Hacker Society Game Dev Meeting 1
The Case Western Reserve University Hacker Society is a subgroup of the local ACM chapter which meets weekly to discuss various topics in computer science and practical programming. For the next few weeks, we'll be talking about game development.
I led today's discussion about game development at Hacker Society, and I was pleasantly surprised at the direction the meeting took. I came prepared with slides outlining various frameworks and tools (see them here), but it only took about ten minutes to get through them. The information is presented better in my post "A starting point for making games", so if you want to read about the game libraries available for various languages, I suggest you look there rather than at the slides. After we got through the slides, each of us summed up our game development experience. Of the 10 or so people there, about 3 had some experience, mostly with XNA in a CWRU class or Java in high school. Another person was an active modder for Wesnoth. Our discussions mostly centered around what tools to use and where to look for information about certain topics, like 2D physics or OpenGL. Since I was trying to gauge interest level, we didn't go in-depth into any particular technology. Instead, we fooled around with Processing and I showed off gw0rp. We also had brief discussions about forming teams and finding contests to participate in. I recommended uDevGames and PyWeek, but I'm sure there are lots more out there. In general, I was pretty happy with how the meeting went. We were missing some regulars, but enough people showed up to make it a very worthwhile discussion, and I look forward to next week, when we'll actually dig into how to write games in Python, following my pyglet tutorial. In the coming weeks, we'll be talking about procedural content, structuring large projects, physics libraries, packaging for distribution, OpenGL, and probably a few things we haven't thought of yet. We'll probably also start some sort of group project, but that may not come for a while, since finals are approaching fast.
