UMBC programs in Interactive Entertainment and Game Development

Recent posts, copied over from GAIMUMBC.blogspot.com:

Learn Morris

As part of my “History and Theory of Games” class, I have students learn and play old games.

The oldest document that gives the rules to Morris is dated 1414 (according to Murray’s History of Board Games other than Chess), but the board’s pattern goes back to classic times.

I am making PDF’s for old games– rules, boards, and history. Here’s one for Morris: link

UMBC GAIM Facebook page

The page for the imaginary person “UMBC GAIM” is up — friend us!

Thanks to everyone involved, we had another great year with the Global Game Jam! Not every game was totally done, but it is absolutely amazing what these great participants managed to accomplish in 48 hours, all expressing the theme “Deception” and one of the three constraints, “Rain”, “Plain” or “Spain”.
Read about the games…

Game Jam Hero, 7:30AM Sunday

It’s 9pm at the Game Jam

And I am online via my blog-enabled smartphone.

Note for next year: burritos and not wraps.

Neal’s first post on rebooted GAIM.UMBC

I’m the Visual Arts prof involved in GAIM at UMBC.

I hope to be posting a lot. I teach 4 game-related classes, including History of Games (Art 380), and team-based game development.

I have a huge backlog of UMBC student-generated Flash games, and I bet we’ll have 10 more games to look at by March.

Global Game Jam 2010 is underway!

The Global Game Jam is into its second day at UMBC, with 41 registered participants working on seven games. Keep up from home with our live video feed, and games list.

Global Game Jam at UMBC, January 29-31

UMBC will be the Baltimore site for the Global Game Jam. This is a 48 hour event, where teams from around the globe will work to each develop a complete game over one weekend. Last year, the UMBC site fielded five teams as one of 54 sites in 23 countries. This year promises to be even bigger, with 124 sites in 34 countries.

The Baltimore site and open to participants at all skill levels. It is not necessary to be a UMBC student to register. Thanks to generous support by Next Century , there is no registration fee for the Baltimore site, but you must register for this site in advance at www.globalgamejam.org. The jam will start at 5PM on Friday, January 29th in the UMBC GAIM lab, room 005a in the ITE building. At that time, the theme for this year’s games will be announced, and we’ll brainstorm game ideas and form into teams. Teams will have until 3pm on Sunday, January 31st to develop their games. We’ll have demos of each game and selection of local awards, wrapping up by 5pm Sunday.

Last year’s theme was “As long as we’re together there will always be problems”, and we had games developed using a combination of XNA, Flash, Maya, Photoshop, and the Unity Engine.

For more information, visit http://gaim.umbc.edu/jam/.

New gaim blog

We had to move our old blog due to some security problems and have set it up here on wordpress.com.Â We will move the old posts soon, when we figure out exactly how to do it!