool infographics during today's meetings, so I've hunted them down and included them in this post for your enjoyment:
The Spring Club Fair will be on Wednesday of next week (February 6th) from 10am to 2pm. Basically, we just sit around on the mall trying to recruit new members. It's usually a lot of fun, so if you're free during the club fair, then find our table and come hang out with us.
Also, Tyler and I may or may not be attending a smaller club fair this Saturday, which is being held by the admissions office in order to help attract new students. We don't know whether our RSVP for the fair has been accepted yet because space is very limited.
Now that we finally got the problems with the club's bank account sorted out, we're decided to seriously start looking into getting funding. We're planning to look into different sources for funding, including ASUA and the CS department itself. During the meeting we made a list of potential items that we are considering getting funding for:
1. The Club Game Jam will be on February 22nd
Mark your calendars! We've decided to hold our game jam four weekends from now. While the officers are busy ironing out the details, getting funding, advertising, and setting up the RSVP system, start planning ahead so that you don't have much homework to do on that weekend. We're still not sure how long the game jam will be, but it'll most likely be a 36-hour game jam.
Zuoming showed some pretty cool infographics during today's meetings, so I've hunted them down and included them in this post for your enjoyment:
2. Upcoming Club Fairs
The Spring Club Fair will be on Wednesday of next week (February 6th) from 10am to 2pm. Basically, we just sit around on the mall trying to recruit new members. It's usually a lot of fun, so if you're free during the club fair, then find our table and come hang out with us.
Also, Tyler and I may or may not be attending a smaller club fair this Saturday, which is being held by the admissions office in order to help attract new students. We don't know whether our RSVP for the fair has been accepted yet because space is very limited.
3. The Plan to Get Funding
Now that we finally got the problems with the club's bank account sorted out, we're decided to seriously start looking into getting funding. We're planning to look into different sources for funding, including ASUA and the CS department itself. During the meeting we made a list of potential items that we are considering getting funding for:
- A canopy tent for the Spring and Fall club fairs, so that we can look like a more official club in order to attract more members and so that we won't have to rely on umbrellas to shade us from the sun.
- An advertising budget, so that we can start printing more posters and flyers.
- Console development kits, so that we can make games for current generation consoles.
- Food for the game jam.
- There was also the idea of holding larger, department-wide tech talks or tutorials, which may help us get funding from the department.
4. Livio is now an IEEE Club Officer
We've been using the IEEE room for our game nights and club meetings for a while now, so to repay the favor, I became their webmaster and built them a site at http://uaieee.blogspot.com. This is significant for a few reasons:
- The IEEE room is not allowed to be open unless there is an officer inside the room. This means that we no longer have to be dependent on having Robbie attend all of our meetings and events. It was also mentioned that we might now start holding game nights that last until after midnight. The last person who had both GameDev and IEEE officer status was Rory, but he graduated two semesters ago.
- As an officer I now have to hold open hours at the IEEE room, and you can see the open hours schedule on this page. Regardless of whether or not you're an engineering student, feel free to visit the room any time throughout the day, especially if you have nothing better to do. The GameDev Club is already pretty ingrained into the ECE community, and it's always nicer to have more people using the room.
5. Current Game Projects
We finished the meeting by talking about all of the game projects that are currently going on in the club:
- Patrick's working on an XNA game called Circuit Breaker, which is a 2D shooter with a pretty cool tech aesthetic.
- Will's working on a few game projects, one of which is being written on a programmable cartridge for the Gameboy Color.
- I'm continuing to work on Magnet Ball for my Honors Thesis.
- I'm also involved in the Course Combat project, which is the arcade cabinet project that you can currently find in the IEEE room. Specifically, their using the M.U.G.E.N. fighting game engine and my job is to help them figure out how to get everything to work with it.
- Zuoming and I have recently gotten involved in a research project in the computer science department called Angry Ants. The idea is to extract data from dozens of hours of video recordings of ants by making a citizen science game that will encourage players to manually track the ants' paths.
