Greetings!

Greetings to all, I figured that we should wait until after finals were over to begin the discussions about the first projects for the game dev club. Before that we should probably figure out how much time everyone has to give to projects and times when people are available for meetings. Then we can figure our ambitions and work toward goal one. I am free anytime but Monday nights. I have as much time to give as needed to move projects along. NOTE: It appears that the Game Design I class over the summer term has been cancelled. Our club meeting times after that class as we discussed at lunch probably won’t work out now. Any ideas? I have at the moment three or four projects that we could work on fleshing out: 1a) A multiplayer client-server GameMaker game. Could be action-adventure like Gauntlet or Champions of Norrath. Could be something totally different. It will give those of you without much C/C++ or GML experience a chance to code. The only problem with this option is we would need multiple machines linked together for testing. I have two machines myself, but unless we are able to use COD resources, anything more than that is impractical. Otherwise this is feasible. 1b) A single player game using GameMaker. Same as above but without the multi-player angle. With either option we would really polish up a quality idea and possibly try to sell it as ShareWare or whatever it’s called these days. 2) A game that runs on the GBA. I think John’s shooter would be perfect. We could prototype it in GameMaker and then port it over. I have been doing much research into the GBA and am having successes. This option might be a bit more complicated because we would be using tools that don’t have the best documentation. Bugs and other issues might be hard to pin down. We can use emulators to test code out, so hardware purchases are a non-issue unless you want to buy some. 3) A game that uses a pre-existing engine or framework, other than GameMaker. I was thinking of using the Torque 2D Engine as the template. I have never used it but it looks powerful. I was thinking of purchasing it anyway. Ben thought that a Flash game is a viable option as well. It’s free, which is a big plus as well. I have no knowledge of this framework, but obviously it has its support as well. 4) From a selfish perspective, I needed someone to help develop the ruleset for the battle engine portion of my Phantasy Star game. Pete has volunteered to do that, so when I have everything in place, that will be covered. --------------- Please feel free to add any game ideas to the list as emails (hopefully) begin passing around. We can also work on multiple projects at the same time with enough people and time to devote, like divisions or something. These projects should give the designers and artists something to design and the coders something to code. Also please add to the list below your contact info, available times and free time so we can figure out meeting times. With that, I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you all. Regards, Brad Sward [Edited by - ascorbic on May 28, 2006 1:36:58 AM]