Meeting wrap-up March 4th, 2003

About 30 people attended the March meeting which took place in ECCR 150 of the CU Engineering Center.

After selecting from a variety of pizzas, CU GameDev Club President Til Newman led the discussion on the usage of puzzles in computer games. Several examples of games which were puzzle-based were given, such as Tetris, King's Quest, Myst, etc. The discussion lead to a general conclusion that puzzles in games should be fair, should be incrementally challenging, and should generally have hints when completing them is essential to continuing in the game.

Next there was a brief introduction of all the people who came, with names, backgrounds, and interests.

Lastly, there were a wide variety of demonstrations / presentations given by the members of the CU GameDev club, with the following projects:

• A 3D implementation of Sokoban, created for the CSCI 4830 - Game Programming class at CU (Hexar, Marcus Griep, John Rose, Andrew Kuttig)
• A 3D physics modeling engine with spherical and box collisions (Marcus Griep)
• WinTetris 2.8, featuring AI code that plays against itself (Hexar)
• Jetstream, a 3D space-flying game based on PicoGUI and OpenGL (Micah and David)
• "Tactiless" Pong - Using a home-brewed sensory device, Micah demonstrated that he could play pong using the movement of his hands in the air alone. Extremely impressive stuff. (Micah)

Other Information:

The CU GameDev club meets every other week on Tuesdays in ECCR 150 of the Engineering Center at 8 PM. Their website is hosted at http://gamedev.cs.colorado.edu/.