President Ian Stoops leads the March 17 Game Dev Club meeting. The new club creates community and provides opportunities to connect with careers. Photo by Owen Jones.
By Owen Jones
In the gaming industry, one of the most important aspects students need to focus on in order to get a position on a team creating a game is their portfolio. Making games, game systems, artwork for or about games like characters or levels, and many other things that give a physical demonstration of a student’s capabilities.
While class projects like the collaborative and senior projects are great ways to build your portfolio, it also helps immensely to work on projects of your own outside of class. What’s even better is being able to share the work that you do with fellow students for feedback and to connect.
Those are some of the goals the president of the new Game Dev Club, Ian Stoops, and vice president, BJ Gardner, are hoping to accomplish with the establishment of the club last semester.
“I wanted to start it to create more community and to get people to share their work and show off what they can do, because it’s a good way to learn more about other people and learn more from other people,” said Stoops.
The club meets every other Tuesday in the SGD lab, where students get together to talk about news related to the gaming industry, share their work, and occasionally participate in events such as a recent motion capture lab hosted by the club.
Professor Brandon Crews, director of the SGD department, believes the club offers a variety of experiences that can help students in their future careers.
“The club is a great opportunity for students to network, to communicate with each other, to see how your peers are developing and working on projects, and to give critiques and feedback on how to improve each other’s work,” said Crews.
Stoops and Crews also expressed the same desire to build a sense of community within the Game Dev club as a big reason for making it, wanting students to be able to connect over their projects and work relating to game design.
“It’s a great opportunity to kind of build a community, but also to see how other people are approaching game design,” said Crews.
The Game Dev club has also hosted events, from guest speakers to talk about the industry and projects they’re working on to hands-on events like a motion capture event to demonstrate different techniques in order to bring in new members.
Markest Haugh, the secretary of the Game Dev club, described his favorite parts of the club as the main reason he decided to join the team dedicated to running it.
“Just meeting the new people, seeing new artwork and new styles that people have, and just seeing awesome work that most people bring in with their games,” said Haugh.
Stoops has also expressed his desire for other events related to students showcasing their work on a larger scale.
“I’d like to host a mini game jam, which would be cool, or just a smaller student showcase for the SGD department, where we would get some more outsiders from the school and some alumni,” said Stoops.
Along with that, the staff supporting the club are hopeful that in the future it will be expanded to allow for more opportunities for simulation and game design majors to thrive.
“I think there’s a lot of opportunities to bring more people from our overall community,” said Crews. “I think we can reach out to other colleges and universities in the area and have networking opportunities so that our students can see what other students in similar fields or curriculums are developing as well.”