Officer Elections Results, Silly Games, and time to play TF2

Today we held officer elections! The debates took longer than expected, but they were also much more fun than expected. Dylan even skipped the class that he usually has in order to defend his vice-president position.

The first round of elections was Zuoming Shi (current Treasurer) vs. Cindy Trieu (non-officer), and they were fighting for the presidency. They were both very popular candidates with some great skills to offer. It was a very close race, but Zuoming won by only two votes!

The second battle was for the vice presidency: Dylan Clavell (current vice president) vs. Tyler Wallace (current outreach officer). This was a hard decision for most voters, because as with the race for the presidency, both candidates were very qualified and well-liked. However, Dylan ended up winning with a strong majority, perhaps because when people are undecided, they tend to vote for the incumbent.

There were a few automatic victories for those who ran for positions without facing any competition. Jonathan Wright (also known as Save Point, our current secretary), became the new club treasurer for next year, while Livio De La Cruz (our current president) became the new secretary. Patrick Wilkening remained the club's cinematographer, and Harvey Sam's position as game server admin got reduced to a pseudo-officer position since we don't have a game server anymore.

We were left with one vacancy, however: no one ran for the position of outreach officer. We decided to hold an election for this position during next week's meeting, and the current candidates are William Wilson (non-officer) and Cindy Trieu (non-officer). After she lost the race for presidency by such a small margin, so many people wanted Cindy to be an officer that we went out of our way to convince her to run for this position, which she would actually be a very good fit for, considering her art and graphic design experience. William, on the other hand, also has art experience, and he hopes to use his officer position as an opportunity to really help the club grow and to more effectively use all of its media outlets.

So to recap, here are all of the results:

President - Zuoming Shi
Vice President - Dylan Clavell
Treasurer - Jonathan Wright
Secretary - Livio De La Cruz
Cinematographer - Patrick Wilkening
Outreach Officer - Up for grabs

The officer positions that we voted on are for the next academic year, so the new terms won't start until the Fall semester. Until then, we'll be in a sort of transition period where the new officers can learn from the incumbents about how to perform their job.

Because we were expecting the elections to take much less time, Dylan hastily prepared a pretty interesting talk/discussion on silly games such as QWOP, Enviro-Bear, and Katamari Damacy. It started five minutes before the meeting ended, but it lasted for about 20 minutes. It was actually a really entertaining talk, and the fact that so many people stayed long after the meeting had ended was a sign of how good it was.

During next week's meeting, we'll finish our elections by voting on Outreach Officer, and for the remainder of the meeting, we're going to try out that "book club"-style game discussion idea that was brought up before Spring Break. The topic of the discussion will likely be Team Fortress 2, so if you haven't played the game yet, download it now (it's free!), play it over the weekend, and share your thoughts about it during the meeting. Meanwhile, we'll be doing our research on the game so that we can guide the discussion around interesting topics and hopefully make it more of an educational experience rather than an aimless discussion.

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03/04/2013: Re-cap - Time To Vote!

Elections are tomorrow and after hopefully a relaxing/exciting/adventurous Spring Break I thought it might be a good idea to refresh everyone's memory.

1. Club Elections!

For the elections tomorrow the voting procedure is quite simple; Anyone running for an office can only run for one office. This rule applies to current officers as well. The Game-server officer position is being turned into a pseudo-officer position and isn't part of these elections.

Also, remember to vote for me (Jonathan, A.K.A. "Save Point") for treasurer!

2. Future Meetings!

We had some discussions on what to do for future meetings since the last few have been mainly logistical because of the game jam and officer elections. There is a long list of talks that people want to do, and so hopefully we can get a schedule crafted as soon as people prepare their presentations. The talks range from 3D graphics and programming to "What is being Indie" and modding. The veteran members plan on sharing with us the legend of Project Sponge too.

3. Another Family Club

Our club is very programming based it seems, and so the idea has been tossed around to add a Digital Art extension to our club. Depending on the amount of interest it may break off and become it's own club, but regardless look towards more news on this during future meetings. In the meanwhile we are hoping to have more diverse talks about graphics, animation, sound, etc.

- Save Point

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Photos & Videos from the Game Jam

The game jam was amazing! This post contains all/most of the pictures and videos that we took during the game jam. You can find a playlist of all the videos on the club's YouTube channel.

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Robot 3000X - The Combines' Game Jam Entry

This game was created during our recent game jam by the team called The Combines. Our team was composed of four people: Cindy Trieu, Lauren Anglin, Shien Hong, and Livio De La Cruz.

Since the theme of the game jam was "evolution", our game is about a little robot called Robot 3000X which evolves from a simple box of switches to a self-aware life form. Because everyone knows that self-aware computers are highly dangerous, this triggers the lab's automatic defense systems, so it's up to the player to help Robot 3000X make his great escape out of the lab. It's almost like an infinite-running game where you're constantly gaining new powers as you keep going.

This game was made using Stencyl, and while the levels were not procedurally generated, there are a lot of glitches in there that might make you think otherwise. I think the glitches made the game more fun, since it was almost as if the game itself had evolved to become self-aware.

Click here to download the game.

The download link includes both the original files that we had at the end of the game jam, and a fixed version of the game which was created a few days after the game jam had ended. The .swf files are the executables that you would run to play the game, while the .stencyl files can be imported into Stencyl if you want to see how exactly our game was made.

Overall, I loved working on this team. While we may have been too big for our own good, we also seemed to be having more fun than everyone else. We weren't afraid to goof off even as the clock kept ticking, and we left the game jam feeling like we had all become really good friends.

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Mutated - Team Ctrl+F+U's Game Jam Entry

This was the winning game during the Spring 2013 Game Jam. I was made by Team Ctrl+F+U, which included Patrick Wilkening and William Wilson.

This game took the theme of "evolution" and twisted it into the idea of mutation. The premise of the game is that you are fighting viruses that are trying to mutate your DNA, and you defend yourself by shooting particles at the incoming viruses. It's part rhythm game in that shooting a particle also places a note, and the control scheme is reminiscent to a musical keyboard.

The game was programmed using XNA, and even though Will had to leave after the first night, they were still able to finish the game several hours early before the game jam ended.

Click here to download the game (Windows only).

The file includes an executable as well as a folder that contains some assets that the game needs to run properly.

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Tucson Festival of Books

Many of our members volunteered at this year's Festival of Books. The University of Arizona put together a large collection of tents called Science City on the east side of the festival, and both CS and SISTA had set up demonstrations and activities to help kids get more interested in studying computing.

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The Spinning Ducks' Game Jam Entry

This card-game videogame was made for the Spring 2013 Game Jam by the Spinning Ducks Team, which included Tyler Wallace, Youhao Wei, and Dilan Jenkins.

In this game you make monsters of various levels fight each other in an attempt to bring your opponent's health points down. The game was made using GameMaker.

Click here to download the game (Windows only).

The above link includes a file that will install the game to your computer.

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02/25/2013: Election Game 2013

1. Club Elections!

Elections are just around the corner during the meeting after Spring Break. If you would like to run for one of the offices then email Livio. The officers are still working out the logistics of the event, but be prepared to vote!

2. Game Jam Winner!

The Game Jam has come and gone. For it being the first one hosted by the club it was quite successful! At the meeting we decided on the winner of the jam. Congratulations to "Cntrl + F + U" and their DNA defense themed space invader [ish] game. Unfortunately they didn't receive a prize, but hopefully next time that will be possible.

3. Game Server

As some people might know, the game server has been "dead" for quite a while now. We've gotten some requests to put up a server with half-life source/Gary's Mod, so that is now on the way!

4. "Juciness" in Games

We were shown a video showing the wide array of positive effects that "juciness" can bring to a video game. It really does up even the simplest of games to the next level.

 

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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.

Game Development
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.
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.
Unreal Development Kit - complete 3D game-development engine. Beware: high learning curve.

Graphic
Tigsource Assemblee Competition Part 1 - graphics for sound assets for public use
GraphicsGale - highly useful and (mostly) free pixel art creation program.
Photoshop CS2 - this old version of Photoshop is now free! Note that Windows 7 needs special support.
GIMP - standard free open-source program.
Pixen - open-source pixel-art creator for Mac OS X
Blender - free 3D graphics rendering software.

Sound
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.
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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Game Night on Friday, March 1st!

Note: Don't forget about our game jam on Friday, February 22nd!

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, March 1st, 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/IEEEGameNight.
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.

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Game Jam Timeline and Advices

Click Here to RSVP for the Game Jam

Schedule

Friday (Feb. 22nd):

6:00 pm is the preferred arrival time of the jam. Coming early gives you time to socialize with other attendees, and will be helpful toward team-forming later on. We'll also be serving dinner at this time.

At 7:00 pm,  the theme will be announced, and the timer officially starts. That's the time to discuss with others jammers, and present your personal pitches to others. As the ideas become mature, settle in with a team whose idea you like and start prototyping!

If you wish to set up early, the room will be open anytime between 10am and 4:30pm.

Sunday (Feb. 24th):

The timer ends at 7:00am, which will be the deadline for submission to the Game Jam dropbox folder. After all the entries are in, each team will show off their results in the 36 hours, and we will hold a vote for the best games of the Jam.

After the winners are announced, we will have a breakfast to celebrate the end of the Jam and return to our usual Sundays.We will be recapping the Game Jam on Monday, so if you missed out on anything, make sure you come to catch up!

Peculiarities

The IEEE room does not have good cell signals, and doors to the ECE building will be locked during the Weekend. Please put down the room phone-number so you don't get locked out: (520)626-7324.
If you wish to spend the night at the Jam site, please bring your own blanket, jacket, and/or sleeping bags.
There will be about 3 tower PC's in the room for free use. If you want any software pre-installed, please contract us in advance.

Advice

Team Size

Do not form teams of more than five. The communication efforts involved to direct a large team will come at considerable expense in efficiency.
Ideally, one person should be working on the program, one person should be working on the graphic, and one person should try to piece everything together.

Scheduling

Get the game foundations set up by bedtime the first day, so you can jump directly to a good workflow by the time you wake up. Get at least six hours sleep on the first day! Alertness on the second day is extremely important.
In the last five or six hours of the Jam, don't try to add any new features unless your game is near complete. Also, use placeholder art!

Game Design

The most valuable way to learn about design is play-testing, and every attendee is a potential play-tester! The first-and-foremost priority should be to make sure that the game is fun, so take any chance you get to show your game to other designers!

Rapid-development Tools

While having tools like Game Maker and Construct is not required, they certainly make your life much easier. Avoid developing 3D games if you don't have considerate amount of experience in the area.

The upcoming meetings on the 18th will discuss the Jam in more detail, including helpful resources for creating or finding images and sounds, and a brief overview of rapid game development tools.

Happy jamming!

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02/11/2013: So You Want to Be a Game Designer

Another meeting and another week closer 'til our first UA Game Jam. If you plan on attending, please RSVP here. Also, we have found a camera man and so the meeting recordings should be up soon, hooray!

1. The Final Boss gives some words of advice.

Our Final Boss (President) lead a discussion on how to get an advantage in the game development career field.

Over the course of the discussion there was input from numerous members of the club and one reoccurring theme became apparent. This theme applies regardless of whether you want to be a designer, developer, programmer, artist, animator, sound designer, etc.

"If you want to create video games then start making them!"

It's said "your first ten games will suck so get them out of the way first," and that's what you have to do. If you're interested in game design practice making games and read books about creating games.

Programmers should mostly focus on learning C languages for both desktop and mobile games. Though there are development tools that help move the process of creating a game along faster (like Stencyl).

If your forte is art then mods are a great way to focus on adding elements to an already existing game, so you can see your creations in action. Also, great 3D animators are a rare find, so if your goal is that then start practicing right away.

Music has the potential to keep a badly designed game afloat, and so it's great to analyze the music and how it compliments the story/game-play. Personally I would listen to music from the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and if you haven't already, play it! For practice, adding or replacing music to games that already exist is great. And for those who just want a quick sound clip to make their game more engaging there is always Freesound.org.

- Save Point

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