I made the following commentary at the utGDDC forums on my experience of organizing the competition:

Unfortunately we didn’t get as many entries compared to previous years but we did have some quality games this time. Not only that, the rules have changed. One positive comments I got about GMD this year was that there was no “anonymous” rule — he said that it made the competition feel more laid back and not so strict. It’s nice to be able to put your name on something you’ve made and have others know about it. In the end, it didn’t have any major affect on the results of judging.

Other than with the people I’ve discussed during planning regarding the use of categories as opposed to ranks from 1 to N, I didn’t get any feedback regarding this change. But there didn’t seem to be any complaints at all either. I would think it’s better to know a team didn’t made it to the top rather than finding themselves at rank 18 (or 17, but it doesn’t make that much of a difference does it?).

The turn around time for getting the results in took a lot longer than I had hoped. I didn’t foresee this during planning but since the majority of the judges were from outside the club with very busy schedules, the results kept getting delayed. I had originally wanted to have the awards ceremony during the CSSU Game Night so that even bystanders who do not the club exists can see what we’ve been up to and possibly check out the games. I have to admit I did lose a lot of motivation for running the competition because of the delay, but in the end it seemed to have worked out. 4 out of the 5 judges I had contacted in the beginning were able to judge. If external judging is going to be done again in the future (and I personally hope it does since it gives GMD some more credibility), then this is something to keep in mind.

I don’t know what the budget was for previous GMDs, but I have to say that we had $0 to begin with. (In fact, the whole club this year ran on virtually $0!). We ended up raising $155 from registration, and $230 was pitched in by the CSSU. About $45 was spent on pizza, and if you were there during the games showcase, now you know why we had so little pizza. The prizes were kindly given by Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft, so I have to give my thanks to them. And of course CSSU for the majority of the funding. In the end we’ve broken even, so I’m happy about that.

Having two themes provided some variety in the games we got to see, even though 7 out of 10 games choose the Frogs, Planet Earth, and Potato theme. I also hope to see more selection of themes in future GMDs.

I’ve also relaxed the rule and allowed the use of game making tools (but still no MODs). Only Wheel of Space took advantage of this, and I think a lot of people liked the results. I decided to do this so that it would be more accessible to non-programmers. Besides, the focus is on creating playable games, not tech demos.

I think that’s about it. If I get some time, I *might* put together a video of all the games - just depends on how much time I get after studying for exams.

I hope GMD 2008 was a pleasant experience for the first timers. As the old timers, a renewed experience for what GMD means to them.

I’m taking another CSC490 capstone project course and this time I’m am (or rather, was) working on a project to simulate fluid dynamics using the Lattice Boltzmann Method on a Nvidia 8000 series GPU. This project was done for PhD student Scott Briggs, and I also worked with James Vaughan. Here’s a video of the project:

Industry feels pinch as numbers of IT grads plummet

If you’re too lazy to read it, at least check out the last few paragraphs of it.

Bring on the PWN4G3 with a free one-month subscription to XBOX Live Gold.

I don’t know why but I always get a chuckle when 1337 speak and/or 1337 slang is used in marketing and is done outside of it’s original context. Here’s my message to the marketing department: cut the crap. IMO, trying to advertise your products using 1337 slang is totally n00bish. Then again, 1337 speak is starting to get really annoying…

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet but this term I’m taking a Computer Science Project Course (CSC490) at school focusing on game design. The course is being taught by Steve Engels and the course homepage is here for those who are interested. Content is somewhat lacking but after all this is a new course and in the past few weeks he has made his slides along the way during course meeting times. He also asks us to do some research on various game topics like what makes a bad game, what makes games fun, psychology of games, and character design. Inspired by Jen’s blog, Girls in Gaming, the theme for the game design course this year is “women in gaming”. There are roughly 20 students in the course and we have been put into teams up to four. By the end of the course, each team is to produce a working prototype of an original game that would appeal to women and girls. I was pretty happy about the topic when I first found out about it.

My team has come up with a game with the working title Snap! where the gameplay is a mix of Metal Gear Solid and Beyond Good & Evil. Not to give away too much in its early stages, the player would play as a paparazzi who goes around shooting photographs of celebrities in the city and sells the photos for money. There are assignments the player would have to do in order to progress through the game. One of the things we’ll be doing for our game, which I’ll be responsible for, is using the Wii Remote as the controller input for the game. I’ll talk more about the game once we really get a working prototype.

So back to the course: just last week Steve announced to us that the game design course is now available as a regular course offering by the Computer Science Department! The new course designation is CSC404 - and it’s kind of fitting IMO. Actually, the department up until now has been quite reluctant to offer any game related course because they considered it as “non-educational” or something of that nature. But the demand IMO is quite high for game courses as it’s being asked every year by prospective U of T students only to be disappointed that there wasn’t any, which was too bad since it’s a good motivator for getting into Computer Science (like myself — I went specifically into it because I wanted to get into game development). But anyway, it’s now being offered, so yay for the future students who’ll be taking it.

I think it’ll be a good chance for me to take a look and try out the latest games for this year without having to spend too much time hunting them down. I’m pretty excited about Guitar Hero 3 as they were finally able to get the rights to use one of Metallica’s songs, One.

But wait, utGDDC never existed before did it? How can there already be an annual competition? Well, before utGDDC, it was known as the UofT Game Programming Club (GPC). Note the italics.

Today me and the other exec members were at our booth letting students and first years know that we exist and what we do. Most of the time when I was talking to students and giving them the sales pitch, they were interested but as soon as I (accidently, I think) said programming, it immediately turned off some, especially those who aren’t in Computer Science or who aren’t interested in learning how to program at all. I think they still wanted to learn or know how to make games, but just not jump into the technical details. We had quite a turn out and a good number of students who were willing to put their email down on our announcement list. Some of the students I’ve talked to said they were into game development areas such as art, writing, level design, or even critiquing(!).

In GPC in the past years, the majority of the members were people from Computer Science and were typically male programmers who learned how to program in the Computer Science program. There have been a few female attendees before, but I don’t know if they were really into it or were just tagging along someone else…

So what does this mean?

If we want our club to not be your stereotypical “geek guys club”, obviously the name Game Programming Club had to change. I think we’ve started off on the right track by renaming the club name to Game Design & Development instead. The name makes a big difference and impression on people.

There are students out there who are interested in designing games, but not necessarily implementing them. Design is the craft. Implementation is the technical. Designing, implementing, and making it work beautifully is the art. In GPC, some members would give presentations on technical subjects, which I’m sure turns off the some of people. For presentations and tutorials, I think we’ll want to give an overview of different disciplines of game design and development, and not dive into too much detail, unless our audience wants that. The business side of games I think would be an interesting talk as well.

For the competition, we’ll need to make it easier for non-technical people to get started and get their heads thinking about it. In the future, if they’re really inclined too and have more confidence, I think they can dive further into the details. What would be even better is to team up people with different skill sets so that everyone can show off their different talents and combine them together to make something the team can be proud of.