It’s the end of the year!
Well, it's been pretty fun but as the academic year comes to a close, so do the activities of the Nottingham Trent Development society. We've had some serious fun and done very well at both X48 events this year but most of us will be making trails after term ends tomorrow, not to be seen until the start of the next academic year at Nottingham Trent University.
After a rather rambuncious TGI's Friday's end of year party with our current President, Patrick Merrit (pictured above) official society activities are winding down. We will be attending a follow up X48 event in Birmingham on the evening of the 1st of July and the odd project we will run over the summer but other than that, you will have to wait until next year to see more from us.
I hope everybody has a good summer and here's to next year when the Dev Soc will start up for it's second year of awesomeness. We will be recruiting during Fresher's week so be ready to get on board the most up and coming society at Nottingham Trent University when you get back to work after the upcoming summer of fun!
Edwin Jones.
PS: A great big thanks to James Lewis and Pauline Smith for all they have done for the society, as well as anybody else who has been helping behind the scenes. Without your help, we wouldn't be where we are today. An even bigger thanks goes out to our hardworking members as without you and your skills, there wouldn't even be a Dev Soc!
Congratulations Final Year Students
As you may know yesterday was the last exam for final year students. It was a tough time and the intense heat wave during revision week called for some desperate measures to be taken! In the end everyone pulled though. Devsoc is here to offer congratulations to all and good luck with the future.
Despite the academic year slowly coming to a close with the 2nd year final exam just around the corner, Decsoc will still be running events with a few things planned to happen before the end of the year. Hopefully some summer projects will tie everybody over until next year. More on that later.
Good luck and have fun!
NTU Dev Soc are in EDGE magazine!
That's right folks, our fair society has already made it into one of the biggest publications in the gaming world despite being less than one academic year old! Our two X48 Huddersfield teams (the aptly named teams 'Default' and 'Awesome') are mentioned in the X48 coverage on page 72 of the June 2010 edition. For reference, this issue has a cover story about LittleBigPlanet 2.
Congratulations to all those who managed to get mentioned in the article and here is looking forward to getting ourselves published in more major gaming magazines.
UPDATE: You can read the article for free on-line here.
GameCityNights #4 – Blur
Hey everybody, I have good news and good news. The first part of the good news is that coursework is winding down, and bar horrific exams most people are going to have a little more free time to do things.
The second part of the good news is the announcement of the fourth GameCityNights events, Blur. This will take place on the 28th May at the Antenna club in Nottingham. Representatives from the legendary Bizarre Creations will be there to show off their latest racing game Blur and to tell us about it. Entry is 18+ only for the price of £3 on the door, but entry is limited and is assigned on a first come, first served basis - arrive early if you want to get in!
The NTU Dev Soc will be attending, so come along and say hello! We hope to see you there.
Workload Overload
Hi everybody. I thought it was time for a general update on the society for those who have been kept out of the loop. We've had our annual vote and Patrick Merrit is our new President, well done to him/applause and all that.
Unfortunately this time of year is very busy for us all, so we have been less active on the blog and are snowed under with our coursework but we are still going strong - Social Saturdays are still on in CIB 202 at 12am-4pm if you want to meet the society and play some games as are our monthly trips to GameCity Nights. We are also still holding meetings on Wednesdays about our projects but there will be reduced attendance until the last of our exams in early June. After that, we will be running some interesting events for all of you to get involved in before the end of term to prepare for the challenges of next year.
There is still time to meet and join the people who make the best games at NTU so feel free to grab somebody in a black hoodie and ask at any time. We hope to see you soon!
Edwin.
New term = New opportunities.
Hey everybody.
Dev Soc is back in action after a brief break for easter. We'll be attending GameCity Nights on the 29th of April to represent ourselves and the University as best we can. At the moment we are currently working hard on getting our winning x48 games published on Xbox Live which will take a while but it will be worth it.
We'll be announcing more exciting things soon, but for now we are busy planning out the next term. Look out for the friendly developers in black hoodies around the CIB if you have any questions.
Edwin.
Game City Nights, Episode 2: Chime (and NTU DevSoc)
Once again, NTU Dev Soc want to congratulate and thank Game City for their second Game City Nights event. The event was structured similarly to the first event, where game developers could mingle and discuss, play and think up games, as well as talk to some developers who have had success with their games. This time, the highlight was on Creative Director Ste Curran, to talk about the game Chime, as well as NTU Dev Soc to talk about our X48 Game Camp projects.
NTU Dev Soc showed off the X48 Game Camp projects made by the three X48 teams, and received feedback and constructive criticism as well as ideas on what to implement into these games next. We wish to thank everyone for their contributions!
For more information on this event, check out Game City's Blog.
X48 Huddersfield 2010
The blogosphere has been discussing it for months. Twitter feeds have been filled with ideas and strategy on it. Yes, today is the first day of X48 Huddersfield 2010, and DevSoc's secondary teams have been entered.
This blog post is an aggregated write up of the team's twitter feeds and their musings during the contest.
Final results
Edwin's team: 2nd place!
Ben's team: (currently unknown)
Well done!
The team's musings
Indy on Sat Mar 20, 2010 6:54 am
8 Hours to go and it's very difficult to motivate anyone. Team Default have got a long way to go, we have all our assets ready. Time to assemble and polish, don't let the over the top plot(yet highly poignant) take away from the fact this is actually a fun simple game, and we have the most original take on the idea.
Indy on Fri Mar 19, 2010 11:31 pm
Our game concept massive sprites in the background, turn out to be new enemies when you manage to get bigger (We were gonna go with this actually implementing new elements to game play depending on ths shape of the sprite). This is the bit we had trouble with last build, however we've gone the other way round built a the mechanics that get you levelling up first. Very very simplistic hit things with hammers, they drop loot you get level up (get bigger) spend money on hammers you could not previously hold. This bit is almost done, we have soundtrack and sounds. Hopefully I still have time to get the original idea implemented, most of the judges/advisers were quite interested in it's originality at least at X48. I've got a few ideas on how to implement this more successfully, but unlike Tim I do not have the liberty to have some sleep 
Thinking of creating a massive collection of rectangles that make up a giant boss which you have to hammer away at. (The mecha dragonfly ridden by the ghost of Jim, who has come back to take on his son in order to get the mightest hammer, which Jim Jr go in order to avenge his Fathers death in the first place.) Spoilers.
I'll get a video up tomorrow, now that I've finally convinced Stone and Ben to give me better art assets. After a minor glitch Jordan is doing pretty well at coding too, sorting out a few of our rpg elements.
Catch up later, people waiting on code. Epic soundtrack going in.
Indy on Fri Mar 19, 2010 9:30 pm
We're way behind on ours, the first 6 hours were a complete waste. No time to stop and write maybe in the morning.
Edwin on Fri Mar 19, 2010 9:10 pm
Assets are one the way, but I can give a quick brief about our game now.
The theme is giants, but we wanted to do something a little different so our game is based on a gas giant, namely a sun that you play as. The game's name is Gigas (latin for giant and also a mixture of the words gas and giant) and it's sort of like a feeding frenzy/katamari game - you have to travel the universe eating smaller suns until you become big enough to eat VY canis majoris, the biggest sun in the universe and become the ruling celestial body of the universe. Every level is a galaxy with a black hole in the middle that gets bigger and bigger so if you don't get enough mass to be able to escape you will die. You move by orbiting objects of higher mass than you until you can build enough momentum with the thumbstick to reach escape velocity and fly off on a new vector but if you hit a sun bigger than you on the way it will eat you rather than you eating it.
We are also using bitlow as a font as ordered by the society. ALL HAIL BITLOW
The team's Twitter feeds
The sleepy stretch: Saturday Morning - closing time
| Ben's Team | Edwin's Team |
|---|---|
|
Peter, Twitter, 11 AM Indy, Twitter, 11 AM Peter, Twitter, 7 AM Peter, Twitter, 5 AM Peter (via Twitter, at about 1 AM) Ben (via Twitter, at about 1AM) Ben (via Twitter, 00:47) Peter (via Twitter, 00:45) |
Simon, Twitter, 16:00 Sammy, Twitter, Finishing time Sammy, Twitter, 14:06 Edwin, Twitter, 10:00 Sammy (via Twitter, about 1 AM) |
The fatigue stretch: 18:00 to 24:00
| Ben's Team | Edwin's Team |
|---|---|
|
Peter (via Twitter, 22:45) Peter (via Twitter, 22:20) Peter (via Twitter, 22:00 Peter (via Twitter, 20:59) Peter (via Twitter, 20:55) Peter (via Twitter, 19:50) Peter (via Twitter, 18:52) Peter (18:24) Ben (via Twitter, 18:17): |
A link from Peter (via Twitter, 23:00 Edwin (via Twitter, 22:32) Simon (via Twitter, 22:25) Edwin (via Twitter, 21:55) Edwin (via Twitter, 21:50) Sammy (via Twitter, 21:26) Edwin (via Twitter, 21:00) Simon (via Twitter, 20:50) Sammy (via Twitter, 19:35) Edwin (via Twitter, 18:00): |
First six hours: 12:00 to 18:00
| Ben's Team | Edwin's Team |
|---|---|
|
Peter (16:51, day 1): Indy (via Twitter, 15:42): Ben (via Twitter, 14:29) Peter (14:00-ish, day 1): Indy (via Twitter, 13:10): Peter (13:00, day 1): Indy (via Twitter, 13:00): Peter (12:00, day 1): Peter (via Twitter, 12 AM): Peter (10 AM, day 1): I'm stone and I will be your blogger for Team Default today, or until someone else takes over. Expect regular hourly updates after the competition starts at 12. Until then, carry on as you were. Peter (via Twitter, 10 AM): Indy (via Twitter, 8 AM): Peter (via Twitter, 6 AM): Peter (via Twitter, 5 AM): Peter (via Twitter, 4:40 AM): |
Simon (via Twitter, 17:40): Edwin (via Twitter, 16:15): Edwin (via Twitter, 16:10): Sammy (via Twitter, 16:10): Simon (via Twitter, 15:38): Edwin (via Twitter, 15:02) Sammy (via Twitter, 14:28) Sammy (via Twitter, 14:14) Edwin (via Twitter, 12:30 AM): Simon (via Twitter, 12 AM): Simon (via Twitter, 12 AM): Sammy (via Twitter, 11:29 AM) Simon (via Twitter, 11:28 AM): Simon (via Twitter, 10 AM): Edwin (via Twitter, 8 AM): Simon (via Twitter, 5 AM): |
Dev Soc XNA Tutorial update.
The first Dev Soc XNA tutorial took place yesterday and was a resounding success. Those that attended now have a game with a visible backround and player sprite which can be controlled with the keyboard, as well as knowledge of basic programming concepts such as 'classes'. We will continue to host these events every Wednesday until the end of term in CIB 205 at 2PM. Feel free to come along as long as you have access to the building no matter what your skill level as we can provide you with any code you missed out on last week. As an aside, any new (and unregistered old) members should register for our official forum by clicking the 'forum' link at the top of the page. Make sure to come to this week's Social Saturday at 12PM in CIB 202 to get to know the other members better and to relax a bit before the next tutorial.
We look forward to seeing you at future events.
Edwin 'Guru' Jones, Vice President of Dev Soc.
Dev Soc at X48 – New Video
Hey everybody, here is some video of our 2nd place earning team at x48 working hard and making a very fun game. Patrick and Jason are interviewed near the end of the clip.