The Oregon State Video Game Development Club buzzes with creativity and collaboration, diving into the world of pixels and programming.
The club has its sights set on expanding its impact with a plan to host a larger game jam in the 2024-2025 school year.
The club, newly established as an International Game Developers Association student chapter,, aims to serve as a resource and community for OSU students to build their game development portfolios, learn new skills, share resources, and connect with other students with shared interests.
The club currently has six officers: a president, vice president, secretary, event coordinator, marketing officer and Ecampus officer. According to Jack Hart, the club’s president, all officers apart from the president were new in the 2023-2024 school year.
“For the winter and spring term, my VP, Will Garrison, and I were pretty much on our own,” Hart said. “Neither of us had a lot of bandwidth to give the club the attention it needed and deserved. I was honestly really worried going into last spring that we might not have enough people to take over the club, but this year’s officer team is a group of such talented and passionate individuals and I’m really excited to see what we’re capable of.”
According to Adrian Baker, the club’s event coordinator, the club boasts 200 members on Ideal-Logic, OSU’s official club database, and 427 members on their Discord server. The club’s in-person meetings are currently held on Wednesday from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Computer Graphics Education Lab in Batcheller Hall 244.
“Our goal as a club the past year or two has been to bolster our offerings with fun new events and workshops. A lot of that has been figuring out what works and what doesn’t.” Hart said.
The club is open to programmers of any skill level, artists, designers, musicians and anybody else interested in video game development.In weekly meetings, members discuss various aspects of game development such as game death mechanics, case studies in game designs and dream game ideas. Beyond regular meetings, the club hosts a variety of events including movie nights, brainstorming sessions and game jams.
Game jams are a particular highlight for the club, offering a game development competition where participants work to create video games from scratch. The club has hosted five game jams since 2021, and has even traveled to Portland to participate in the Global Game Jam.
The club’s most recent game jam, themed ‘chance’, ran from April 24 to April 28. The jam challenged participants to create games interpreting the concept of chance. The game jam was open to any form of game, from traditional board games to VRChat minigames. Entries included games such as a racing game and a coin-flipping game.
Since 2021, the club has hosted five game jams with various themes, putting on team-building events before the launch of each jam. For the coming fall, Hart stated that the club wants to host workshops as well to prepare members for a game jam later in the term. Reflecting on future plans for his final year in the club, Hart shares his vision.
“I’d really like to host a much bigger public game jam in the ballroom during the spring, but that depends on whether we can find the funding. That’s been my dream as president for the last couple years,” Hart said.
