Hello! I wanted to let you all know that this school year we don’t have Coding Club Mondays after school at GV Jr High -the rules changed a bit, and they needed us to have a teacher sponsor, and thought lunchtime would be better -which made it difficult to get high school student volunteers, as you can imagine! We’re working on this though.
And in the meantime, the SB Central Library was keen for us to continue, and we’ve started up again on Wednesdays but earlier – 3:30 pm – 5:30 pm. We have Matt and Caleb coming to help out. We’re also adding in some ‘challenges’ – things you can do during one session, like 10 levels of Code Combat, creating a sprite (for the new member page), using Scratch to create a pong game, creating a single level game on flowlab.io…We’ll vary it each week. The goal is to provide Code Combat to learn actual coding, but lots of other activities as doing Code Combat 2 hrs straight for 10 weeks might not be everyone’s cup of tea.
If anyone needs a ride to the library from GV Jr High – I could pick you up at the Goleta library at 2:45pm on Wednesdays… please let me know in a comment here if you’d like to do this and we’ll sort it out! take care – Paula
Here is a link to a free version of RPG Maker MV, the dev kit we’re going to be using for then next few weeks. It’s downloaded in 2 parts, when both are downloaded extract all files from both into a single folder and then replace all duplicate files. When that is done open the folder and launch the application.
Here are two development kits for you to try out and experiment with, both are free to download, however you have to pay royalties to Epic Games if you publish a game in UE4
Source Development Kit (SDK) is based on the source engine by Steam® SDK is much more stable than Unreal Engine, however it cannot create stand-alone games, only levels for steam games such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2.
Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is the newest engine created by Epic Games® which can create just about any kind of game that you want as long as you spend time working on it. It is much more advanced and harder to learn than SDK, however it can create much more complex and diverse titles.
Cry Engine 5 (CE5) is another engine very similar to Unreal, I have little experience using it but plan on learning about it in the near future. It can also be free to use, however similar to UE4 publishing requires royalties.
Source Development Kit: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SDK_Installation
Last meeting we discussed possible roles, and decided to have an election. (There was some criticism of snacks provided, and I suggested that they take responsibility for finding a club sponsor, if they want to have any sort of say as to snacks!)
Here were the roles and the people who ran:
President: Damian, Caleb
Vice President: Thomas
Marketing: no one
Communications: no one
Webmaster: no one
Tech Manager/Tester: Shashank, Tuna
Event Manager: no one
The results:
Caleb, President
Damian, Thomas, vice presidents
Shashank, Tech Manager/Tester
So now we’ll look at what these roles entail! First major project is sponsorship.
Player MiniGru wrote a text rendering engine within CodeCombat using flowers. Awesome. http://ow.ly/WiRxT
I just saw the above on the CodeCombat Facebook page… Sounds cool – looking forward to seeing what all of you create in Code Combat.. I don’t get how, but you might get it?
Andrew Tosh is the Founder and President of GameSim Inc. Prior to GameSim, Mr. Tosh was the Director of Engineering at the Modeling and Simulation company, AcuSoft, in Orlando, FL. While at AcuSoft, he specialized in the development of terrain databases and image generation systems. Mr. Tosh left AcuSoft to enter the gaming industry with Electronic Arts in 2005. While at EA, Mr. Tosh led the development of a number of Electronic Arts games, including the first live-hosted video game, EA Sports GameShow. In 2008, Mr. Tosh founded GameSim with the goal of providing software products and services to the entertainment, simulation, and geospatial industries. GameSim is one of the fastest growing companies in the country, working with a host of clients including Electronic Arts, NASA, US Army, US Air Force and CSX. Mr. Tosh holds a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Central Florida in Computer Science and an MBA from the University of Florida.
Here is what GameSim does:
Summary
Andrew spoke about how he started programming – at home, for fun – and then got into gaming. At university studying computer science, he realized there is tons of math involved, which is important to coding (learn math, including calculus!).
Andrew also went over hardware, machine languages, programming languages (such as Java, Python, C++, C#, Ruby on Rails) that are used by humans to code. On top of programming languages are game engine platforms – Unreal engine, Unity – which make it easier to create games. The main languages used for gaming is C++, and sometimes C#.
Roles in gaming – software engineer, game designer, tester, debugger, sound, art design… the most roles are for software engineers. Many people want to be game designers, but it’s a good idea to get into an organization as a software engineer or tester, and work your way up to game designer. It’s hard to know from interviewing someone if they will be a really good game designer, so a lot of the time companies will move someone into that role internally.
Hiring – when Andrew hires, he looks for people who have been coding as ‘hobbyists’ long before college, as this means they like doing it. The best advice is to learn coding while having fun. Andrew wishes there were more women software engineers – right now he has one on his team. There are not many women applying and this reflects those choosing to go into this field. He said about 40% of their art designer staff are women, so there’s more parity there.
Unfortunately we didn’t have an HDMI cable, so weren’t able to hook Andrew’s laptop up to the monitor, but he showed some examples of their games on the computer: one was a game created for employees of a freight train company, to help staff who don’t spend time on the trains understand the business. [Question was asked – can you crash the train? Answer was no, company didn’t want trains to be crashed!]
This is an example of how gaming is starting to happen in new domains – not just games for entertainment. Gamification is a term used widely now, and means adding game elements into something so it’s more fun for humans to do or learn – you’re seeing this in large organizations (training or motivating behavior in employees) and also online learning.
Andrew also spoke about the work they do for the US Military – they will do 3d world renderings for training simulations. Unlike games where there can be imaginary places, the Military wants real, accurate places in their simulations. GameSim can take satellite and other data and turn this into a 3D world of an entire country for example. They also have done flight simulation/training projects – in these, you can crash the plane (as they are simulating real world conditions and consequences).
Lastly, Andrew also said that game development is just a tiny, tiny, piece of software engineering overall…Massive opportunities in this space!
GV Coding Club 
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