Reminders and Announcements:

Open Game Labs:   The group hosts an Open Game Lab every Tuesday 5:30PM – 8PM and on the 3rd Sunday of the month 2PM – 5PM.  These labs are unstructured time for anyone to come to the space, hang out and work on their game.  If you are just starting out this is also a great time to come ask questions!

Call for Topics:  We need speakers!  If you’ve been to a meetup you know that the group is very informal and you do not need a well timed and polished presentation.  A presentation can simply be discussing a topic while showing a demo on a laptop.  If you are interested in presenting or have a request for a topic you would like to see covered please contact Michael at michael.neel@gmail.com

Next Game Jam:  The next Ludum Dare is scheduled for April 17th.  Now is the time to block out that weekend on your calendars to make sure you have the time set aside.  If you are curious what happened during a Ludum Dare and how to get ready, check out the post from December’s jam.

Facebook and Twitter: It’s been mentioned in the meetings but never sent out until now but the group has a facebook group.  The group is closed, so you’ll need request access and it make take a day or two to get approved.  If you don’t get approved in a few days, send me an email at the address above.  There is also a twitter list maintained by Levi.  For info on joining the twitter list, contact Levi @gatechgrad.

This Month’s Topic: Analytics and FPS Level Design

This month Michael C. Neel will be speaking on tracking your players with analytics and sharing some design tips for levels in a first person shooter (these are two separate topics, not analytics for FPSs).

For the analytics portion we’ll cover two services for analytics, the established and popular Game Analytics (any engine) and the new Unity Analytics Beta (Unity only).  Michael has been collecting stats for a few of his games and will demonstrate how to use the data to find and fix weak spots in the game’s design.

In the second topic Michael will share tips learned from researching Doom and Quake level design.  Then Michael will share some methods for making a Quake style game in Unity using Blender as a level editor.  Yes, Michael is using Blender now proving old dogs can learn new tricks and programs with horrible user experience.

Location and Time

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative located at 13 Emory Place, Knoxville TN.  Parking is available in front of the Technology Cooperative.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with a Show ‘n Tell where everyone can show a bit of their in progress game, favorite tool, mechanic they love in another game, or anything they find helpful and want to share with the group.

The past weekend was another Ludum Dare game jam, and once again several games were submitted by Knoxville Game Design members.  The theme this time was “Entire Game on One Screen” though many of us were hoping for ☃(not “snowman” but the unicode symbol for snowman was a possible theme).  I think you’ll see that many of us included some cold love for unicode Frosty…

Ice Fishing Derby by Dylan

Play the game here

Ice Fishing Derby is inspired by David Crane’s Fishing Derby for the Atari 2600 (where the entire game was played on one screen–there wasn’t even a title!) My goal was also to make a retro-style game.

This game is a bit more complicated, however. You’re ice fishing, so you have to cut holes in the ice, and you can use bait to attract fish.

Each fish is worth $1 to $3. In addition to being your score, you can use this to buy various types of bait. Each bait has different properties: some attract fish at greater distances, some keep fish interested longer, and some are less likely to be lost once you reel in a fish.

TV World by Levi

Play the game here
Watch Time-lapse

Make your way through the nine channels of the TV World!
Collect remotes… shoot everything else!

Snowman Simulator by Jacob

Play the game here

Jacob (age 11) has his interpretation of the theme presents: Snowman Simulator
play with: WSAD, arrows, mouse — secret stuff to click on and do. can you find multiplayer mode? Get the high score?

Made with GameMaker Studio and Tile Studio.

Dad helped with minor debugging, encouraging, and cleanup for submission. Jacob did 99% of the work.

Click For Dragons! by Mike, Rachel, Hannah, and Cicelie

Play the game here
Watch Time-lapse

We decided to combine the fun of idle games like cookie clicker with the RPG setting of games like Dragon Age. It’s a game you can play while playing other games in Ludum Dare!

The development team was myself, my wife, and my two oldest daughters (we entered the game jam as a team). Even though this is a jam entry, everything in the game was made by us.

Build A Snowman by Paul

Play the game here

I have to admit, the original idea was all based around the fact that the ‘uni-code snowman’ may have won, but the theme still allowed me to build this.

There are 8 boxes at the bottom of the screen, and falling from the left and right you have parts of a snowman, two snowballs, hat, coal and a carrot. The idea being you catch it, and drag it down to the box, as you do, a piece appears in the box, get all the pieces the snowman starts to dance, click it, you’ll get points.

Starting with this Sunday – November 16th, 2014 – the Technology Cooperative will be open the third Sunday of the month from 2PM – 5PM for an “Open Game Lab”.  In addition to these Sundays, the Technology Cooperative will also be holding a weekly Open Game Lab every Tuesday night from 5:30 PM – 8PM.  Because these are on going events, please check the Technology Cooperative Program Calendar for any last minute cancellations or changes.

These labs will be unstructured time for anyone to come to the space, hang out and work on their game.  If you are just starting out this is also a great time to come ask questions of other game designers.  There will be no presentations scheduled during the labs, those will continue to be held on the 2nd Sunday of the month at the regular meetup.

The Technology Cooperative does have a few older laptops and Raspberry Pis available for use running open source software that can be used.  These systems are not super fast and may limit the tools you can use in making a game.  If you have the means to bring your own system to work from it is highly recommended.