3/23/2015 - Developing in HTML5 and Roblox, Game Jam!

Hey everyone, just a few more days until our 2015 spring semester Game Jam! If you haven't already RSVP'd then you can sign up right here.

As for other announcments...

Our next Game Night is Firday, April 3rd.
Officer elections for the next academic year will be held soon. Look for an email.

Tonight we had two well-known members give talks.

The first was an HTML5 talk by Rory. Some of the main points to walk away from his cherry blossom filled talk are:

HTML5 is accessible everywhere.
It's a great for prototyping; enabling you to dive straight into 2d development.
Rory enjoys writing in Vim.
Crafty - a JS game engine. Their site has some nifty code to get started with.
JSFiddle - a browser IDE for javascript.
Check out construct and impress (javascript frameworks) as well.

Rory helped walk us through all of this by making a brand new game involving a player controlled turquoise rectangle colliding with a big fat square, and all in just a few minutes!

Our second speaker was Greyson giving a talk on his platform of expertise, Roblox. If you don't know what Roblox is then head on over to the Roblox site and check it out, To summarize briefly, it's an online platform to develop and sell/share games as well as play them (with 5 million people) in a very cubeoid setting.

The platform's functionality comes from the scripting language Lua. If you haven't heard of it before that's alright, but if you've ever even touched World of Warcraft, you'll have probably been in contact with it through the game's extensive, community-made UI addon library. It's also used in the popular Source game Gary's Mod.

Overall, developing in Roblox functions similarly to a toned down version of Unreal Engine or Unity without all the fancy-smancy graphical stuff. Without even knowing tons about coding you can hop right in and use the engine itself to prototype games. The best part of Roblox is probably the ability to publish a multiplayer game without writing a single line of raw networking code.

Greyson showed off Bed Simulator 2015 (I wonder if it's better than Rock Simulator), and how a game like it could be started through importing meshes and the models made by other members of the community.

Thanks for the talks guys!