Student scholarships to the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Fancisco

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) will award 25 scholarships to send qualified students to the 2008 Game Developers Conference. GDC is where game development professionals gather to share ideas and build the skills that the industry needs. This year’s GDC will be held 18-20 February 2007 in San Francisco.

Applicants must be student members of IGDA, but becoming one is not very expensive ($30/year) and is probably a good idea if you are serious about a career in the game industry. You can get more information about joining IGDA and the benefits of membership online. Once you have joined, you can apply online for the GDC scholarship. Applications must be submitted on or before Friday, 7 December 2007.

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Halo 3 release party, 7-12pm Fri 9/28 UMBC Gameroom

There will be a Halo 3 release party Friday night September 28th from 7:00 pm to Midnight in the UMBC Gameroom. The event is sponsored by the UMBC Commons Gameroom, Microsoft, and the UMBC Game Development Club. The release party will feature a multiplayer tournament (4 vs. 4) in which pairs of four-person teams compete in a Halo 3 match and winners will receive Gameroom Free Play Passes. Up to five Xbox 360s will also be available for individual Halo 3 play. Microsoft will provide free pizza and Xbox 360 games to give away. Pool will be free all night.

Halo 3, a first-person shooter game developed by Bungie Studios for the Xbox 360, will be released on 25 September. It follows and builds on the two previous successful Halo games.

Update 9/24: Matt Hurst notes that “Halo 3 is being touted as not just the biggest launch for a video game, but also the biggest launch of anything.” and backs it up with a graph of mentions on the blogosphere in a “comparison of the Halo brand with mentions of Resident Evil (the top release from last week) and The Bourne Ultimatum (one of the largest films of the summer).”

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UMBC Digital Entertainment Conference 28 April 2007

The UMBC Game Developer’s Club will host the second Digital Entertainment Conference on careers in the computer game and interactive entertainment industry. The event will take place on Saturday April 28th from 10:30-5:30 in Lecture Hall 5 of the Engineering and Computer Science Building. It is free and open to the public.

The 2007 DEC will feature presentations from seven speakers from four Maryland game companies and cover a range of topics, including art, programming and production.

• Dave Inscore (Art Director, Big Huge Games)
• Katie Hirsch (Artist / Programmer, Breakaway)
• Ryan McFall (Engineer, Day 1 Studios)
• Dominic Cerquetti (Engineer, Firaxis)
• Don Goddard (Technical Director, Breakaway)
• Barry Caudill (Executive Producer, Firaxis)
• Matt Udvari (Designer, Day 1 Studios)

See the GDC site for a detailed schedule and biographic sketches of the presenters. Consult this UMBC map for directions and parking information.

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XNA game studio demonstration and tutorial

On March 31st, the UMBC Game Developer’s Club hosted a presentation by Microsoft on their XNA Game programming framework. Dr. Ranjan K. Sen, Microsoft’s Academic Developer Evangelist for the Mid-Atlantic region, kicked off the event with an overview of XNA and Microsoft’s Krishna Kumar gave a hands-on demonstration and tutorial of XNA and XNA Game Studio Express.

XNA Game Studio Express is a free integrated development environment intended to help students and hobbyists develop games. It is based on Visual C# Express 2005 and lets developers target both Windows and Xbox 360.

Some photos from the UMBC XNA event are avilable on Flickr.

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