8 votes

Starting a video game creation club

I got a kiosk for two days at my school last week to present my ideas to college students to gauge interest. 16 people said they'd be interested. There's even a teacher that'd want to be involved, he teaches a game programming course. There's also a university club nearby that wants to team up. (Also mid to long term, I'm in Quebec City so I could contact the many local studios around the campus.)

I wonder what the people of Tildes expect when they hear about a video game creation club. Have you been in one before?

I wrote myself a brainstorm document, here are the general ideas:

  • Every field of study is welcome. Game projects are great for multidisciplinary groups, and people can also do stuff outside their field of study.
  • General roles (someone could have many): project lead, game designer, gameplay programmer, systems and tools programmer, art director, 2D/3D/animation artist, UI/UX, composer, sound designer, writer, QA, voice actor, etc.
  • Around 2 hours together per week, meeting in either a classroom or a club location if we get one.
  • Would be nice if people shared what they learned during the week at each session.
  • Game jam orientation? A college semester lasts 15 weeks. We could pick a theme at the start to drive the game ideas we want to do. Scope control is really important.
  • Building a portfolio should be a main goal.
  • Do we allow people from outside the club to come hang out? There are probably solo people working on their own games.
  • How to handle intellectual property? Should we eventually try to sell games for the club finances? I guess we should at least be allowed to use the games for club marketing.
  • If we do console games, we'd need an NDA. Not sure a club can even get console dev access, though we could probably work with a third party for that.
  • Some nice stuff: the school has a recording booth we could record voices in. We might also have access to the school's servers if we get the proper approvals.
  • We could demo the games in the school's public spaces to get feedback.
  • The club could have a website, itch.io page, Discord.
  • How to train people who have never made a game before?

Did I overthink this or forget about important details?