Our Second GameJam!

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The time has come. The time for our second GameJam!

This will work in a similar way to our first GameJam. As before, you can use any language, tool or framework you like, provided you are not just completing an existing game. See our previous GameJam post for more details.

Slightly, differently from last time, there will be only one fabulous prize, for a winner chosen by the community. And of course there will be a new and enthralling theme, chosen from the hat, to centre your game around.

The event takes place in the Ochil Room in the Pleasance Union (same as last time), and runs from 11am till midnight on February 4th and from midday till 10pm on the 5th.

Please RVSP via our Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/355511477792499/

As always, you can send any questions to us via email.

Our First GameJam!

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We’re pleased to announce our first GameJam!

So, what is a GameJam? Basically, you spend a weekend rapidly producing a short game, based on a given theme (revealed on the day). All the games are then judged, once by us, and once by the community, with separate (fabulous and unspecified) prizes for each! The event is open to everyone regardless of skill level, and it’s free to enter. Turn up in a team of up to four, or on your own and we will organise teams on the day.

The event takes place on the 22nd and 23rd October (Saturday and Sunday). It starts at 10am in the Ochil Room at the Pleasance Union, which we have booked till 11pm. The second day runs from 11am till 8pm, with judging at the end. You will need to bring your own laptop, contact us if this is a problem.

Regarding rules, you can use any language, framework or program you like, provided you are not simply completing an existing game. We will judge based on the game, not the tools used to make it. As an aside, we will also be there to help novices if they choose to use GameMaker or XNA.

It should be a lot of fun, and we hope to see you all there!

Please RSVP on our Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=114799428627808

Fresher’s Fair Demo Game Source Code

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Here is the source code to the demo game we showed off at the 2011 fresher’s fair:

Dual Stick Shooter project page

For those who didn’t stop by, it’s a dual stick shooter with a few enemy types, waves customisable in XML, a basic high score table and motion blur effects.

We’re releasing this under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Basically this means that the project is completely free for any use, even commercial, but do bear in mind that the code is not optimised in any way, and will require considerable clean up for an actual release – it was all written in a few days, after all!

The project is written in C# using the XNA framework. In order to get the project to compile, you will need to download the XNA development tools, which are available for free from the Microsoft website. You’ll want to grab the “Windows Phone SDK”, which actually is an SDK which supports Windows, Xbox 360 and Windows Phone. Go figure.

The controls are all game pad based. You’ll need an Xbox 360 controller plugged into your PC to play.

Welcome New Members

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Welcome to the first year of the society. We’re really excited about the number of the people who signed up (we have almost 150 members now), and the enthusiam of the local development community.

We plan on organizing a couple more meetups and events in the near future. These will most likely be game jams, a semester long competition and casual pub meet-ups. We’ll post the details for these up here on the blog when they are finalised.

The source code for the demo game, along with details of what you need to download to get it up and running, will be released tomorrow as promised has now been released.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with programming, but would like to make their own game, we are planning on writing a tutorial on the Game Maker Lite program. Game Maker Lite is a free program which allows you to make games using only ‘drag and drop’ commands.

We’ve opened an introductions thread in the forum with a little info about all of us, and we encourage you to introduce yourself there as well.

Fresher’s Pub Quiz

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Hello all, long time no writing I’ll grant, but then not much happens over summer. However Its now creeping closer to September, and the start of uni once more, and with that, what will be GameDevSoc’s first official Fresher’s week!

So good news, we’ll have a stall at both the Societies Fair and the Informatics Fair if you want to come an find out a bit more about the Society and what we do, plus we’ll be holding a joint pub quiz with GameSoc on Thursday from 2000 till 2200 in the Middle Reading Room at Teviot. There will be fabulous prizes* and questions on all things games related so come along and give it a go!

*For certain definitions of fabulous only…

Glorious Public!

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Lend me your listening apparatus: I am pleased, nay thrilled, to proclaim the official recognition of Game Development Society! This means that tomorrow we will have an amazing new website (which may superficially appear identical to this one to the untrained eye) with a linked forum for you, our wonderful members, to discuss the fruits of GameDevSoc labours.

So the result of this is that our new blog address is http://gamedevsoc.eusa.ed.ac.uk/, and all future tutorials, in addition to a titillating series of posts about the rapidly progressing rts wonder that is Ganymede, will be published there. :-)

Good News Everyone

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We’ve passed the first approval stage, which means that we are now a functioning EUSA society! So we should have our shiny new website (which will look very much like this one, at least for a while) up soon. The next hurdle is getting approval from the student council on March 8th, which will give us our official status.