Monday, March 31, 2014


For the first time ever, the GameDev Club is selling club t-shirts! You can now proudly show your support for the coolest club on campus by having the our new logo printed on your chest. See the above image for the design of the shirt.

How to Buy a Club Shirt

  1. Contact Zuoming (zuomingshi@email.arizona.edu)
  2. Tell him what shirt size you want (small, medium, large, etc.)
  3. Give him $20 for the shirt.
Please pay for your shirt by Monday, April 7th. We intend to make the order for shirts sometime after the GameDev Club meeting for that day, so please try to pay for your shirt before then.

How to Pay for your Shirt


We only accept cash, but you have three possible ways to give us money:
  1. Come to Game Jam this weekend,
  2. Come to the club meeting on Monday, April 7th at 5:00pm at the ECE building, room 105,
  3. Or organize a meetup with Zuoming (zuomingshi@email.arizona.edu)

Sunday, March 30, 2014


Today we had Ky Tran come to give a talk about concept art and how to become a good artist, in general. He also spoke about his experiences with learning the craft and how he's been trying to improve his skills by relying on practice, online resources, books, and lots and lots of more practice.

Friday, March 14, 2014


Once every semester, the GameDev Club holds an epic, multi-day, game-making marathon known as a game jam. During this event, students from all sorts of different backgrounds and majors come together to form teams and make an entire game in a single weekend. The game jam is definitely one of the most fun things you'll do all year, and it's a great excuse to broaden your skill set. Plus, there's free food all weekend.

Our next game jam will be on the weekend of April 4th, and this time the event will last for 42 hours so that you can have time on Sunday to get plenty of rest and catch up on any homework you might have.
  • Starts: Friday, April 4th at 5:00pm
  • Ends: Sunday, April 6th at 1:00pm
  • Location: Electrical and Computer Engineering building, room 105
  • RSVP: http://bit.ly/uagamejam
As usual, it's a good idea to plan ahead so that you can minimize the amount of classwork that you'll have that weekend. For more information about the event, please read the rest of the post.

How does the Game Jam work?


Because the purpose of the game jam is to encourage students to improve and learn new skills, the game jam is open to anyone from any background and level of experience. For instance, the game jam is a great opportunity for artists and musicians to work on a game project and to see what it can be like to be part of a game development team.

In order to prevent people from starting their games early, every game has to be made around a theme, which is revealed at the start of the game jam. These themes are usually vague and open ended, so you'll have plenty of room to come up with something creative. Some examples of typical game jam themes are: evolution, color, artificial, etc.

If you want to get a much better idea of what the game jam is like, click here to read about how our previous game jam went.

Schedule


Friday, April 4th, from 4:00pm to 5:00pm: many people will be transporting their computers, monitors, musical instruments, drawing tablets, etc., into the room. If you want to bring anything earlier, please contact Livio at ldelac01@email.arizona.edu.

Friday, April 4th, from 5:00pm to 6:00pm: we're going to have a "social hour." During this time, participants will get a chance to eat dinner, talk to other participants, and most importantly, form teams. People also use this time to prepare their workspace so that they can work more closely with their team.

Friday, April 4th, at 6:00pm: the theme is announced and everyone gets to work. This is when the 42-hour countdown begins, and then everyone's games will be due at 12:00pm on Sunday.

Sunday, April 6th from 12:00pm to 1:00pm: At this point, everyone's games will be due! We'll present everyone's games and then the community will vote on which game they think was the best. After this, everyone will be free to go home, unless they want to help us clean up. After cleaning up, many of us will be going to eat lunch together at some restaurant, so you're encouraged to join us!

Most people will go home during the first night so that they can get some sleep, and this is especially convenient for those who live on campus. Some participants, however, like to bring in sleeping bags and toothbrushes so that they can sleep in the room. We will have multiple officers on duty throughout the entire event so that we can keep an eye on everything and to make sure that nothing gets stolen or damaged.

Important Tips and Advice


Important: Please put the room's phone number into your phone contacts: (520) 626-7324. If you ever get locked out of the building during the event, you can then call this number and we will send someone to let you in. We will likely have poor cellphone reception throughout the event, since we will be in what is essentially the basement of the ECE building. This is why we insist that you call the room phone because that will be the most reliable. Also, the poor reception will eat away at your phone's battery, so you might want to bring your charger.

You should be able to get free parking in the parking lot next to the ECE building starting at 5:00pm on Friday. Parking on campus is usually free during the weekends, unless there's a big event such as a home football game.

Also, please plan to take a lot of breaks. It's not healthy to sit in front of a computer for more than a few hours at a time, so use this as an excuse to get up, go outside, and get some sun. Having your entire team take breaks together can make for some great team-bonding moments since you typically spend that time having fun.

And finally, don't get discouraged if you don't have a lot of experience! Usually half of our participants are new to making games, and the game jam is actually a great environment to learn how to build your first game. The constraints of the event will teach you how to focus on the most important parts of your game, and you'll get to more clearly see how your work gets translated into the final product.

Finally, don't forget to RSVP!

Questions


If you have any more questions, please ask Zuoming at zuomingshi@email.arizona.edu.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014


We started this week's meeting with a visit by Vaughn Croft, who works for the Office of the Pima County School Superintendent. He helped us organize a couple of mini game design workshops that we held for middle school students as part of their Career Shadowing Day. He came to give us some of the great feedback he got from the students who participated, as well as to give us some pointers on how to make the next workshops better.

We then spent the rest of the meeting playing a game called The Yawhg, which is best described as a four-player choose-your-own-adventure story. Most of us agreed that this game worked amazingly well as a party game, and it's best enjoyed when knowing very little about the game. While playing the game, we talked about some of the interesting things that the game did, such as its at-first mysterious stats system, the unpredictability of events, and its strong RPG style.

Thursday, March 6, 2014


Are you ready to learn more about GameMaker while finishing the MegaMan game that we started last time? If you didn't attend the first workshop, that's okay, since we'll try to keep this workshop as accessible as possible. You can also try skimming through the video recording of the last workshop. You can also download the source files that we created during the last workshop to get familiar with (or remind yourself about) what we did last time.

If possible, please bring a computer to the workshop so that you can follow along. If you don't have a computer, tell us in the RSVP form so that we can try getting laptops for you in advance.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

It's that time again...


On Monday we held club officer elections. The only position that had more than one person running for it was the presidency, unless you count Rory who ran for every single position on the campaign of "don't vote for me." Below are the results of the officer election:

President (Final Boss):
Cindy Trieu

Vice President (Old Man in Cave) (Miniboss):
Zuoming Shi

Outreach Officer (Bard):
Jordan Hunt

Treasurer (Rogue):
Josh Djakaria

Secretary (Save Point):
Jonathan Wright

Cinematographer (Shy Guy) (Lakitu):
Patrick Wilkening

The vote for presidency was super close. Cindy beat Patrick by only one vote, while Rory actually managed to score a vote from one indecisive member.

After the election, we voted on club shirt designs:


And we ended up choosing the design below:

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