Interactive Art Circle
at the University of Minnesota
Last updated: April 7th, 2003
About Events Schedule Meeting Information Project Board Links Contact
About:
The Interactive Art Circle is about bringing people with diverse backgrounds, who share a common interest in game development, together. Through discussions, demonstrations, and tutorials the group shares information and learns collaboratively about a number of game design and development tools, techniques, and topics. The group meets at 5:30pm every other Friday on the Minneapolis, University of Minnesota campus, in Anderson Hall, Room 170(map).
Events:
* Apr 5-10, 2003 CHI 2003: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
* Apr 7, 2003 Emerging Digerati: Steven McCarthy, Mauricio Arango, Michael Berkowski, Pete Wagner, Tony Lam, and Mamun Rashid
Apr 27-30, 2003 I3D 2003: Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics (Monterey, CA)
Jun 11-13, 2003 Graphics Interface 2003 Conference on Computer Graphics, Interactive Systems, and Human-Computer Interaction. (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada)
Jul 27-31, 2003 SIGGRAPH 2003: Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (San Diego, CA)
Nov 2-5, 2003 UIST 2003: Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada)
Schedule:
2002-2003
* Apr 11, 2002 GDC 2003 Overview - Everyone
Mar 7, 2002 Flash Games Tutorial - Marjorie Franklin
Feb 21, 2002 Lamb&Company Shopping Game (Murphy Hall)- Larry Lamb
Feb 7, 2002 Ludology - Everyone
Jan 24, 2002 Game Research Literature - Everyone
Dec 6, 2002 UIs, Stories, Dvorak/Nomic Games - Everyone
Nov 22, 2002 Scripting in Games: VB and SGDK - Ben Marty
Nov 8, 2002 Synthesis Design - Gary Dahl
Nov 3, 2002 Working in the Game Industry - Chuck Carter
Oct 25, 2002 Dreamcast Fighting Game Engine - Mike Zaimont
Oct 11, 2002 Pen and Paper RPGs - Christopher Weiss
Sep 27, 2002 Game Ideas, and SGDK - Gary Dahl
Sep 13, 2002 Introductions, Agenda, and Summer Wrap - Everyone
2001-2002
May 3, 2002 Physical Video Games - Everyone
Apr 19, 2002 Stories and Games - Everyone
Apr 5, 2002 Favorite Game Critiques - Everyone
Mar 8, 2002 Java 3d - Pete Border
Feb 22, 2002 Visibility and WorldCraft - Gary Dahl
Feb 8, 2002 Blender Creator - Kent Mein
Jan 25, 2002 Interfacing Games - Gary Dahl
Dec 14, 2001 Writing a Game Design Document - Brian Bender
Nov 30, 2001 Physics and Simulation in Games - Pete Border
Nov 16, 2001 Scrolling Game Development Kit - Ben Marty
Nov 9, 2001 Macromedia Flash - Angie Hanson
Oct 19, 2001 Verge and Verge Online - Brian Peterson
Oct 5, 2001 "Infinite Universe" Design - Gary Dahl
Sep 21, 2001 Introductions and Alice - Gary Dahl
Meeting Information:
GDC 2003 Overview
As implied by the title, the focus of this meeting will the topics and issues presented or conceived at this year's game developers conference. Some GDC infomation is available at the GDC Website, in addition to what's posted on Gamasutra.com.
Flash Games Tutorial
This tutorial will cover some of the fundamental ideas behind Macromedia's Flash, and introduce the group to designing and developing fun and exciting games in Flash.
Lamb&Company Shopping Game
Larry Lamb of the Lamb&Company animation studio is interested in developing a virtual shopping space game. We will discuss potential directions and ideas (in collaboration with marketing students) toward making this product more fun, and successful. This Discussion will take place in the Murphy Hall Conference Center at the usual time.
Ludology
This week, we will be discussing the article Ludology Meets Narratology: Similitude and differences between (video) games and narrative by Gonzalo Frasca.
Game Research Literature
The consensus from last semester seemed to indicate that this group should move forward as more of a reading discussion group. We'll therefore start the semester with Jonas Heide Smith's article Computer Game Research 101: A Brief Introduction to the Literature. In addition to discussing the article, the purpose of this meeting will be to better define a focus for the coming semester.
UIs, Stories, Dvorak/Nomic Games
This last meeting of the Winter Semester will be open to whatever people are interested in discussing to wrap up the year. A number of User Interface, Narrative vs. Interactivity, and Dvorak/Nomic Game issues will be compiled to help catalyze and focus the discussion.
Scripting in Games: VB and SGDK
This meeting will center around the use of scripting languages in game development. The Scrolling Game Development Kit's use of VB script will be described and discussed as an example of the why, what, and how of game scripting.
Synthesis Design
This meetings discussion will be focused on controlling analysis based content synthesis. A number of basic controlls will be presented, followed by brainstorming and discussion around interesting applications of these controls. Potential applications of this technique include: interactive story creation, persistent infinite terrains, and game synthesis.
Working in the Game Industry
This talk will expose a number of practical issues involved in developing art assets for modern commercial-quality games. Chuck Carter has been involved in the design and development of games like Myst, and Earth and Beyond. His wealth of experience and friendly personality are sure to make for an interesting talk.
Dreamcast Fighting Game Engine
This meeting will include a case study in the desin of a fighting game engine for Sega's Dreamcast. Fighting game conventions have found their way into many different genres. As with tools discussed in the past, this engine's specific abilities and limitations should provide significant insight, and inspire innovation.
Pen and Paper RPGs
Pen and paper role playing games have a rich history that has greatly influenced a number of modern game players and designers. The focus of this meeting will be to discuss the conventions of pen and paper RPGs, and how an electronic media might leverage some of the genre's strengths.
Game Ideas, and SGDK Tutorial: Part 1
As we will be designing and developing a number of games over the course of this semester/year, this meeting's discussion will will be centered around building game ideas. We will also begin a series of comprehensive scrolling game development kit tutorials, in order to facilite the game's development.
Introductions, Agenda, and Summer Wrap
This first meeting of the year will be dedicated to introductions, catching up, and setting an agenda for the new year.
Physical Video Games
Arcade games have been increasingly incoorporating a mix of virtual and physical game elements. This discussion will attempt to identify some of the streangths of non-video games, and brainstorm ways of incorporating such elements into future video games. What potential do smart appliances, wireless networks, augmented reality, and future sensing technolopgies have for games?
Stories and Games
Durring this meeting we will explore the relationship between stories and games. How games can leverage storytelling, and how storytelling can leverage games. Issues of control and freedom, structure, points of view, randomness, and the forms of enjoyment each provide may be discused.
Favorite Game Critiques
The idea for this meeting is that everyone come with five favorite games in mind. We'll discuss as a group what makes each of these games so great, and how they might be improved.
Java 3D
All the niceties of Java, in a 3D API. The architecture of this API should provide a nice introduction to 3d graphics programming in general. This library also provides some handy scene graph functionality, and support for VRML as well as its up and coming predecessor X3D. Find out if this API is right for your next game.
Related Links: Java Java 3D X3D Black Art of Java Game Programming
Visibility and WorldCraft
Visibility determination and culling become critical when rendering complex interactive scenes in real time. By investing some resources in determining what objects are visible, time can be saved by further processing only those objects. WorldCraft is a tool used to design and edit maps for games like Half-Life and Quake.
Related Links: Geometry Culling in 3D Engines Inside Quake: Visible Surface Determination WorldCraft
Blender Creator
Blender is the all in one 3D content suite from Not a Number Technologies. Blender Creator is a free (for non-comercial use) environment for 3D modeling, animation, simulation, and interactive content generation. Tools for releasing stand-alone and plug-in applications are avaliable upon payment of the commercial licenseing fee.
Related Links: Blender Learning Path Converters Resources Demos Community
Interfacing Games
Game interfaces are the means of communication between a game and it's player(s). The field of human-computer interaction provides a number of simple design guidelines that have lead to some very clever and compelling interfaces in games past. New technologies are constantly emerging, and adding to the complexity and potential of modern game interface design.
Related Links: Nielson's Heuristics Task Centered UI Design Game Interfaces Mapping the Player Feeding the Player
Writing a Game Design Document
It is important to be able to articulate the vision of a particular game for many reasons, including: formalization, organization, unification, and commercialization (to name a fewizations). The difference in mediums' apparent expressiveness (paper vs interactive) warrent this topic much attention.
Related Links: Game Design Documents Creating a Great Design Document
Physics and Simulation in Games
Correctly modeling and simulating believable physics in a game is often extreemely important. Physics are arguably the most frequent form of interaction we, as humans on this planet, experience (equal and opposite reactions, and all). Since we pick up on minor inconsistancies very quickly, this topic desearves special attention.
Related Links: Physics for Game Developers SIGGRAPH'97 Notes Blockies Demo Walkies Demo Fishies Demo
Scrolling Game Development Kit
The Scrolling Game Development Kit can be used to create scrolling games without writing code. It comes complete with a sprite/tile editor, map editor, and a number of attribute editing dialogs. For more control: the whole project is open source, and supports vbscripts (that can be written with the help of a dedicated wizard).
Related Links: Scrolling Game Development Kit Games
Macromedia Flash
Flash delivers low bandwith animation, and interactive content to the masses via the world wide web. In addition to being used in a number of web based games, many game companies take advantage of Flash for short in-game sequences, and menus. Although Flash is not free, an educational discount is available for students.
Related Links: Flash Angie's Flash Links
Verge and Verge Online
Vecnas Extraordinary Role-Playing Game Engine: is a set of tools originally intended to help people build 16bit console style RPGs. Verge and Verge2 are however, capable of making many other kinds of 2D sprite based games. Network support is on it's way, as is the Verge Online MMORPG.
Related Links: Verge Games (V1) Games (V2)
"Infinite Universe" Design
"Infinite Universe" design presuposses adding a level of indirection to the process of creating game objects. By modeling relationships and statistical properties, a computer can be given the job of instantiating an "infinite" number of such plausible objects, attributes, events, or ... things.
Related Links: Algorithms for an Infinite Universe Infinite Game Universe
Introductions and Alice
Alice is a free an easy to use graphical programming environment developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Complete interactive 3D worlds can be quickly and easily composed using Alice, the integrated Teddy2 modeler, and AlicePaint3D. More control and advanced features are offered via the python scripting language.
Related Links: Alice Teddy and Chameleon Python
Links:
News and Articles
FlipCode
Gamasutra
GameDev.net
IGDA
Ludum Dare
Other Resources
Game Creation Resources
Game Developers Conference Archives
Game Development Search Engine
Game Research
Game Studies Journal
Copyright 2001-2003 The Interactive Art Circle
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.
Privacy Statement
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.