Students embark upon quest to score high at video game competition
Many students on campus kill time or unwind by playing video games . However, there is a small group of students on campus who go beyond simply playing video games, and into the realm of developing them.
The Game Development Association is all about what goes into designing games before you play them. This organization concocts its own games, experimenting with coding, sugar, spice, everything nice and chemical X.
Revived in fall 2011 by alumnus Jarod Young, the association now is run by President Zac Jennings and Vice President Matt Rainwater. The association’s mission is to teach students the techniques it takes to develop a game, according to its website.
Under this mantra, the association has launched a contest where groups of students can assemble their own development team and design a game.
Initially, the contest was planned as a 48-hour blitz, where students only had two days to assemble their team and design a game. However, since the contest is the first of its kind hosted by the group, it decided against the blitz in favor of a longer contest, said Rainwater, computer science senior.
“We were thinking about that, but then we realized we would have to host it over a weekend, it’s a lot of work, and we realized it just wasn’t very feasible with a college student’s schedule,” he said. “So we decided to do a make it a month and submit it to a Sundance Film Festival sort of thing.”
Game Fest 2012, as the contest has been dubbed, kicked off Feb. 1 and runs through 5 p.m. March 9, he said, so any game-design prodigies hiding out there still have time to crank something out.
The contestants are pretty tight lipped about their current projects. The only details they were open about were the name of two of the projects: “Baking it to the Street” and “Rocket Surgery.”
“Baking it to the Street” is Rainwater’s project. The story line follows a young girl who uses her bakery to infiltrate a local crime syndicate, Rainwater said.
The contest entry games will be showcased March 15 for those who have an affinity for video games or who want to check out the games and vote for their favorite.
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