Starting a video game creation club

You severely underestimate just how difficult it is to make games. With 2 hours per week, and a team with zero experience, you won't finish much - if anything at all. You don't have to worry about signing NDAs or making money. You won't.

What you will do is have fun while learning some stuff, and more importantly create some good friends. My advice is: Worry more about the social element, that's what it is after all - social club. Temper your expectations about finishing a bunch of games for your portfolio.

I would recommend maybe treating the club as a more long-lived "game jam", and potentially look up structures for how those are typically run and how groups in those are organized.

I would expect any game created from the club to end up at "game jam" levels of quality (note: this is not a bad thing. Quite a few well-received and highly popular indie games such as Celeste, Superhot, and Baba Is You started from games developed for a game jam).

echoing sunset's point about just how hard it is to make a game. but theres totally a way to make it a fun experience and still wind up with something for ur portfolio maybe, its just got to be a bit smaller scale.

the main advice i give to people is that nobody has a good radar for how doable a project is at first. things sound simple at first theres a bajillion different things to learn and each new "thing" will feel like a roadblock

im a big advocate for playing flash games / mobile games you grew up on and try to make some basic recreations of them. its going to look rough, and be buggy, but i think smaller projects are going to be overall more fun and a better learning experience than being stuck on the same thing for weeks.

it could take the form of there just being a general vibe of using tetris as a vehicle to explore things like how to handle pauses, different menus, settings, save files, what adding sound effects to things are like, how would you theme the UI to make it stylized, those kinds of things

because there are a lotttt of small details and workflows that aren't technically difficult to learn, doing it for the first time on an ambitious project in a constrained timeframe is just more headaches and not as fun. and i think if you guys do get on a roll with a project, its way easier to capitalize on it and polish a small idea up for the portfolio

While doing a "proper" videogame is hard and timeconsuming, people do bang them out on the regular over a weekend or a couple of weeks at gamejams as you mentioned. I think this sounds fun, and as long as you set the bar appropriately I bet you could do something fun. My recommendations is to try and do smaller things, basically gamejam-sized things to start with, and then once you know how that's done you can potentially build something bigger. I wouldn't worry about money, and I would not try to make money selling your games, it's really hard and probably also counterproductive to your main goal - the portfolio. If you're doing this for the portfolio, it's great if anyone can just pick them up and try them out. I wouldn't worry too much about filling roles for the projects you do. As long as you've got someone that can code, you can create a game. And depending on how you feel about agentic coding that could be almost anyone. I recommend using an engine, that's going to be helpful in many ways, but also writing your own thing from scratch is a great learning experience. Once you know what you're doing the engines mostly help with polish stuff.

I think meeting up regularly sounds great, that way you can help each other out and share ideas. Not to mention that networking might be one of the most important things when building a career.

I think I should also mention that the video games industry is in a great turmoil, and nobody really knows where it will end up. Even with a great cv/portfolio it can be hard to get a job today, and things are changing rapidly. I'm working as a programmer at a gamedev company, and I don't know if my skills will still be valuable within just a couple of years.

Agree with sunset's comment. Though a game jam seems like a realistic target to aim for I think. Being able to complete a jam is already a pretty significant achievement as complete beginners.

I think the game jam idea makes a bit more sense. I used to be the undergrad teaching assistant for a software development lab course at my university where students proposed a project they wanted to work on for the semester and I essentially just checked in on their progress weekly and graded them on the quality of their outputs. Most students progressed more slowly than they’d expected so I think it’s reasonable expect something similar with your students.

I think a club like a video game club could be pretty fun, and a great way to get those interdisciplinary folks together.

However, it sounds more like a series of hackathons than a club, clubs don’t usually have a shared single goal and deliverables. My guess is that some folks who show up might have the same thing in mind as you, but others will show up expecting discussion about how video games are made, along with how other people are doing with their own games.

There are some filmmaking clubs in my area that run along those lines and folks really enjoy them. Having a sounding board for help with challenges and outside perspectives from people in a similar situation is really valuable, so is exposure to specialties that are hard to find. I think you’re going to find that you have some overlap with filmmakers and suggest you seek out your local filmmaker clubs to talk about what has and hasn’t worked for them. Sound design is absolutely going to be a common challenge unless your school specializes in it.

I like the game jam idea, but more as one of the things that happens with the club rather than the whole thing. To keep people coming back I think you need a structure that doesn’t have a specific end like a finished game.

So my university had a game developers' group that met every Friday. Some people used it as an opportunity to group up and form teams to work on games (I believe primarily during the meeting hours, but wouldn't be surprised if some of them met and worked outside the club). Some of us also just worked solo during the time, and were primarily there for the camaraderie. I joined partway through my second-to-last semester so didn't join any group, just worked on assignments mostly, and my last semester I and two others just worked on a project fairly casually.

Aside from that, we'd have guest speakers drop in and organize participation in game jams. I never joined the jams, but I know they'd have people from outside the club join in.

So my input: don't plan to make some big, singular game together as a group. Use the first meeting to get ideas on what directions people want to go. You might be able to have one "big" project that anyone is free to join in and help, and let others decide to break into smaller teams or solo work. For some, it may simply be a networking opportunity. Others might be willing to just come by to offer advice or exchange tips and tricks with each other.

What are your assumptions around AI use?

A note: I think clubs related to games have potential to become less serious.

I was in a game development club in middle school and at some point, the 'development' part kinda fell off ; at first the animator started having one session before each holiday where we would do a LAN party instead, as a treat. But as it carried on, us kids started caring more about that than the actual game making, and the animator tended to cave in, and by the end of my last year there, as I recall, we were barely ever touching an editor.

To be fair, it was still cool! It's how I discovered arena shooters since we would often play Teeworlds, Quake Live, Xonotic and even Nerf Arena Blast. It's a fond memory... but uh, I don't think I actually picked up any skills from there. At all. When I picked game dev up later in life, it was from scratch (programming knowledge aside).

Point being, it's probably gonna be important to keep the students focused. If they're coming into a club like this, it's because they love games, which is a good thing, but they'll be prone to be less focused about game making.