Game Jam Weekend Starts Tomorrow!

Meetings

The time is  (almost) now!

Tomorrow we will meetup at the TechCo starting at 7PM and the Game Jam officially kicks off at 9PM.  I’ve moved things up an hour as we may have a few guests from the press in attendance checking out the group and jam, plus I’ll also be bringing a laptop loaded with indie games to play and get the ideas rolling.

Let me stress again your game does not need to be complex and you don’t need to spend every hour of the jam devoted to making the game.  The game jam was started because “for many people, it can be difficult to find or make the time create a game or prototype for yourself. We’re here to be your excuse.”  If you’ve been lurking in the mailing list or thinking about making a game but don’t know where to start this jam is for you!  Come out, ask some questions, and the other members will help you get started.

For a full recap on how the weekend will go, check out the previous post December Meetup Changed to Game Jam Weekend

Knoxville Indies Are Taking Over!

Links & Notes

(Quick reminder, our normal meetup has been moved to next weekend and is in a special format for the game jam).

Some big things happening for local indie developers this month!

First, Levi D. Smith has released ANSI_GFX_ADVNTR on the Xbox 360.  You can find the game under the Xbox Live Indie Games section on the Xbox 360, or send it to your console directly from the xbox.xom website.  Here is a bit on the game from the press release:

Knoxville, TN – November 2013 – Levi D. Smith presents TTY GFX ADVNTR, his second game published on the XBox Live Indie Game marketplace.  TTY GFX ADVNTR puts the player in the role of a hero who must defeat the dragon to save the princess.

The idea for the game was originally conceived through the game jam competition, where the theme was to create a game using a low level programming language in 48 hours.  The game was inspired by BBS DOOR games of the mid-90’s, and it uses a graphical style of games that were played through a computer terminal (TTY).  After receiving positive feedback from the Indie developer community, Levi decided to port the original game to the Xbox Live Indie Game platform so that it could be enjoyed by a wider audience.

As the hero, the player must battle monsters across five different lands to gain the experience needed to conquer the dragon.  Long time RPG fans will find the battle system and mechanics very familiar.  While on the adventure, the player will meet various allies who will assist the player in progressing through the story.   Weapons and armor crafted by the blacksmith will give the player the needed power to complete the adventure.

Second, Chaosoft Games will be bringing EvilQuest to Steam! As part of the December 4th batch, EvilQuest was greenlit to be on Steam, the largest digital distribution site for games (it’s estimated that 75% of all digital games purchased for the PC are through Steam).  I hear that Josh Ferguson has already commissioned a gold plated version of G1 Megatron appropriate to his new status in society.

December Meetup Changed to Game Jam Weekend!

Meetings

Attention Knox Game Designers, based on our discussions last month our December 15th Meetup will be a bit different – it will be a Game Jam!  Here is what we’ll be doing, and what you need to know about the weekend:

We will meet Friday December 13th @7PM at the Technology Cooperative – The game jam officially kicks off at 9PM when the game theme is announced.  This will be a good time for any last minute questions on the jam, software, or process you have for making your game.

From Friday until Sunday work on your game.  We won’t be keeping the Techco open the whole weekend for the jam (and there is a group that will be using the space Saturday morning).

We will meet again Sunday 15th @7PM at the Technology Cooperative – The game jam “compo” ends at 9PM and you game must be submitted by then.  If you need to skip / come late to finish your game, by all means do.  Know however that the game jam servers are notorious for being overloaded in the last moments so do not wait too long to submit your game.  We’ll meetup to share our games, war stories of success and failure, and check out other entries.

What you should do before the jam:

  • Read over the rules of the game jam and decide if you’ll be doing the “compo” or “jam” version.
  • Get your development system ready to go – figure out what software you’ll be using and make sure it’s ready to go.
    A list of common tools others have used in the game jam is listed on the Tools page.
  • Make an account on the game jam website
  • The week leading up to the Jam, check the game jam site daily to vote on topics
  • It’s common to live stream your game development – if you plan to do this then:
    • Setup a Twitch.tv account
    • Install Open Broadcaster Software – a free, open source app for live streaming
    • Test out Twitch and OBS (don’t wait to the jam to start learning about live streaming!)
  • It’s also common to make a timelapse video of your development, and there are some tools to help with this too.  Again, test this out on your system before the jam beings.

Your game does not need to be complex and you don’t need to spend every hour of the jam devoted to making the game.  Simple is better, and seeing friends and family is a good break to keep you fresh.  The goal is to finish, and the reward is having completed a game!

Taking Unity to the Second Dimension! – November 10th, 2013 Meetup

Meetings, Presentations

Next Meetup Dylan Wolf will give us a tour of how he’s working with Unity for 2D games:

We’ll cover the 2D Toolkit and 2D Platform Controller from the Unity Asset Store, look at some demos, and see how they can be combined to create a side-scrolling platformer.

(Rephrase this however you need to fit it in the post.)

Admin Note: Let this be a notice to all future speakers I’m probably not going to rephrase your abstract and publish it as is! =)

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative located in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  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.

Special Location Note: The meetup make take place in suite 105 instead of the normal suite (same building).  The Technology Cooperative is growing into a bigger spot but the move may not be completed by Sunday.  If we are in the new spot there will be a note on the door to direct you to the new location.

Oculus Rift Demonstration – October 13th, 2013 Meetup

Meetings, Presentations

At our next meetup, Adam Byram will bring an Oculus Rift dev kit:

The Oculus Rift is an upcoming virtual reality headset designed to deliver immersive 3D gaming experiences to the mass market.  The best way to get a feel for what this means to the future of gaming is to experience it first hand.  At this month’s meeting, we’ll have an Oculus Rift Dev Kit loaded up with some of the popular tech demos and games for attendees to try.  We’ll also take a brief look at the Oculus SDK, in particular, the drop in components for Unity 4 Pro integration.

If you want to bring your own project made with the Rift’s SDK to try out you can download the SDK from developer.oculusvr.com.  Adam has passed on that the SDK requires a Unity Pro 4.2+ license due to the use of external DLLs.

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative located in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  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.

September Meetup Links

Links & Notes

The Knoxville Raspberry Pi Users Group (knoxpi) fist meeting will be Sunday September 15th, 2013 @ 3 PM.

Forrest brought and demonstrated his Ouya, if anyone is interested in more information on the Ouya check out their website.

Two members entered last month in the game jam:

Getting Started with Game Design list:

Sculptris and Modeling Tools:

Hands on with Sculptris – September 8th, 2013 Meetup

Meetings, Presentations

This month Josh Ferguson will lead a tour of Sculprtis, a free digital sculpting tool by the makers of ZBrush.

Sculptris provides an excellent gateway into the exciting world of 3D. It’s features are easy to learn, even for someone with no experience in digital art, yet robust enough for creating base models that can then be refined in other applications, such as ZBrush, 3D Studio Max, or Blender.

There will be 2 parts to the demo – first, how to use Sculptris in a general sense for sculpting and painting in 3D. Second, how to incorporate Sculptris into a game art pipeline by using it to create hi-poly models for the generation of Normal Bump maps and Ambient Occlusion textures.

Josh Ferguson is the lead artist of local indie game studio Chaosoft Games and an instructor in graphic design, game design, and 3D animation.

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative locating in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  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.

GDC Comes to Knoxville – August 11th, 2013 Meetup

Meetings

Our next meetup will feature select sessions delivered at the 2013 Game Developers Conference.  We will start with Jason VandenBerghe’s “Applying the 5 Domains of Play: Acting Like Players”.  I saw this talk given by Jason at EGCG and it is something every game designer should see:

Last year’s ‘5 Domains of Play’ presentation demonstrated how the facets of motivation in Psychology’s Big 5 (or OCEAN) correlate to player preferences for specific game elements. Science! This year, we are going to find a solid, universal, practical game development application of this model, or die in the attempt. Firstly, the 5 Domains model needs some work. Over the last year, we have simplified it to focus exclusively on the 8 facets that seem to be primary for gaming, found a place for Neuroticism/Threat (last year’s mystery), and have streamlined the whole thing to include a complete set of player archetypes (and the games they would play) for each set of facets. Easier to remember, easier to master, confusions removed, etc. That’s cool, but how do we apply such a thing to game development? The speaker believes that the answer to that question for this model (and every other psychological model for that matter) is simply this: developing accurate empathy. Fun fact: accurate empathy makes for better game developers and thus better games!

Following this talk and any discussion, we will watch one or two more GDC sessions chosen at the meeting by those in attendance.

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative locating in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  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.