For the last two days I have been helping promote the Game Developers Club at my university's clubs week. I have been a member of the Game Developers Club for about a year and a half, but this is the first time I have helped at clubs week.
Clubs week happens at the beginning of each semester where all of the clubs setup tables and promote their club. I took a quick walk around, as I do every year, to see what kinds of clubs there are, and as usual most of the clubs are faculty/student association clubs, ethnic/religious clubs or political/protest clubs, not that there is anything wrong with most of these clubs but they are not particularly interesting to me. I am always looking for more of an activity based club, something fun and social to do while at university. There were a couple more this year than I have seen in previous years, like two or three board game clubs, the outdoor club, the photography club, one or two dance clubs, and three or four athletic clubs, but these kinds of clubs are still few and far between. This is one of the reasons I decided to join the Game Developers Club, the other being that I enjoy Game Development as a hobby and like discussing my ideas with other people.
When I got to our table I noticed the other guys did not have very much setup, a medium sized sign, a couple of game related decorations and some hand outs. And after a few minutes it seemed like not very many people were coming by. So I suggested that we put on a youtube video of one of my games I made a couple of years ago. As soon as we put this on I started to notice most of the people walking by looking at the video and some of them starting to walk over to the table to ask about it and the club. I thought this was awesome, and we got lots of people to sign up, hopefully some of them come to the meetings.
What the Game Developers Club does is support those interested in developing games either as a hobby or as a potential career. We have members from all different backgrounds with a range of technical and non-technical skills. Some are programmers but many have very little technical skill and are interested in art or design. We have meetings twice a week, one technical and the other design related. In the technical discussion we usually discuss techniques used for developing games, such as handling collisions and physics or analyzing an interesting technique in a game we recently played. In the design discussions we usually try to design a game, starting with an idea or an experience we want to give the player and expanding on it until we have a complete game idea. Many of the members of the club are also working on hobby game projects and are often looking for people to help them out. We have also had some club projects we have started such as a collectible card game. Lastly, we have a mailing list that we send out announcements about local events, like game development competitions or conferences like SIGGRAPH, or sometimes even about game companies that are hiring.
In conclusion, the game developers club is a something I really enjoy and I also really enjoyed promoting it at clubs day.
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