« October 2003 Meeting Report | Main | March 2004 Meeting Report »
February 15, 2004
February 2004 Meeting Report
It's been a few months since we got together, but for our first meeting of 2004, we thought we would try something a little bit different. We reserved a room at Lawrence Tech University in Southfield and scheduled a free form social. Nine of us showed up (not including the guy who wanted to sit in the back of the room on his laptop, but have nothing to do with us).
For the first hour, we mostly just sat around and talked about random development topics. A few students talked about doing game development for their senior projects. A few of us talked about our (lack of) success in actually selling our games.
For the next hour, we started out by showing off the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo and discussed what we thought were the cool new features. Austin Krauss then showed off Midway Math, which was his final project for the Game Development course at U of M - Dearborn. It was his attempt at an educational game title (despite his classmates attempt to turn it into a deathmatch title). The game presents a math equation, and you have to calculate the answer. A series of crates with varying numbers painted on them are stacked up in a pyramid. You select the correct answer by throwing a ball at the correct crate and attempting to knock it out of the stack. The game used a realistic physics engine to control the how the impact with the ball affected the crates, and how the crates on top of the stack fall when the crates below are knocked out. The goal of the game is to answer all the equations correctly by knocking down the correct crates using the fewest number of balls necessary.
After Austin finished, Jay Semerad gave a talk about game audio and some tips on how to get the best audio in your games. He discussed things such as normalizing sound volumes, making sounds fit together using pitch shifting, uses of adaptive and interactive audio, and cross-fading sounds for a more professional quality finish. Jay then talked a bit about his role as our newest chapter coordinator. He outlined some of his plans for getting people interested, increasing the exposure of our chapter, and ways in which we can set up mentor programs for more experienced developers to help out the less experienced ones.
After Jay finished up, we drew names for the book give away. We had 4 books this month. From New Riders Games, we had "Mobile Games: Creating Business with Nokia N-Gage" and "The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness". We also had 2 books from Paraglyph Press: "Game Coding Complete" and "Monster Gaming. Congratulations to the winners: Paul Kerchen (Fat Man), Pete Knepleg (Game Coding Complete), Jay Semerad (N-Gage), and Jesse Brindle (Monster Gaming)
For our final hour, it turns out there was a scheduling conflict with our room, and since we were done with the presentations, we graciously decided to move the meeting out into the hall and finish socializing out there.
It looks like our next meeting is tentatively scheduled for March 28th at Trippers in Lansing. We'll probably try to have a GDC wrap-up from those who went, and we'll also be talking about plans for the Computer Game Technology conference in Toronto on April 8-10. We hope to see you there.
The chapter coordinators:
Rich Elswick
Ron Frazier
Jay Semerad
Brian Winn
Posted by BrianWinn at February 15, 2004 05:05 PM