Hello to new and old alumni and students. We dearly apologies for the lack of updates from us in the past year. We aim to try to improve and will try to bring you the latest news about GDS.
It has been nearly 1 year since we became part of the EPS Community and it has been a very good year. Last you heard about us, we were about to hold a now annual event: a Charity Game Jam, dubbed 1up Jam.
1Up Game Jam is an event where the goal of every team, consisting of 2 to 8 people, is to make a game and design every aspect including programming, art and sound all in just 48 hours. It was set to be quite a weekend! Throughout the event we provided free food for participants to fuel their creative minds and offered many breakout events where more games and challenges were held and we gave away with some great prizes; someone even won a cop of Overwatch: Originals Edition, the hottest game of the summer!
After the 48 hours were up, the winning game was “Power Defence”, a top-down shooter/tower defence hybrid. You can see the winners happily holding their trophy! We had some great games coming out of this Jam, even an Oculus Rift VR ultimate squash simulator: impressive stuff!
All the games made in the Jam were bundled on the indie game marketplace online. Game keys could also be used for downloading the games so we printed some out and created a donation box to raise money from the sales. In total we raised £60 which we will donate to Cancer Research UK. It's never too late to still donate through the marketplace!
It was a very successful event, but the best part is: it’s happening again! Plans are already underway for 2017 so if you would like to be a part of it, please don’t hesitate to contact us at gds@guild.bham.ac.uk. We are sure it will be awesome!
This academic year has also been very successful for us as a society. We have had more interest in our sessions thanks to our new and creative ways to promote the society. We have had live play-testing sessions to show students what we are working on and have tailored our programming tutorial sessions towards Computer Science students to help with their coursework. Recently we even had music students coming to us with interests for writing scores for games. We hope to be able to continue with this effort and grow a healthy GamesDev community at the University.
Introductions are in order as we have a new committee. Congratulations to:
Chair - James Adey
Secretary - Sam Halls
Treasurer - Hung Hoang
Audio Tutors - Liangpeng Zeng
Java GamesDev Tutors – Mike Watkeys Dowie & Reece Meek
The new committee is working hard to get 1up Jam running again in June, as well as coming up with ideas for the next academic year. If you ever have any great ideas for collaboration, again please do not hesitate to contact us. We will continue to work hard to bring enjoyment to those who want to make games at our University and we hope those reading this will support our efforts. We hope that you will hear from us next after 1up Jam, cannot wait to tell you all about it!
If you’ve like what you’ve heard so far, please consider nominating us for an EPS Societies’ Award. We’d love to get our hands on a trophy!
