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March 30, 2004

March 2004 Meeting Report

About 15 of us got together at Michigan State University on March 28. We did the usual intro, socializing, pizza & pop, etc. Next we moved on to a discussion of GDC 2004. Those who attended did a summary presentation on it and showed us some pics of the cooler things they saw. After that, we talked a bit about the upcomming CGT conference in Toronto. Some members made arrangements to hook up and go together. Our big topic for the meeting was our discussion on the mentorship program. We discussed details and options, what-if scenarios, how to make everything fair for both parties, etc. What we came up with was a pretty solid outline of what issues we needed to address in our mentorship guidelines.

Finally, we moved on to the Made in Michigan portion of the meeting. To start off, Jason Tye from MSU showed off 3 projects he had worked on as part of the game design class he was in (instructed by Brian Winn). First was Shingi, a top down scrolling space shooter. The unique feature of this game was the two player mode, where one player controlled the movement of the ship while the other player controls the firing rotation. Next was Power Boy, an Isometric adventure game where the goal is to kill robots, ghosts, and monsters to collect coins to buy upgrades. The third game presented by Jason was Group Conflict, a 2D fighting game that demonstrated some advanced collision detection techniques. All 3 games were developed in Macromedia Director. You can learn about Jason's projects at http://commtechlab.msu.edu/humans/tye/games.html.

Next up was Mike Meyer, who was also in Brian's class. He showed off his game Squest, where you control a squid to help him escape from an aquarium without keeping him out of water too long. The game is done in a Spiderman-like style...you extend your tentacles to grab onto an overhead object and swing from platform to platform. Squest was developed in Dark Basic. You can download Squest from http://www.spartasoft.msu.edu/games/squest/squest.zip

Finally, Pete Keepley from UofM showed off a space fighting game he developed as part of his computer graphics class. The game used 3DS Max models of star wars ships, and demonstrated several advanced techniques such as sky domes, quaternion rotations, MP3 support, and spline evaluation. The game was developed in C++. You can get more details on Pete's projects at http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~knepleyp/

After that, we gave away 3 books courtesy of New Riders Games and .Peachpit Press. We wrapped up the meeting with a bunch more socializing and some leftover pizza. Most of us left about 1/2 hour after our scheduled finish time, but a few more stayed around for a Spartasoft meeting to be held later that night. We thank everyone for coming out. Until next time....

The chapter coordinators:

Rich Elswick
Ron Frazier
Jay Semerad
Brian Winn

Posted by BrianWinn at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)