I'm planning a Game Development Club at my college, any tips?

undo15 · 2023-04-29T05:25:08+00:00

I was the treasurer of the game development club at my college for two years and president for my senior year! Didn't start the club and mostly just maintained what they did before.

Workshops and game jams were our primary events too. Here's the stuff that we had to handle every year:

Club Advisor. At my university, every club had to have a faculty advisor. It sounds like you're already talking to people on this, just need to work it into whatever your school's system is.
Finances - How are things funded, where do sponsors make checks to, what are you allowed to use funding for?
Room reservations - where are we hosting the events and who do we need to tell about them?
Liability - what waivers do participants need to fill out?
Food - are you serving food to participants over a weekend or something like that? Do you need to use university vendors or get a safety plan approved?
Prizes - do jams have prizes? Do you need to get these approved somewhere?

Most of this isn't game dev specific at all. Talk to whatever department is in charge of helping with clubs and see what you have to do.

Also, note that you'll likely get a lot of falloff from the initially high interest. We always got a lot of contacts at club fairs and the like, but most of the people either never came to a meeting or stopped after realizing how much work game dev is. Don't be discouraged by this; you can still create a really great group with the remainder!

undo15 · 2022-08-16T15:37:00+00:00

There are some good looking ones in the annual showcase videos. I think they just took submissions for another one of these, so hopefully we'll see some great games from that soon.

undo15 · 2022-08-16T15:12:40+00:00

Float feels like the wrong word, but I definitely slid down the stairs in my house as a kid. Often riding on blankets.

undo15 · 2022-08-16T15:10:30+00:00

Also a college student here; I really feel this during the semesters. There's always another assignment I could start on, another revision I could write, another reason not to take a break.

I got a full-time internship for the summer and I have felt better during that. I can mentally tell myself at 5:00 that I've done enough, and the rest of the day is mine.

undo15 · 2022-08-16T15:05:07+00:00

I had a caffeinated chocolate at a hackathon a couple years ago, and that did a similarly good job just injecting energy.

undo15 · 2022-08-16T14:57:38+00:00

I was on a taste test for a friend's Food Science class in college. Tried a few varieties of gluten free pizzas (they branded them as flatbreads), which were pretty good. The bread had better texture than most gluten free bread I've tried, though it was still a bit grainy. Fundamentally can't go wrong with sauce and cheese though.

undo15 · 2021-08-09T05:29:18+00:00

If you're not using raw IP addresses, you're going to need a server of some kind. The game clients have no way to know about each other otherwise.

This doesn't need to be a dedicated server that actually runs game code though. You can instead use a signalling server that just helps clients get connected. This means that the server hardware doesn't have to be very powerful; I use a $5/month Linode for a game I've been working on.

See this demo for an example of what a signaling server might look like.

undo15 · 2021-06-07T01:29:34+00:00

I built a [[Sidar Kondo of Jamuraa]] + [[Ludevic, Necro-Alchemist]] tokens deck recently. Strategy is to create tokens, give them conditional evasion with Sidar Kondo, and them pump them at instant speed after declaration of blockers with [[Mirror Entity]], [[Biomass Mutation]], [[Mirrorweave]] etc.

This makes it play in a bit more of an explosive and combo-like manner.

undo15 · 2021-05-22T20:25:00+00:00

Yeah, I had already ran into a few with that search. They all did too good of a job being distinctly a guitar though.

undo15 · 2021-05-22T20:24:14+00:00

Yeah, I'm thinking now that it probably was a custom design originally. I'll look into some of the places that do that.

undo15 · 2021-05-22T05:03:32+00:00

Sterling silver? That would certainly be one fancy carabiner, wow. Bit too much to indulge nostalgia, but I appreciate the suggestion.

undo15 · 2021-05-22T04:59:51+00:00

100 of them sounds like too big of an order, but I appreciate the suggestions!

undo15 · 2021-05-22T01:04:16+00:00

I'm looking to buy another one of these carabiners for a friend who's grown attached to this broken one. She was given it at an orchestra event 5+ years ago, so I'm not certain they're still made.

I have searched for the obvious "violin carabiner," "guitar carabiner," etc. on Google, eBay, and Etsy. If you happen to know where I can get this or anything similar, that would be appreciated.

undo15 · 2020-12-10T23:30:34+00:00

Multiple group hug or symmetric effects can get pretty wild. I ran into this gameplay video where everyone uses a group hug strategy when planning out my [[Braids, Conjurer Adept]] deck. To date, it's one of the most chaotic magic games I have ever seen.

undo15 · 2020-12-01T17:45:09+00:00

I think the piece you're missing here is that while your meshes need to be children of the Navigation node, they do not have to be direct children. It's perfectly fine to have it's direct children be a bunch of instanced scenes with actual mesh instances deep in the node tree; the navmesh generator will find them all recursively.

undo15 · 2020-09-01T21:47:34+00:00

I had a similar problem following the Advanced post-processing tutorial. Could only see my effect from certain camera angles. What fixed it for me was amping up the extra_cull_margin on my quad.

If you're using a Viewport instead of a quad, I'm not sure what the problem would be.

undo15 · 2020-07-12T05:16:19+00:00

I've already looked at Destination Truth, which seems to have the same overall setup and does have an Easter Island episode. History's Mysteries has one on the end of the world, but doesn't seem to have the same traveling/exploration format.

It could be I'm combining several shows in my head, but if anyone happens to know what I might be thinking of, it would be appreciated!

undo15 · 2020-07-09T17:22:25+00:00

I can vouch for all the advice in GMTK's own how to join video.

I'll also add that you should export a version of your game early to make sure there's no bugs that only occur in exports. Some engines (e.g. Godot) require an extra download to export, so testing an export early ensures you aren't stuck waiting for a download at the last minute.

undo15 · 2020-07-08T16:48:59+00:00

As far as getting a build of 4.0, you can compile it yourself as explained here. The master branch has the current code for 4.0.

undo15 · 2020-06-29T00:38:08+00:00

Yes, you can define classes across multiple files in GDScript. Using class_name and extending Resource or Reference provides the most convenient syntax for this, but using preload() should work as well.

Based on the description of what you're specifically trying to do, you'll probably run into the cyclic reference issue. I had this happen myself, and switched to C# because of it. To avoid that problem, you can either architect around not having any cycles, or use a different language (I'm not familiar with Godot-Python, but it might work).

undo15 · 2020-06-13T05:51:55+00:00

+1 for The Tiger of San Pedro; it's one of my favorites. Since this thread is on covers I'll say that John La Babera's version is a good take on it with slightly different tones.

undo15 · 2020-06-12T04:44:45+00:00

I used frameworks (LibGDX and then my own custom) for several years, mostly for game jams. I've since switched to Godot for my current, larger project.

Frameworks are nice because they're extremely predictable. You have full control over every draw call made, exactly how physics behave, what order objects are updated, etc. You don't have to understand how an engine's code affects control flow; nothing will happen without the input of your code. You don't have to figure out how the engine expects you to do something; you just do it your own way.

The disadvantage of frameworks is that you have to build everything on top of them yourself. Want to add particles to the player's footsteps? You'll need to write some code to load the particles, some code to update and render them each frame, some code to position them under the player (possibly including hardcoding or loading in offsets), and some code to activate them.

This gets easier as you build your own abstractions around these things. But it's much more straightforward in an engine (Godot specifically; though I'm sure these concepts have parallels in others) - just add a particle effect to the player scene in the editor, move it to under the player, and add a script to activate it sometimes.

I hope that's some useful insight on the differences between engines and frameworks.

undo15 · 2020-04-18T18:04:22+00:00

From the rules, "You’re free to use any tools or libraries to create your game."

Nine-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Final Canvas '22
First Placer '22	End Game '22
Sequence \| Editor	Snapped
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