Our Meetings

Interested in the club? Come to one of our meetings!

We meet at 5:30 PM every Monday in Gould-Simpson Room 856! Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our meetings live on Twitch at the same time (5:30 PM every Monday): twitch.tv/uagamedev. Our meetings cover all kinds of topics: game design, art, music, and sound, the business of game startups, genre analysis, discussions about both little-known and popular games, and general career advice.

For the latest up-to-date information and announcements, be sure to join our Discord!

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4/06/2015 - Threes & Te... Seven Design Tools

Hi all, this week GameDev had two talks about the game Threes and almost 10 design tools you can use in 30 minutes. Along with that, there is talk about an end of the semester event, so stay tuned!

Announcements:

• Mark from Kihon games will be speaking next Monday 
• Potential Laser tag or sports/esports tournament/fun-time by the end of the smester 
• Officer elections for the 2015-2016 are coming up soon. If you'd like to be an officer sign up here by Friday, April 17th. 

Cool-stuff:

• Twinyjam
• Make a text based game. 
• It's over now, but look at all the cool creations 

Threes: the Mobile Masterpiece

by Jeremy

Threes is what you might call an adorable game. The goal of the game is simple, make the numbers bigger, and to do that all that is required is swiping in any direction. As you progress farther in the game you are given the ultimate reward: more and more cuteness. Graphic designers made this game, and that makes sense, because the game is mechanically simple, but the visuals kick in to make the player feel rewarded in a relaxing sort of way. This helps counteract the maddeningly addictive number mechancis of the game.

Threes emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the small details. When you swipe it's fluid and the feedback and transitions/animations are immediate and smooth. Due to the natural progression of numbers, advancing in the game explains itself. If you want to see the development process of the game it's been published online.

Ten Game Design Tools That You Can Use in 30 Minutes

by Zuoming

This is an unapollegitically, "click-baity" title that you would see on LifeHacker, but lets roll with it. Below is Rory's summary of each Game Design Tool. Though it's very note esque (since it's his meeting notes), I think it fits the list layout. Thanks Rory!

1) Initiative

When you enter a new game, you want to learn something, but it's a taxing experience. Would you play a new game everyday? No. It's exhausting. Learning can be daunting. A player comes in with some level of initiative with a willingness to learn how to play your game.

As the player learns to play the game, they will lose initiative until they do something cool that engages them. Eventually, they may just give up on playing the game.

Can your game get the player past their sinking initiative?

The beginning initiative is dependant on context and various factors.

• Assigned in a class 
• Friends play the game 
• Cultural phenomenon 

2) Mechanics

No debate on what mechanics are. We'll go with base definition.

"Construct of rules that allow you to interact with the game."-Wikipedia. 

Different mechanics give different mileages. Trivial when said aloud. "How in the space of possible mechanics can I find the most mileage?"

3) Tutorial

Tuorials hurt initiative unless its hidden within the game. Or you can "bite the nail" and put it all in the beginning of the game, and make it short. 

4) Affordance

Affordance is used in various design disciplines. "How can you use things that already exist in real life to make your design better?" An example given in the archetypical book on design the Design of Everyday Things: doors designed to know whether or not a door should be pushed or pulled.


Example of Affordance

Extra Credits example: low resolution game with cash register, green rectangle, and grey circle? That low-resolution stuff is obviously money! Affordances make it easier to add more things to your game.

Example: a button that will increase upwards velocity with downward acceleration. That's jumping. Constant upwards velocity? Elevator? Think of good affordances to make things intuitive. Eventually, though, things will get too complicated, so you'll have to just teach it in.

Another example that Zuoming loves: Braid affordances Mario (affordances is now a verb, deal with it). Real-life is not a necessary source of affordance. Gets into the concepts of genres (not on the list).

5) Conveyance

Choose how to limit the players to do what you expect them to do. The beginning of Mario is a good example. The game conveys to the player that the player must go right. Conveyance can reduce the need for tutorials.

6) Inherent Challenge

Made the terminology up, don't look it up online. Something that already exists that adds interesting properties to the game (related to affordance). Example: local multiplayer. It's hard to break local multiplayer into something not fun. Deck building (aka probability).

Question: definition of inherent challenge? Free packages of affordance.

Another example: gravity.

7) Elegance

Extra Credits talks about depth-vs-complexity. Zuoming thinks of it in terms of amount of initiative/intuitiveness required vs variety of the game. Elegance is important beyond beauty, good for design, because when there are few rules you can really play around with them and really make it adaptable and change it.

Jumping mechanic is intuitive, but orbits are complicated.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't worry, you're not crazy. There are only 7 tools so far.

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3/23/2015 - Developing in HTML5 and Roblox, Game Jam!

Hey everyone, just a few more days until our 2015 spring semester Game Jam! If you haven't already RSVP'd then you can sign up right here.

As for other announcments...

• Our next Game Night is Firday, April 3rd.
• Officer elections for the next academic year will be held soon. Look for an email.

Tonight we had two well-known members give talks. 

The first was an HTML5 talk by Rory. Some of the main points to walk away from his cherry blossom filled talk are:

• HTML5 is accessible everywhere.
• It's a great for prototyping; enabling you to dive straight into 2d development.
• Rory enjoys writing in Vim.
• Crafty - a JS game engine. Their site has some nifty code to get started with.
• JSFiddle - a browser IDE for javascript.
• Check out construct and impress (javascript frameworks) as well.

Rory helped walk us through all of this by making a brand new game involving a player controlled turquoise rectangle colliding with a big fat square, and all in just a few minutes! 

Our second speaker was Greyson giving a talk on his platform of expertise, Roblox. If you don't know what Roblox is then head on over to the Roblox site and check it out, To summarize briefly, it's an online platform to develop and sell/share games as well as play them (with 5 million people) in a very cubeoid setting.

The platform's functionality comes from the scripting language Lua. If you haven't heard of it before that's alright, but if you've ever even touched World of Warcraft, you'll have probably been in contact with it through the game's extensive, community-made UI addon library. It's also used in the popular Source game Gary's Mod.

Overall, developing in Roblox functions similarly to a toned down version of Unreal Engine or Unity without all the fancy-smancy graphical stuff. Without even knowing tons about coding you can hop right in and use the engine itself to prototype games. The best part of Roblox is probably the ability to publish a multiplayer game without writing a single line of raw networking code.

Greyson showed off Bed Simulator 2015 (I wonder if it's better than Rock Simulator), and how a game like it could be started through importing meshes and the models made by other members of the community.

Thanks for the talks guys!

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11/1/2014 - Game Jam Please

Just a few more days until our 4th biannual Game Jam!!! This week Cindy was kind enough to give us some few tips on how to get the most out of Game Jam.

1. Talk to people who have participated before and try to find a group with them. Think of it as if it were a 42 hours apprenticeship.
2. Make sure you don't try and create Starcraft 2. Focus on a game with a small enough scope that you can get it working. Then you can add onto that if you have time.
3. Eat the free food.
4. Make sure to pace yourself. Don't try to stay up 42 hours programming because you'll start making terrible mistakes.

In addition to that Cindy played some Papers, Please. She actually did really well, and though one of her children got sick and her family had to go cold and hungry some nights, they were still alive by the time the meeting ended. While on the job she was hit on by women going to diva shows, she conformed to peer pressure on whether to deny or admit, and had her character randomly threatened.

                                                                                                                                                                    

Below you'll find more information on the Game Jam written by our founder, Livio De La Cruz. The dates have been updated.

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, Nov 7th at 5:00pm
• Ends: Sunday, Nov 9th at 1:00pm
• Location: Electrical and Computer Engineering building, room 105
• 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, Nov 7th, 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 Jonathan at jonwrightcs@email.arizona.edu

Friday, Nov 7th, 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, Nov 7th, 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, Nov 9th 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.

Questions

If you have any more questions, please ask Cindy at cindytrieu@email.arizona.edu

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10/03/2014 - GDC and Competitive Balance

Hey all,

This week we went more in depth on our future trip to GDC in San Francisco. There are a few things to note about this...

If you would like to go on the trip then please sign up here. We will try to get funding from ASUA and the computer science department, but to qualify for this funding you need to fill out a CA application. Being a CA (Conference Associate) enable you to get a free all-access pass, significantly lowering the cost of the trip. We will also be trying out some fundraising ideas.


For the other half of the meeting Patrick gave a talk on balancing competitive games - Halo. He focused on a multiplayer game because he found that the ideas translated more easily to single player games than they would the other way around...


Tuning Knobs: These are areas that are easily to change technically and can have relatively easy to identify affects on gameplay. Crank them high when starting the balancing process.

Game Mechanics: With your tuning knobs turned up see which of the mechanics you actually consider fun and focus on those. Also, identify which mechanics are not fun or are overly complex.

Feedback: Player feedback is nice near the end, but remember that you can't please everyone and everyone is looking out for what makes the game most fun to them.

See you all next week!

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10/06/2014 - Rapid Prototyping

This Monday evening our beloved ex-president (now vice) gave a talk on rapid prototyping. Pulling from his past experiences and especially his ongoing student IGF project, he went through the process and benefits of this development process.

Some of the things to take away from his presentation...

1. Prototypes are a great way to get an idea of how your brainstormed ideas will work as games.
2. They save a lot of time due to not requiring a lot of coding.
3. Set a deadline on each prototype.
4. Before starting, make sure to ask yourself, "what do I want to learn from this prototype?"

Next week Patrick will be giving a talk on gameplay balance. We'll also be talking about GDC, so if you plan on coming, or are interested in how the largest Game Developers Conference operates come join us!

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4/7/2014 - The GDC Rant Panel

We dedicated this week's meeting to talking about our club's trip to GDC. We organized the meeting like a typical GDC rant session, where everyone who went to GDC (all eight of us) sat at a long table in the front of the room. We each took turns talking about our favorite parts of the trip, what we learned, and advice for attending next year.

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3/31/2014 - Roblox talk, and Volunteer Opportunity

During this week's meeting, Greyson gave a talk about how he has been making money by making games on Roblox. Click here to download the slides from his presentation.

We also had Juan Cuadra from Pima Community College come to give a presentation about a new charity-based game project that he's starting. It looked like an awesome project, and he's looking for students who are willing to volunteer their time to help work on it. Click here to read more about his project.

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3/24/2014 - Concept Art Talk

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.

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3/10/2014 - The Yawhg

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.

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3/3/2014 - Officer Elections!

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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2/24/2014: Character Design Talk, and Spec Ops: The Line Analysis

We had two talks during this week's meeting. First, Cindy gave a talk about character design in games. She pointed out some strong designs and some weak ones, and then she had the club throw a bunch of ideas together for a character in order to guide us through what the creative process can be like. The image above is a rough sketch of what we came up with.

Patrick then gave a talk about Spec Ops: The Line, which is a first-person shooter game that has received a lot of praise for its extremely well written and depressing story. Some of the design decisions that were made about this game were really interesting, and it's amazing that they were able to make something that was packed with so much meaning.

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2/17/14 - Stochasticity in Game Design

This week we held a game design challenge structured around the idea of stochastic design, or the idea of adding randomness without being completely random. Dylan gave a quick talk to introduce the idea, and then he broke us up into random teams for the design challenge. The challenge was to take the game tic-tac-toe and turn it into a better game by adding some element of randomness to it. The winner of the challenge was chosen by public vote, and and they won a box of Valentines Day candy. It was a pretty fun meeting.

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2/10/2014 - Intro to Modularity in 3D Games

During Monday's meeting, William gave a talk about modularity, which refers to a technique used by artists and level designers to simplify the process of building complicated 3D environments. The talk wasn't too technical since most of us don't have experience with 3D graphics, but it was still really cool and eye-opening because it showed just how often assets get reused in a single level without the player even realizing it.

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2/3/2014 - Artificial Intelligence

On Monday's meeting, we started by talking about all of the currently ongoing projects. There were quite a few projects, some were remakes, and others were small prototype ideas.

The rest of the meeting was Dylan's talk about artificial intelligence (AI). It was mostly about AI from a more general point of view, rather than a technical point of view. It was interesting to think about some of the design applications of AI, as well as some of the recent innovations that the field of games AI has gone through recently.

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1/27/2014 - Trans-Media Worlds

Last Monday, we held our first meeting of the semester. We got a chance to meet all of the new members and talk about all of the events that we have planned.

Livio also gave a talk about Transmedia Worlds, which are basically fictional worlds that are represented by multiple types of media, such as film, novels, and of course, games. The talk focused on three examples: Star Wars, Pokémon, and Hot Wheels Acceleracers. The first two examples were some of the most successful worlds of recent years, while the third one is an example of a failed attempt to make a successful transmedia world.

Click here to download the slides from the presentation.

As usual, we recorded the meeting, but we are still editing the video. Check back here for the recording once it has been uploaded.

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9/28/2013 - Video Recording of the Intro to Game Programming Workshop

We finally uploaded a video recording of the Intro to Game Programming Workshop that we held almost two months ago. The workshop was done with Java, since that's what the department teaches, and some of the topics we covered include: how to draw images to the screen, how to animate images, the concept of a game loop, how to listen to keyboard events, how to detect collisions, and more!

The workshop lasted for two and a half hours, when it was scheduled to last only two hours. The recording, however, is only a little over an hour long because we cut out a lot of empty segments, such as when we were waiting for participants to finish writing their code.

If you want to download the code from the workshop, we have three collections of files for you to use:

WorkshopGame_3pm.zip
This is the code that we had at 3:00pm when people started leaving. At this stage we had a simple window with a circle in it that moved around when the player pressed the arrow keys.

WorkshopGame_Finished.zip
This is the code that we had at 3:30pm, after we decided to stay late and add an enemy to the game. We figured out how to detect collisions between two circles, and we added logic to "kill" the player when they got hit by the big evil circle.

WorkshopGame_Pre-Workshop.zip
This is the game that we made while planning this workshop. The variable names are slightly different, but the main difference is that we added an image background to our level.

If you have any questions about the material covered in this workshop, or the source code, feel free to ask Livio at livio@interguild.org.

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Game Development Resources

(Sfxr, speedy sfx generator.)

On Monday, we covered a variety of handy resources to use for our upcoming game jam. Here's list of the resourced we covered, highly useful for not only the game jam, but game development in general. All items here are free for most functionality, and are arranged in no specific order save for categories.

Before you jump into exploring these resources, note that 3D-related tools tend to have a much more significant learning curve, so we do not recommend attempting to develop a 3D game during the game jam without significant prior experience.

Update 11/8: added several new tools to our game development list, and categorized our tools into either the Rapid category or the Advanced category.

Game Development
Rapid:
Stencyl - popular 2D game-creation software with visual scripting and integrated physics engine.
Game Maker Studio - speedy game-development tool with extensive community.
Construct 2 - 2D game-development engine.
RPG Maker - popular program for creating JRPG-style games.
Advanced:
LibGDX - Open-Source Java framework for deploying on PC, iOS, HTML5, and Android.
Unity - strong 3D game-creation tool.
Ren'Py - Python-based visual novel creation engine, no prior programming experience necessary.
Pygame - popular Python extension for game creation.
Flash Builder - Fast IDE for flash games, using AS3.
Unreal Development Kit - complete 3D game-development engine. Beware: high learning curve.

Graphic
Rapid:
Tigsource Assemblee Competition Part 1 - graphics for sound assets for public use
GraphicsGale - highly useful and (mostly) free pixel art creation program.
GIMP - standard free open-source program.

Microsoft Paint- don't laugh! Paint is actually a very handy tool for quick edits.
Advanced:
Photoshop CS2 - this old version of Photoshop is now free! Note that Windows 7 needs special support.
Pixen - open-source pixel-art creator for Mac OS X
Blender - free 3D graphics rendering software.

Sound
Rapid:
Audacity - powerful open-source sound-editing program.
Sfxr - instant 8-bit sound effect generator. Check out bfxr for flash version and cfxr for Mac version.
FreeSound - huge database of quality sound effects, under a variety of references.
Incompetech - another database of free sounds.
Advanced:
GarageBand - powerful tracking/SE tool for Mac.
Acid Xpress - free music recording and creation software for Windows.

Misc.
Tiled - map-creation software for tile-based games.
MakeHuman - random 3D human model generator.
PolyCount - community for 3D art creation and game development.
ModDb - community for game modding.

Comment if you have more resources that you think fits on this page, and good luck if you are attending the Game Jam!

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10/28/2013 - "The Lost Meeting"

This week was pretty weird. We started off with a bunch of announcements about the upcoming game jam and a potential workshop that we're thinking of holding. We then spent a good amount of time talking about the talks that we're thinking of giving during the upcoming weeks. We listed all of our potential talk ideas on the board, and then we voted to see which talks had more interest around them.

Then starting at around 13:40, Josh started his talk about conveyance in game design. Conveyance usually refers to how well you can explain something to the player, and the term is usually used when talking about subtle, nonverbal ways to inform players. Josh actually decided to play an outdoor game for his talk, which involved us going outside for most of the meeting. This is why we only recorded the first 20 minutes of the meeting.

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10/21/2013 - "Takeaway & Theme" or the design of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

This week, Dylan gave an hour-long talk about The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. He talked about several other games as well, including FTL, Gone Home, and Shelter (which we played at the end of the meeting), but the underlying idea that tied the talk together was what Dylan called "takeaway," or your ability to take away something meaningful from your experience with a game.

It was a very engaging and interesting talk. If you ever wondered why some people love Majora's Mask so much (or why others find it so strange and nontraditional), this talk does a great job of explaining it, while still keeping it accessible to those who haven't played the game without too many spoilers.

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