12/3/2012: Welcome to Blockland!

This week, we held our last meeting of the semester. Our next meeting will be sometime in January, and we'll send an email out on our mailing list about it as we get closer to that date.

During this week's meeting, Jordan Wallet showed us the game Blockland, which is a semi-popular game that tries to be Lego in video game form. Jordan originally got into programming because of this game's amazingly easy modding features.

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Game Night this Friday, November 30th

Once again, the GameDev Club is teaming up with the IEEE club to hold a game night! There will be food, and everyone is encouraged to bring their own games, snacks, TVs, computers, etc.

• When: Friday, November 30, starting at 5:30pm until midnight.
• Where: Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) building, room 105 (map below)

Important Info

1. Please RSVP using this form: http://bit.ly/uagamenight.
2. You can park for free in the parking lot by the ECE building (lot #3039) after 5:00pm.
3. To drive to the Parking lot, you'll most likely have to get to 2nd St from Mountain Ave, because Park Ave is closed due to construction (see map below).
4. The doors for the building, as well as the elevator, close at around 6pm, so call the IEEE room at 520-626-7324 if you're locked out. It's best to add that number to your contacts, just in case.
5. In order to get to the bottom floor of the ECE building, please only use the South stairwell door, which will be left open.
6. While we've never had any incidents before, the clubs are not responsible for damaged, lost, or stolen valuables. It's generally good practice to label your things to make sure they don't get mixed up.
7. In accordance to university policy, no alcohol, firearms, or weapons will be allowed.

University Map

Below is a map of where the ECE building is. To view the map in another window, click here.



View Larger Map

Questions

If you have any questions, send an email to Robbie, the chair of the IEEE, at laityr@email.arizona.edu, or to Livio, the president of the GameDev Club, at ldelac01@email.arizona.edu.

Remember that Livio won't be at the game night this Friday because he'll be in Seattle interviewing with Microsoft, so you should direct any urgent questions to Robbie.

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11/26/2012: Magnet Ball Postmortem Talk

This week, Livio and Zuoming gave a postmortem-style talk about Magnet Ball, the two player game that they've been working on this semester.

Some of the things that went right for the project include: a successful rapid prototyping phase early in the semester, a consistent reliance on playtesting to assess design decisions, and a very resilient and dedicated team that was able to keep working on this side project through all of the roadblocks they faced.

Some of the major challenges they faced included: managing a team that was too large for the project, the fact that the project was restarted about two-thirds of the way through, and difficulties with establishing a good preproduction phase.

Magnet Ball is a two player game, where each player uses their attraction/repulsion powers to redirect blocks into goals in order to score points. Click here to play Magnet Ball.

Game Credits:

Tyler May - Producer
Livio De La Cruz - Game Design, Programming
Zuoming Shi - Game Design, Programming
Ami Pribadi - Art, Animations
Pooria Rashidi - Stadium Art
Scott McGowan - Music, Sound Effects
Logan Barnes - Music, Sound Effects
Teresa Frazier - Programming, Java Prototyping

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11/19/2012: Cutscenes and Quick Time Events

We didn't meet last week because of veterans day, but this week Dave Fei gave a really good presentation on cutscenes, quick time events, and similar devices. We didn't think the presentation would take more than 10-15 minutes, but we were able to maintain some pretty engaging discussions for a full hour about the design difficulties of balancing gameplay with story and other presentation-based elements.

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11/5/2012: Stories in Games, & Applying for the GDC's CA Position

During today's meeting, Dylan gave continued his talk from last week by talking about the strange design desicions behind Justine, the DLC for Amnesia. He then went on to talk about the place of story in game design.

The rest of our meeting was spent talking about the Games Developers Conference and sharing tips about applying for the CA position. Basically, Tyler's main advice was to remember that you're applying for a customer service position. In the application process, you only get 1500 characters to explain why you would make a CA, and talking about how great your game development skills are isn't going to be very relevant. What they want to see is that you're good with people and a dependable worker, but also why you really want to go to GDC in the first place.

We also talked about which passes are worth buying for the conference in case you don't win a CA position. For instance, the Student Pass ($75) is kinda a waste of money because that day is so crowded that you can't really make much use of it. The Expo Pass is what I got last year ($200) and it was pretty awesome and probably a really great choice for one's first trip to GDC.

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Course Kombat Game Cabinet

The local IEEE chapter is currently working on a project for the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. They're building two game cabinets to put around the ECE building that will feature projects created by students. The project is being led by Max Roth and other IEEE members, but we also have some GameDev members, such as Alex Burney, contributing to the project as well.

The goal of the project is to create a more visible representation of the ECE community in order to help attract new students. The first game to be featured on the cabinets will be Course Kombat, a version of M.U.G.E.N. that features a character for each professor at the ECE department.

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10/29/2012: Horror Games

Since Halloween is in just a few days, today Dylan gave a presentation on horror game design. He even dressed up a bit with something that made it look like he had a zombie-like wound on his neck, which was creepily partially hidden by his hair.

Next week, Dylan will be finishing the second half of his presentation, which focused more on story design rather than horror games. Dave has also volunteered to give a talk on cut scenes in games after Dylan's presentation is done.

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Game Night this Friday, October 26th

Once again, the GameDev Club is teaming up with the IEEE club to hold a game night! There will be food, and everyone is encouraged to bring their own games, snacks, TVs, computers, etc.

• When: Friday, October 26, starting at 5:30pm until midnight.
• Where: Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) building, room 105 (map below)

In addition to all of the awesome games that we usually bring, we'll also be holding a playtesting session for one of the games that we've been developing in the club, Magnet Ball, which we intend to submit to the Independent Games Festival next week. Also, if you stick around until around 11pm, we'll likely start watching the latest Doctor Who episodes.

Important Info

1. Please RSVP using this form: http://bit.ly/UAGameNight.
2. You can park for free in the parking lot by the ECE building (lot #3039) after 5:00pm.
3. To drive to the Parking lot, you'll most likely have to get to 2nd St from Park Ave, because the intersection of 2nd St with Mountain Ave is closed due to construction (see map below).
4. The doors for the building, as well as the elevator, close at around 6pm, so call the IEEE room at 520-626-7324 if you're locked out. It's best to add that number to your contacts, just in case.
5. In order to get to the bottom floor of the ECE building, please only use the South stairwell door, which will be left open.
6. While we've never had any incidents before, the clubs are not responsible for damaged, lost, or stolen valuables. It's generally good practice to label your things to make sure they don't get mixed up.
7. In accordance to university policy, no alcohol, firearms, or weapons will be allowed.

University Map

Below is a map of where the ECE building is. To view the map in another window, click here.



View Larger Map

Questions

If you have any questions, send an email to Robbie, the chair of the IEEE, at laityr@email.arizona.edu, or to Livio, the president of the GameDev Club, at ldelac01@email.arizona.edu.

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10/22/2012: Intro to XNA 4.0

During today's meeting, Patrick gave a talk introducing us to the XNA framework, which is a popular game development API that can be used with the C# programming language.

Next week will be our Halloween meeting, and Dylan will be giving a presentation about horror games.

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10/15/2012: Sound Effects, and Intro to ActionScript 3.0

Our video recording of this meeting will be uploaded soon!

Today, Livio gave two short talks. The first was an introduction into making your own sound effects. We talked about the sound effects generator bfxr, which is a Flash port of the Windows program called sfxr (and there's also a Mac port called cfxr). We also used Audacity to record sounds from a mic and manipulate them until they sounded professional.

The second talk was an introduction into programming for Flash. We talked about the display list and some basic ideas about how Flash works.

Next week, Patrick will be giving a talk about making games with XNA.

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10/8/2012: Overview of Game-Making Tools

The video recording of this meeting will be posted soon!

This week, Livio gave an overview of game development tools, starting with the most accessible and simple tools, such as rapid prototyping and educational software, and then moving up towards more advanced topics, such as coding libraries and IDE's. Below are the slides used during the presentation, and they include links to everything mentioned:

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10/1/2012: Unreal Engine 3 Demo

The video recording of this meeting will be posted soon!

This week, Tyler Wallace gave a demonstration of how to use Unreal 3, the popular 3D game engine by Epic Games. Tyler has been working with Unreal for the past few months for his job, and this demo was an attempt to teach us what he had learned.

During the talk, we managed to run into a hilariously large amount of problems, and nothing seemed to go as smoothly as originally planned. We still had a good amount of fun though, and we still got a pretty good look at the engine.

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