Whatever Shall We Do: The Beginning
A little over a month until school begins for ACE kids! Time to get more specific about some of the things we'll be doing in the Game Dev Club (GDC)!
Assuming we get a decent turnout, my dream is that we run the club like a game company whenever possible. That means one of our first activities will be to come up with a game company name, creating a logo, reserving a URL for the company, setting up a website with team bios! We of course won't use any real kid pictures or names, just team nicknames, self-written bios, and fake pictures.
Even for adults, writing bios is something that can take some time so this might be part of our class one optional HOMEWORK! While this is just a club and we won't have any grades or required homework and since it is on a Friday it won't compete with other schoolwork, I'm expecting that the kids will be excited enough about the club to want to do work for it at home!
Another piece of "homework" I expect the kids to do will be an even bigger challenge, turning ideas bouncing around in their heads and putting them down on paper in a way that others can read and understand! This will be an early lesson for the kids on the challenges of both game development and general life skills! My experience has shown that there is no better way to shoot holes in your own "great" idea than to try to put it down on paper in a way that makes sense!
Another first club meeting piece of homework I'm hoping to give the kids is to name their favorite game and then think of one change or new feature they would like to add to the game. The next step is to write that down in such a way that a friend could read it and understand it.
The next topic will be the team budget! Once again, I'll go over how game budgets usually get spent. For our project though, we'll plan a budget for building our final product. My plan is that the final product for the club will be to have a working, though likely very rough, standup arcade game!
I think as long as we get at least 5 kids, I think this will be doable budget-wise. If we get 8+ kids, I would love to do back-to-back Monitors with 4 or 5 controllers per side.
The rough budget would be to use cheap 50" LED TVs (under $200 each), digital arcade console joysticks that can be mounted below a console ($20 each), reuse some existing MDF table tops (free), use the speakers on the TVs (free), and drive it all with an inexpensive mini PC ($150-300 with 16gbRAM/500GB SSD). Mix in a couple of cheap TV wall mounts ($25 each) and some scrap lumber and we're in business! Due to limited space to store something of that size, I suspect we'll want it to have wheels so we can put it into storage for most of the week. In total, even with the two-screen configuration, we should be under $1000 budget.
We'll go over the ideas and design how to put it together and what it will look like as a team. From that, we'll figure out the budget and what needs to be done. As for who works on putting it together, wherever possible, we'll get the kids to do it. The hardest work will be the wood-cutting but the kids can help with the measuring and marking for the cuts. They will also get to help with the wiring of joysticks and buttons and making other connections.
This post is getting pretty long already! I'll stop here. Next post, I'll cover the actual games we might be making and how we'll run the team!