Related posts for Albert Chen Presentation

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!

Filed under Announcements by Kelsey
Related posts | No Comments »

Thanks to everyone for coming!

The collaborative game challenge has started! Rules will be posted shortly, in a different post.

Also thanks to Albert Chen for his presentation, “Getting into the Video Game Industry: Episode II – Unemployment Strikes Back.” You can view his presentation here.

Before Albert Chen’s presentation, we took a few minutes to mention a few development kits that are popular for game development, including Game Maker, which is great for people without programming experience. More info can be found on the presentation slides from this meeting.

Filed under Announcements, Speakers by Kristopher
Related posts | No Comments »

Thanks to everyone who came to our first meeting!
We saw a video of last year’s awesomeness and game presentations from five different people.

SJSU Game Dev Highlight Reel from SJSU Game Dev on Vimeo.

Grid[z] and Ultimate Checkers Online from SJSU Game Dev on Vimeo.

Bryan Munro’s War and Bees from SJSU Game Dev on Vimeo.

Convenience from SJSU Game Dev on Vimeo.

First development challenge of the semester

Our first game development challenge starts in two weeks, but you need to form your teams now! For the first time ever, we will be collaborating with students at Cogswell Polytechnical College. Through collaboration, we hope to get several teams that each have dedicated programmers and artists, as well as game designers and others.

To get the teams formed for this challenge, please post on this Google group, even if you plan to work independently or already have a team planned: The Cogswell and SJSU Collaborative Game Challenge Google Group. Following the example (the readme post), please state your skills and the type of team or team members that you’d like to work with. In a week or so, participants can then go through the list to find team members.

Semester schedule

The second challenge of the semester, as well as additional guest speakers and other awesomeness, will be finalized later. For the meetings below, the rooms in the Student Union are already reserved, and the guest speakers are confirmed.

September 2nd
Student org fair tabel’n (10:00 AM – 2:00)

September 10th
7:00 – 9:30, Almaden room
Albert Chen will speak, and the Cogswell and SJSU Collaborative Game Challenge will start

September 24th
7:00 – 9:30, Almaden room

October 8th
7:00 – 9:30, Almaden room
Guest speakers from Zynga are coming, and the Collaborative Challenge will end
EDIT: Zynga needs to be rescheduled :/

October 22th
7:00 – 9:30, Almaden room
Guest speakers from HeyZap are coming

November 5th, November 19th, December 3rd
TBA

Filed under Announcements by Kristopher
Related posts | No Comments »

Thanks to Albert Chen for coming!

Filed under Speakers by marek
Related posts | No Comments »