Hello and Welcome!

Welcome to many things:

• A new semester!
• A new website!
• A new DevLUp FSU Board!
• A new way of our organization operating…

We’re still a relatively new club - at the time of writing, less than a year old! But, we’ve come a long way in terms of finding our niche on campus and figuring out what we do, what we’re about, and who we are - our identity.

I think it’s easy for organizations like ours to run into a bit of an identity crisis - what does a club organized around game development even do? It may seem obvious, make games, right? But, consider the breadth of possibility here. It’s not as easy as it seems.

Do we teach games, do play games, do we make a game/games?

Do we assume you’re already excited about making games, do we assume you know what kinds of things you want to make?

Do we assume you know nothing, do we assume you know everything?

Why are we even here?

We’re gonna try to answer those questions here, and in our meetings to come; we’re working on our elevator pitch as we go…

There was definitely some discussion, some searching, and some experimentation needed to land where we are now. But after all, I think we can be really proud of what we have planned for this semester. Now it’s just up to the follow-through - wish us luck.

Who are we?

Alec Tremblay - President (@BillyJoelsNightmareExplosion on Discord)

What did you do this summer?

This summer, I interned at PlayStation Visual Arts in San Diego as a technical artist, working on the internal tools and pipelines for their cinematic animation workflows. It was really cool to be a part of a big company in a big city and always have something to do!

What are you excited for this semester?

Last semester, I did I think 6 workshops, which varied in quality and relevance, and were usually prepared last minute. This year, we’re gonna have everyone on the board do talks and/or workshops, and try to make everything as well organized and thought through as possible. It won’t be perfect (we’re always learning!), but expect meetings to be a lot better. Also, we’re gonna try and focus a lot more on building a community and all of us interacting. Let’s not just be gamers, let’s be a community! I think all of this should make DevLUp FSU more much engaging for us (the board) and our members!

What should people go to you for?

If you want to talk about any feedback for the club, hosting your own workshops, anything unreal engine, godot, python or blender, anything about cooking (especially pizza), how to work on your career or getting an internship (not an expert, but I can try to be useful!) We’re all here as a resource to you, please go up to us or message us with anything you think of!

Dion - Vice President (@trikzon on Discord)

What did you do this summer?

Worked on my website, started a voxel library in Godot, made a game in a game jam, and went to the beach once a week.

What are you excited for this semester?

Colder weather (and the DevLUp wide game jam)

What should people go to you for?

Most things Godot or programming related

Mike - Secretary (@brownbookcover on Discord)

What did you do this summer?

Went to Niagara Falls and finally experienced a non Florida summer

What are you excited for this semester?

The upcoming DevLUp wide game jam, im also going to be taking a hopefully fun AI class which if its a class in tune with modern things should be really informative and cool

What should people go to you for?

I really don’t know what to put here (if you want to do your own workshop, Mike is a great person to go to! - Alec)

Skylar Scorca - Treasurer (@Toothpaste on Discord)

What did you do this summer?

This summer I lived abroad in Trondheim, Norway to assist in research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. When I returned, I defended my undergraduate Honors Thesis under Dr. David Whalley on an implementation of a new instruction fetch technique. This past August, I graduated with a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.S. in Computer Science with honors.

What are you excited for this semester?

I am excited to enter the first semester on my path to pursuing a PhD in Computer Science. I am also excited to establish an organized treasury for DevLUp FSU, as well as assist in a few game development workshops during meetings.

What should people go to you for?

Members should come to me with questions about how DevLUp FSU receives and spends its money. They should especially come to me if they are interested in hosting an event which requires funding. I also would love to offer insight and advice to anyone interested in pursuing a graduate degree.

Chris Swezy - Promoting Chair (@ghoul on Discord)

What did you do this summer?

I worked on building a portfolio to apply to internships next summer, did a lot of writing, visited friends and family in New Jersey, and went on a fun little trip to NYC

What are you excited for this semester?

Working on finishing up some of my CS course load, and continuing to build my game dev portfolio

What should people go to you for?

General questions about the club, questions about/ ideas for events, and involvement with other organizations.

What are we doing?

Here’s our schedule for the semester!

Generally, the format we’d like to follow is that “talks” are presentations shorter than an hour, while workshops may take longer and involve someone doing something live with the option to follow along, ask questions and make suggestions. For workshops, we stick to free software that any old laptop can run, which is why we’re not really teaching any industry standard tools - we’re aiming to teach the concepts and the process, not necessarily the tool itself. For our more complex topics, we have a talk followed by a workshop, for a kind of theory and practice division.

While we mainly communicate through discord, we’re going to make a page here, on our site, for each meeting that has all of the links to materials and software, copies of our meeting slides and links to recordings of meetings. If you have any further questions, the answer’s always the same: ask on our discord linked above!

Why do we do it?

Generally, we’re focused on these workshops and talks that educate our members on all aspects game development, participating in and hosting game jams to give our members opportunities to make games and apply what they’ve learned, and helping our members navigate the world of games industry recruiting to get internships and the like by reaching our to recruiters/people in the games business to talk to us and reviewing members’ portfolios and resumes.

Another thing you may have heard is that we’re part of a larger non-profit organization called DevLUp. DevLUp was started by UF students to create a network of game development focused student organizations across Florida universities. We generally try to share resources and access to recruiters and industry personnel - especially for recruiters that find it difficult to make time to talk to schools like ours with no game development focus, grouping us together helps justify talking to us.

There’s more on this stuff on the /about page.

Really though, as people, the reasoning isn’t very complicated:

We love games, and we love dev.

Some of us are here for coding the solutions to unique, interesting problems (game dev easily takes the cake for the funniest patch notes of all software), some of us are here because we love the worlds and characters games allow us to create, to extend our imaginations in a way no other media can. Some of us are just bored and have nothing else to do. We’re aiming to engage with you no matter where you fall on the spectrum.

Thanks,
Alec