Related posts for Our First Meeting

Are you new here? THAT IS RAD AND YOU ARE RAD.

If you want to make games but have no idea how, there are some pretty simple steps we can provide.

• Come to meetings! People will showcase games they’ve made, and you can meet people to collaborate with. Meetings tend to be every two weeks; look down a bit to see when our first one is.
• Come to events wherein we will be teaching people to make games! A bunch of people have made their very first videogames at such events. These tend to happen on the third Saturday of every month.

To learn about such meetings and events, you’ll have to keep an ear out. There are way too many ways to do this:

• Sign up for our RSS feed (if you know what that means)
• Like us on Facebook (if you’re into that kind of thing)
• Follow us on Twitter (if you’re one of those people)
• Join our Google Group (if you were born in like the sixties)

Meanwhile, to get an idea of what the club is about, check out some of the things we’ve made, and watch some of the speakers we’ve hosted.

Have a nice school year!

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Time and Location

Tuesday, September 7, 2010
9:30pm – 10:30pm
Almaden Room in the Student Union, San José State University

Everything Else

If you’re new to the club, welcome, and if you’ve been here before, welcome back! This semester will be an exciting semester, I can feel it. Here’s what will happen at our first meeting:

• Hella introductions will go down. You’ll learn what the club is all about, and we’ll all learn each other’s names, so that we all feel bad when we forget them by the next meeting.
• If you’ve made a game before, bring it on your laptop or USB drive! You’ll get a few minutes to show off anything you’ve made before, and especially anything you’ve made over the summer.
• The first game challenge of the semester will be announced! We’ll help you get into groups so that you can make a game like a team. If you haven’t worked on a game before, don’t worry, that’s what we’re here for to begin with!

We look forward to seeing you there!

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Perhaps the flyer which brought you here in the first place??

Anna Anthropy will be presenting at our next meeting on Tuesday, March 16! You should come, even if you’re not a part of the club. (Even if you’re not a student here! (Even if you’re from the Internet.)) I don’t know what she’ll be talking about, so I’ll tell you a few miscellaneous things about her. Or you could just skip this post and play her games.

As a general introduction, Anna is a game designer and critic who excels at telling stories through the medium of games. Rather than relying on the embedded media of text or movies, like most story-based games out there today, she embeds her stories in the gameplay interactions. Literally, she has told a video game love story where the only action you can take, as the player, is to shoot. More abstractly, she’s told countless smaller stories in her various games’ level designs. She has written extensively about game design and storytelling on her blog, where she has, among other things, dissected the level designs in Super Mario Bros. and Star Guard to find out some of the reasons they’re so good.

Since it’s right after transgendered awareness week, I feel it’s worth mentioning that she’s transgendered. Historically, this has been a problem for people in the game industry; the story of Dani Bunten, lead designer of MULE (you should play the online multiplayer version) is a tragic one. Anna’s story is more inspiring—it’s a testament to the meritocratic nature of the Internet that she became known and respected first, and when people finally figured out that she was biologically male, few really seemed to care. Ultimately, people are more grateful than anything, because she has created some of the few games with non-immature lesbian stories.

She’s a judge in the Independent Games Festival, and she’s been influential in making the judging process suck less for those whose games were are getting judged.

Also at this meeting

People will show their progress on the current challenge, if they’ve got anything to show! (I still need to post the rules and the design docs for that thing, sorry. •_•)

We’ll probably share anything interesting that happened at GDC this weekend. I’m sure that something interesting will happen at GDC this weekend. (EDIT: Interesting things happened at GDC this weekend!)

People will also make new friends and get along with each other!

Here’s the where and the when

Guadalupe room (second floor), Student Union building, San José State University
Tuesday, March 16
7:15pm – 9:15pm

RSVP on Facebook, if you like.

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If you didn’t come to the meeting, you missed a grand time. But that’s okay, because it’s my job to summarize it for you!

GDC

If you’re attending GDC, there’s a mandatory informational meeting next Friday Wednesday (March 11th)! We don’t know when or where it’ll be yet, but it’ll be posted on the Facebook event page (so sign up on there to get messages if you haven’t already) and there’ll be a flyer or something in the CS Club. The informational meeting is now scheduled for Wednesday, March 10, at 7:00 PM, and will start out in front of the Student Union.

The deadline for payment is Tuesday, March 9th, which is five days from now! If you haven’t paid yet, get in contact with Cindy through the Facebook page, where her name is spelled Shin Deh.

T-Shirt Design

We’re going to be making T-shirts at some point! You can try to design one, but it’ll pass through an intensive quality control program, so don’t be offended if it gets rejected for being too boring or ugly or something! Here is one which was rejected, how foreboding:

Not that you shouldn’t try! You can post attempts and works in progress on the mailing list.

First Phase of the Contest

People presented their designs, shoddy half-designs, assets, and shoddy half-assets! You have like three hours left to submit your own, by the way. I will post them on the website here because we are about to start the

Second Phase of the Contest!

I will be posting the rules to that too, just be patient.

Intergalacticollabogamesmash

Parris played all the games we made for the Intergalacticollabogamesmash! You can play them yourself here. Those are only the 35 (!) games we made at our physical event; on the Internet, 102 people made 529 games, which you can play here. It was an awesome time, so we will be doing more things like that.

Next Meeting

Anna Anthropy will be our guest speaker! Sweet! More on that later.

Update: The GDC mandatory informational meeting is on Wednesday now! Gosh!

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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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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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Last semester ended well. Although we didn’t publish any Facebook games, we did make the playable games Too Much Stuff and Factory City. :D

…And we’re back!

Our first meeting of the semester will be next Tuesday (not Thursday). We’ll be having some fun and introducing the next game development challenge.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010
7:15pm – 9:00pm
SJSU Student Union, Guadalupe room

Facebook event details

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Many thanks to Jude Gomila of HeyZap for speaking at our last meeting! It was great to learn how social networks can be used to promote games, and hear a success story from a start-up co-founder.

Winners of the Collaborative Game Challenge have been announced! Intergalactic Planetary Super Showdown tied with Nyx for first place, and Cygnus the Cutie was a close runner up.

Our next challenge is the Facebook Game Dev Challenge! The details will be posted in a separate post.

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The Collaborative Game Challenge starts now!
Game entries are due on October 7, 2009.

Students from SJSU and Cogswell Polytechnical College are working together to make games. Although some teams have been formed already, you can still use this Google group to find or form a team. Following these instructions, students are posting to list their skills and the types of teams they would like to join. If you haven’t posted yet, please do, then either try to start a team or ask others if you can join their team.

Challenge dates:

• Thursday September 10th: rules are announced and challenge starts
• Thursday September 24th: (optional) teams may presents previews of their games
• Wednesday October 7th: game entries are due by email
• Thursday October 8th: teams will present their games
• October 15-21: team members vote for the best entries (see website for details)
• Thursday October 22: winners are announced and prizes are awarded

Main rules:

• Game entries must match at least one of these tags / themes: 4th wall, building, coloring, and gravity
• Game must be completable in less than five minutes
• Teams must have 1 – 5 people, from Cogswell / SJSU
• Code and artwork must be made by the team members

Complete rules

The challenge starts on Thursday, September 10, 2009
Entries must be received by Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 8AM. (That means, submit on the previous day.)
Games will be presented at the SJSU Game Dev meeting on Thursday, October 8, 2009

Challenge entry rules:

• The game must be fully completable in less than five minutes
• The game must match one of these tags: 4th wall, building, coloring, and gravity.

To be eligible for prizes:

• Teams must announce their team name and members on the Challenge Google Group (one post per team), by Thursday, September 24
• Teams must have 1 – 5 people, and people cannot be on multiple teams. Team members must be associated with either Cogswell or SJSU
• The SJSU Game Dev Club must receive permission to post at least one of the following for each entry on the website: executable, source, screenshots, or presentation video
• The game and its code (excepting code libraries) must be new and made by team members, after the start date of the competition
• All artwork must be created by members of the team
• The team must either make included sound and music, or get permission for all sound and music used
• At least one member of each team must be present at the meeting on Thursday, October 8 to demo their game. (For non-Windows games: bring your own laptop!)

Submissions:

• Submissions must be received at kristopherwindsor@gmail.com before 8AM, Thursday, October 8, 2009
• Submissions should include all of the following: game name, source code, Windows executable (not necessary for Linux / Mac – only games) or SWF / link to SWF, two screenshots, list of team members / positions and team name, and what the team will allow on the website (ie do they want the source code posted?)

Judging and prizes:

• Games will be posted on the SJSU Game Dev website by Thursday, October 15, so everyone can review them
• Every member of each team that submits a game should review the games after that date, pick two different games to vote for (members cannot vote for their own games), and email their votes to kristopherwindsor@gmail.com by Wednesday, October 21 (voting is optional)
• The two games with the most votes will win * (in case of tie: prizes will be awarded to 3 teams if there is a 2-way tie for second or 3-way tie for first; other ties will be broken with some form of re-voting)
• Each member of the winning teams will receive one prize (prizes include XBox 360 games, PC games, and a variety of Microsoft hardware)
• Prizes will be awarded at the meeting two weeks after the game presentations, on Thursday, October 22 (members do not need to be present to collect prizes)

* At some point before the challenge ends, we may announce that more than two teams will win (don’t count on it)

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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

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