Welcome to the new school year! Today’s update will be focusing on only a couple of club related things. First and foremost I will be posting the list of the base-line topics to be discussed throughout the school year. This does not include any member-given talks, and is simply a list of talks that will be given by our officer team. The list is quite long, but I am confident that we will get through most of it by the the time the year is done. If you have a topic you would like to see added to this list, please comment below this post and we will see what we can do. Before we do this however I have an important announcement for a special opportunity coming up this Thursday October 1st:
The Cal State Fullerton Video Game Design Club has somehow managed to get Jim Rivers from Obsidian Entertainment (Hiring manager at the company), to come give a presentation in the Titan Theater of Cal State Fullerton from 5PM to whenever. This is an incredible opportunity to come get industry information from a man that David, John, and I met at last year’s Game Developer’s Conference. If you are interested in going to this event, please comment below this post and perhaps we can form a group together to go (I’m sure as hell going).
And now, for the list of discussion topics for the 2009 – 2010 school year:
Programming
- Game Engine Architecture
- Abstraction
- State machines
- Audio
- Physics
- Mathematics
- Graphics
- Networking
- Timing
- API’s / Framworks / Languages
- Lua, C++, C#, XML, ActionScript
- XNA
- DirectX
- OpenGL
- OpenAL
- Engine Case Studies
- Hardware limitations
Art
- Interface Design
- Conceptual Art
- Character Modeling
- Animation
- Background Modeling
- Textures
- Software Limitations
- Music and sound effects
Production
- Marketing
- Competitive Analysis
- Roles in the industry
- Scheduling
- Software Engineering Practices
- Franchises, Licenses, Brands
Design
- Story Telling in Games
- Character / Weapon Design
- Genre Analysis
- Strategy
- Shooters
- Role-playing Games
- Massively Multiplayer Online Games
- Action
- Stealth
- Adventure
- Casual
- Hybrid Genres
- Level Design
- Game-play Systems
- The fun factor
- Puzzle Design
Breaking In
- Resume writing
- Portfolio analysis
- Networking with developers
- Conferences and local meetings
Other
- Game Developer’s Conference Recap
- CS499 student projects
- Industry / faculty guest speakers
Lastly, our first meeting of the year will take place not this Thursday but the next. Expect to see an official announcement and fliers around school sometime near the end of next week. We hope to see many of you on October 1st at Cal State Fullerton, as well as in 2 weeks for our next meeting.
That is incredible
I’m taking a collaborative game engine development class right now and we’re using XNA so I can contribute a little bit of general XNA knowledge. I’m specializing in audio programming and implementation so I can give everyone the down-low about XACT, the Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool that’s part of XNA. It’s really awesome!
I’d also still love to give a tutorial on modding Vega Strike if people are interested.
Also I just realized that this semester I could come to your regular meetings on occasion since I don’t have class until 2:30pm.
Looking forward to it. Try to make it to Fullerton if I can, sounds interesting.
Same with GDC, interested and wanting to go, but I need to look into it. Assume that I’m going though.
When we were making PHASE I had to make our audio engine in OpenAL (it was really poorly written due to time contraints). I actually got it to work quite well, and can explain how to program for it! I will look into FMOD though, and see if I can learn it well enough to talk about it
I friggen hate OpenAL. There’s no freakin documentation at all! Stupid manual doesn’t explain anything! I found another audio library. It’s free for non-commercial use, it’s called FMOD. I think that would be a good topic to discuss.