Oh hey, we have a meeting next Tuesday! There are two important things you should know about it.

GDC Money

If you want to attend GDC with us (about that), you need to bring $75 to this meeting probably. Technically, you need to get it to Cindy by March 9, which is a week later, but she will be at the meeting, so it makes sense to bring it then!

Deadline for the Current Challenge

This meeting Wednesday Thursday at midnight is the deadline for the subtitular current challenge! If you have stuff on a computer, put it in a zip file and email it to kelseyhigham+gamedevyay@gmail.com (that’s me) by the end of the meeting Wednesday Thursday, so that I can put it on this website here. If you have stuff on paper, either scan+email it, or bring it to the meeting and we’ll have a person with a scanner you can lend it to. If you have stuff made out of clay, man, I really admire that.

Hurr

Also at this meeting: we’ll announce the next challenge (you already pretty much know what it is), and we’ll show off any games made during the Intergalacticollabogamesmash! (Which is on Saturday, and which you should attend, because it will be fun fun fun.)

Tuesday, March 2, 2010
7:15pm – 9:15pm (though it probably won’t last nearly that long)
SJSU Student Union, Guadalupe Room
Facebook event details

Update: The new deadline for submission is Wednesday at midnight, not Tuesday at 9:00.

Update update: Haha, now the deadline for submission is Thursday at midnight.

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Thanks, Albert Chen, Assistant Professor of Game Design and Development at Cogswell, alumnus of LucasArts, Factor5, EA, and 3DO, and generally awesome guy, for presenting at our club for a third time!

(He talked about design docs, you guys! So great!)

Albert Chen from Cogswell – 2 from SJSU Game Dev on Vimeo.

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That was a cool meeting! Albert Chen provided three general approaches to designing and documenting a game, not all of them explicitly involving a design doc. If you couldn’t make it, or you thought it was so great you have to see it again, we’ll have a video up soon. Soooooooon.

Nobody seemed to actually bring stuff they made, but people did team up, so that’s cool! I wonder how many entries we’ll get? It seemed like not very many—if you have an idea for a game, this is a pretty good opportunity to get it out there! Remember, designs and assets are due on March 2.

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What You Need to Know

The next meeting is this Tuesday! Albert Chen will be presenting about design docs, and you (yes, you!) will be bringing stuff you’ve made.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010
7:00pm – 9:00pm
SJSU Student Union, Guadalupe Room

Facebook event details

The Rest of This Post is Boring

Design Docs

We’ve asked Albert Chen (we’ve seen him before) to give a presentation on design documents! A design doc is basically a big document that describes a game in detail before it’s been made; in big companies, it’s given to all the departments and they try to make a game matching it as accurately as possible. For some games, it can be hundreds of pages long, and it can be a full-time job to write and maintain one!

Making a design document first isn’t the only way to make a game—some continue designing throughout the entire development process, some just implement what’s fun to implement. Some use a design doc, but only as a first draft, and modify the game as they please as they’re making it. Some, like Valve, just make a bunch of gamelike things, see which ones are the most fun, and try to glue them together.

A design doc is probably the best way for you to describe your game, though, for this competition! Albert will help you make yours better.

Teaming Up

This is the meeting where you should bring stuff you have made that can conceivably be shoehorned into a game! It doesn’t matter how terrible or ugly or embarrassing it is, bringing stuff is better than not bringing stuff.

If you’re an artist, you can bring drawings or your laptop or whatever. If you’re designing a game, you can bring any game ideas or sketches or mockups you’ve made. If you’re a musician, you can bring something with headphones or speakers.

If you haven’t made anything that could conceivably be shoehorned into a game, try it! Think up a game idea and write it down, or try to draw a cool robot. Give yourself an absurd time constraint, like 5 minutes, so that when you show it to people, you can excuse how bad it is with “well I only gave myself five minutes”.

The goal here isn’t to find out who’s good at what, it’s to find out who’s interested in what. If there are two people who like unicorns, and one of them is interested in design, and one of them is interested in illustration, maybe they should team up!

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This post is way too long! Just read the bullet points at the end.

Our next challenge is a two-parter! In Part Ⅰ, you are tasked with designing your game’s gameplay and assets.

In Part Ⅱ, you are tasked with coding together someone else’s game, but we’ll worry about that in a few weeks.

Does the prospect of making a game without learning to code appeal to you? Well get your head out of the cloud, buster, it’s not as easy as your daydreams make it out to be. There are some barriers, technical and human, which you need to deal with.

The Technical (or: The Rules)

To be eligible to compete, and to be awesome, your game must incorporate at least two of the following keywords: animals, food, future, and snow. How you incorporate them is up to you!

Here’s the tricky part. If you want something in the game, you have to make it yourself. Do you want your guy to be able to run and jump to the left and the right? If you don’t want your game looking like Karoshi, where the main guy is facing forward the whole time, you have to draw all of those pictures! Don’t worry, it doesn’t take as long as you fear. I drew this guy in a minute:  Imagine what you can do with ten minutes.

If you have a grander vision, however, you are welcome to team up with people. Teams can be up to three people in size. Have one person draw the backgrounds and one person draw the sprites and one person compose the music, I dunno! (You can also make THREE DEE MODELS, if that’s your thing.)

That’s one reason you should bring stuff you’ve made to the next meeting: you can see who’s interested in what and team up with people who complement you. Don’t worry if you suck at everything; all of us suck at everything! That’s why we’re in college.

The deadline for this thing is March 2nd. Establish your vision by then.

The Human (or: Protips)

You’ll want to make your game design as detailed as possible. Otherwise the programmer could misunderstand your vision! Make sure you write down exactly what you have in mind. Draw levels on graph paper, specify speeds of things in pixels per second, write down text exactly how you want it to be worded. Coding a game is hard work; the programmer has enough on his plate without having to make arbitrary decisions all the time.

Remember, though, coding is hard. Keep your game simple. If you make your game design too complicated, the programmer won’t have time to finish it all—he might just pick the funnest subset of your game to make, or worse, skip it entirely! Take a look at some existing games we’ve made to get an idea of what a reasonable scope is.

tl;dr:

• Form teams of 1 – 3 people to design a game. People cannot be on multiple teams.
• Design the game, but don’t create the game: describe the game in words, and provide assets (art and sound) for it.
• Game designs must match at least two of these keywords: food, future, snow, animals
• Game design descriptions should be as detailed as possible so that the game design is not misunderstood
• Game designs should be easy to implement, because some of them will be implemented in the next challenge
• There will be prizes
• The design is due in four weeks, at the meeting on March 2nd

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Here’s what went down!

Cindy described the plan for GDC. If you’d like to go, she’s gonna need your contact info and $75 deposit by March 11, as it now says on the Facebook event page. You should sign up on the event page, even if you’re not sure whether you’re going! That way you can receive updates about it. Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone.

Our meetings will be on Tuesday this semester, due to room availability in the Student Union. Put that in your brain so you don’t forget it! The meetings will be on Feb 2, Feb 16, Mar 2, Mar 16, April 6, April 27, and May 11. That’s almost, but not quite a meeting every two weeks.

The next meeting is a flaunt-your-wares meeting! If you have made pictures or programs or noises or anything that could conceivably be shoehorned into a game, you should print it out or put it on your laptop on into your iPod and bring it. It will give you an opportunity to meet people to team up with to make games! That’s great! Don’t you think that’s great?

We brought up the Glorious Trainwrecks 371-in-1 Pirate Kart II. In a nutshell, it’s an attempt to make 371 shoddy rush job of a games over a period of 48 hours. If you’re interested, you should sign up for the Facebook event!

Because we’re best friends with the SJSU CS Club, we’re obeying their order to pimp S2B, a Microsoft thing that purports to connect students who want jobs to businesses who want students.

Last but soitenly not least, we have a new competition woo! This one is a competition in two parts, kinda like Assemblee, if you’re familiar with that or you bothered to click. The first phase is one involving design and asset creation. If it’s the kind of thing you enjoy, you design a game and provide all the images, models, sound, or whatever needed to make the game a reality. (It’s okay to team up with people! That’s what our next meeting is for, to let you figure out who to team up with.) In the second phase, games get assembled into moving parts. If you’re qualified or motivated, you take as much of someone else’s design and assets as you can and code it up. Hopefully by the end, we’ll have made some awesome collabogames!

The next meeting is on February 16. You should go! My feelings will be hurt if you don’t go.

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