Goodbye Blogger

If anyone has stumbled upon this page, this blog is no longer active. The SGD club website can now be found at

http://sgd.cs.virginia.edu/

In case we don't see you: good afternoon, good evening, and good night.

NEW SITE LINK BELOW!

Hello all! We are beginning our migration from this current site to our new site. Below is a link to the new SGD website! Please visit us at:

http://www.nicoledev.com/master/sgd/

Retroverse (2013) Available for Download!

Retroverse, the popular SGD game directed by Momin Khan, is now available for download through Desura!  Retroverse has now been downloaded over 1000 times and experienced by people all around the globe.  Download the game and enjoy a fantastic arcade adventure!

Retroverse Website: http://people.virginia.edu/~mbk6wm/retroverse.html

Download Retroverse through Desura here: http://www.desura.com/games/retroverse

Karts For Kids April 26th

Want to prove you racing superiority and benefit a great cause before the end of the semester?  Show your skills at the SGD and sponsored Mario Kart Tournament. Entrance to the tournament is just $10, and all proceeds go towards benefiting Child's Play!

The event will be held:
Friday, April 26th, from 5 PM to 8 PM
in the Newcomb Game Room

Come earlier to join the Gamer's club in their "Gamer's Give Back" event!  Games will be available to play throughout the day, with the proceeds also benefiting Child's Play.

If you want to donate using a credit card you can do so using the widget below. All money collected here will be sent directly to Child's Play without going through us. All we will see is the name you enter so that we let you in to the tournament. In order to enter you will need to donate at least $10.

Zynga, XNA, and Future Posts

Hi Everyone,

So the first order of business is to announce that Zynga will be coming to give a talk to UVA's SGD about game development, the tools, and the industry. Also there will be SWAG =). Anyone who is interested in gaming is welcome to join. Its this Wed. Sep 29.

Now XNA, the XNA tutorial that we did is currently being edited and will be on the UVA SGD site soon. Once it's up I'll put a link to it here as well. =)

Anyway, we are all really busy with our games and all the teams are off to a good start but if you are still interested in joining the club shoot an email to sgd and we will try to get you on a team, but as the semester wears on it will become harder and harder to do that. Don't worry there is also next semester, and you can always try making a game on your own, we will always be here to help and dish out advice.

Happy Coding!
- SGD

Thanks to everyone who came to the first meeting!
Our Pitch Meeting is this Monday at 5pm Olson 011
Come and check out what we are doing for the new semester =)
SEE YOU THERE!!

2012-2013 Officers

Congratulations to the 2012-2013 officers!

President: Zack Reilly

Vice President: Kat Harris

Treasurer: Paul Huang

Asset Administrator: David Dodge

External Relations: Hunter Williams

Mid-Semester Expo Scheduled!

Our Mid-Semester Expo has been scheduled for March 20 at 5pm in Thornton E303. We will also be doing our elections for the 2012-2013 school year at the meeting.

Global Game Jam 2012 at UVA

UVA's first Global Game Jam finished up this past weekend, and it was definite success! Four teams completed games over the 48 hours. Check them out below:

Break: A time bending puzzle adventure game with an intriguing story.
Game Page: http://globalgamejam.org/2012/break
Source Link: http://globalgamejam.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2012/22000/Break.7z

Eat Sheep and Die: Get to the ice cream before your opponent! Use sheep platforms to get up to it! Use sheep to block your opponent's way!
Game Page: http://globalgamejam.org/2012/eat-sheep-and-die
Source Link: http://globalgamejam.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2012/3985/SheepAndDie.zip

Do You Know the Muffin Man: Control a gang a muffins to platform your way to success!
Game Page: http://globalgamejam.org/2012/wrap-around
Source Link: http://globalgamejam.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2012/19321/DoYouKnowTheMuffinMan_1.rar

Rejuvenate: Rejuvenate puts you in charge of a lush garden. As each season passes, some plants will grow while others wither. Expand your territory as the years roll by.
Game Page: http://globalgamejam.org/2012/rejuvenate
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svaTidZES1Q
Source: http://globalgamejam.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2012/18222/PlantGame_0.zip
Installer: http://globalgamejam.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2012/18222/publish_0.zip

Global Game Jam

Global Game Jam kicks off tonight, and for the first time the Student Game Developers are organizing a site! We'll be sure to post pictures from the event.

Spring Pitch Meeting Scheduled

SGD's Spring Pitch Meeting has been scheduled for 5pm in Olsson 005. We'll have an SGD-Record seven projects this semester, and they look very diverse and fun. If you're interested in being on a team, come to the pitch meeting!

Kinect Pong Uploaded

SGD is back to uploading completed games, and we have uploaded Kinect Pong for anyone with a Kinect who is interested in playing! Our team was smaller than SGD's standards, but the project turned out to be a great success. We had really dedicated members, and ended up with a fully playable game with three levels of AI.

You can download the game here.

ESE and Karts for Kids: Success!

The End of Semester Expo and Karts for Kids were both highly successful, thanks to everyone who came out! Stay tuned for some info about the games that we made this semester...

ESE and Karts for Kids

Need a study break? Join the SGD on Sunday for our end of semester expo! Come play four games created by students over the last semester, and while your at it, prove you worth by out racing everyone in a SGD and ACM sponsored Mario Kart Tournament. Entrance to the tournament is just $10, and all proceeds go towards benefiting Child's Play!

The event will be held:
Sunday, December 11th from 11am-2pm
in Thornton D221

If you want to donate using a credit card you can do so using the widget below. All money collected here will be sent directly to Child's Play without going through us. All we will see is the name you enter so that we let you in to the tournament. In order to enter you will need to donate at least $10.

Mid Semester Update

It's (more than) half way through the fall semester, and that means projects are starting to get playable and move towards their final state for the ESE. We had our mid-semester expo a couple of weeks ago, so I thought I'd give an update on where the projects stand so far.

- Kinect Pong has made good progress, and are now reading in a moving skeleton from the Kinect and letting you bounce a ball back and forth off a wall.

- Sequence has a test level going where you can match and extend the pattern that the game gives you.

- Marblematic has a working 3D scene using the Ogre3D graphics engine, with some great lighting and shadows. Next up will come physics and track building mechanics.

- Beat Descent has beat detection working and lets you fly around a test dungeon while playing random tracks off of your computer.

- Node Defense has a working tile engine and some basic tower mechanics set up.

Mid-Semester Expo

The Mid-Semester Expo has been scheduled for Wednesday, October 19th at 6pm in Olsson 120. Come to see the progress of the 5 cool projects!

XNA Crash Course

On Tuesday we hosted a tutorial session for Microsoft's XNA Game studio.

You can download a recording of the session here, and the code sample from the presentation here.

To use XNA you will need the following, which are both free/free for students:

• Microsoft XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Visual Studio 2010 Professional on Dreamspark
  

Pitch Meeting Scheduled!

The pitch meeting for the Fall Semester has been scheduled for Tuesday, August 30th at 7:00pm in Olsson 009. Come out and see what we're going to work on this semester, we have 5 great projects in store for you!

iPhone App Development

Games for the iPhone and iPad have been very popular in the last few years, so for those looking into developing a game for an iOS platform, here are some concepts to think about.

-The language used in iOS development is Objective-C with Cocoa. Whether or not you like this language, there are quickly increasing number of tutorials of how it works.

- In order to develop iOS games, you'll need a Mac (sorry PC-users) and Xcode, the IDE for creating iPhone, iPad, and Mac applications. Xcode is a great IDE that comes with an interface builder and one of the best developer documentations around. You can either buy it from the Mac App store (about 5 bucks at time of writing) or you can download it for free if you are a member of the iOS or Mac Developer Program (which is $99 a year and allows you to distribute the game through the store).

- iPhone App and Game Development relies heavily on the Model-View-Controller software architecture, which divides programs into three parts:

-- Models- These are abstractions of data or data structures. For games, some examples of this would include characters, items, enemies, and levels.
--Views- These are the physical representation that the user sees. The art and animations of what was listed above are good examples of views as well as the menus and help screens.
-- Controllers- These link the actions of the user to the program. The models and views can be changed based on what the controllers detect from the users.

The controllers is probably the hardest part to grasp for a new iOS developer. It is a lot more than writing code for when a player presses a button. Everything on the screen inherits from the UIView class, and each of these can have a ViewController. If the player rotates the device, a ViewController is responsible for managing how the screen flips or adjusts. If the player presses on an enemy, the enemy's ViewController reads this and alters the enemy accordingly.

This should be enough for a good start in developing for iOS.

T-Cubed Update

T-Cubed for Xbox Live Indie Games is coming along pretty nicely. So far we've added a number of new minigames, a scoring system, and support for avatars. We've also ported the game to the Xbox 360 (although this video is for the PC). From here we'll continue adding minigames, as well as improve the overall polish and balance.