(Nearly) End of Semester Updates

Thought I'd change up the theme here, since Blogger's added a lot of new features since last I played with the blog's appearance.

I should also mention that this club is going to be working with the Software Engineering Club at Shippensburg University, who intends to build an RPG-esque educational game/simulation. The Software Engineering Club has already produced a couple basic games, based on pre-existing concepts; the Video Game Development Club intends to throw some fresh ideas at them, and help where-ever we can in the development process, whereas the Software Engineering Club will teach us proper project management techniques. Hopefully this project will mark the beginning of a long, healthy, and productive partnership.

Finally, the semester is nearing its end, and with any luck, I'll be graduating this year, so in the upcoming weeks we'll be electing a new cabinet, and shortly after that this blog will have a new maintainer. It will be sad for me to finally walk away from this, having been in charge since founding it in 2008, but I feel the club has reached a point where it can function without me, and for that, I'm proud. With any luck, VGDC will become one of the more prominent academic clubs on campus, and a draw for potential students. Thanks for helping me make this a reality, everybody.

Now, let's crank out some more stuff in time for Too Many Games! It'd be a shame to fall short after our first year of real, visible progress. I'm counting on you guys!

Summary of 2011-2012

I apologize to any interested in our club for not having updated this since November 2010. A good bit has been done in that time, bureaucratically speaking.

1) We are now an official student organization, registered as the Video Game Development Club at Shippensburg University. We also updated our Facebook group (though it's still relatively inactive)

2) In becoming an official student organization, we needed to draft a constitution. One part of the constitution establishes a self-organized team system; teams can be created and dissolved, and can work on whatever they want. This should allow members the opportunity to help and learn from eachother, along with the freedom to work on what they want, while keeping things structured, and providing internal competition.

3) The platformer that some were working on last year is now a separate team within the club, since the whole club is no longer geared towards working on a single project. It's also kind of in hibernation, especially with some members currently dealing with Senior Research, and others preparing to graduate.

4) As president, I am encouraging teams to create and maintain development blogs for their teams. Those who actually follow through and send their link to the club email will have their blog linked to through this page. From now on, this blog is to act as a hub to access the other teams' blogs, and as a general news page for the club as a whole.

5) We might, might, be going to Too Many Games this year. This is a small indie gaming convention in Philadelphia; if we go, we'll be acquiring a display table, and show off some of our work. Unlike previous years, we've had some ambitious teams this year, so having some games and mods to show off is not unlikely.

That should be all for now. Hopefully, I'll keep this blog updated in the future, or at least remember to hand it off to someone else.

Platformer Plot/Character Motivation

Here's a provisional plot; I relayed it during club, but here it is in written form for reference. Not to deep, and it's vague enough to be able to squeeze in a variety of bosses and abilities. Enjoy!

Character Motivation text file


EDIT: Written on Linux, so it lacks Windows carriage returns. Open it in Wordpad or an internet browser for correct formatting.

Game Development Kits

For the sake of efficiency, we are currently sidelining the development of our own Java-based game engine, and will instead select a game development kit/application for the creation of our platformer. Below is a list of potential kits, and we will be spending the next week or two testing them, and selecting one that best suits our group.

Game Maker 8
001 Game Maker
JumpCraft
Golden T Game Engine
Scrolling Game Development Kit 2
Reality Factory
VERGE 3
Sphere
Lightweight Java Game Library


Comments and grades will be applied as we test the applications.

UML diagram

It's a little shoddy, and was stitched together in GIMP, and my handwriting is atrocious, but here is the pseudo-UML diagram for the Graphics Engine of the platformer.



If you feel like you can implement a class yourself, go for it. Keep in mind, that the inputs and outputs of a method should be consistent across the engine, and we're using Java, with Swing as the base system. If you don't know how to use Swing, go through some of the tutorials on Oracle's web site.

New Semester, New Plan

We lost a lot of members this semester (graduation, etc), so we gotta deal with less until some new members pop up.

Additionally, as a result of getting essentially nowhere last semester, we're going to be changing the game we'll be working on. It's an extension of the plot of the game we were working on last semester, but it's a prequel and a platformer; we already have a basic plot, so most of the bickering can be skipped this time. On top of that, a basic platformer is fairly easy in comparison to the ambitious RPG we were planning last year.

We're going to be splitting development into a variety of stages, starting with a basic, sprite-based 2D graphics engine, and later moving onto a pseudo-physics engine, and a user/AI control system. if we have time, we'll add sound/music and an event system, but for now, we're trying to keep it simple.

Change in Platform: CrystalSpace

Ok, it appears that the development group is displeased with Python, due to unfamiliarity (and a variety of other reasons). Therefore, we will be switching to C++, with CrystalSpace as our graphics/input/audio/etc. manager, instead of Python with PyGame. While few of us are familiar with CrystalSpace, all of us are familiar with at least one language related to C++ (if not C++ itself) and the fundamental concepts of Object Oriented Programming.

The end of the semester is fast approaching, and I honestly don't expect us to finish anything significant. I do expect this project to be carried over into next semester, as it seems many are loath to abandon it.