Ludicious Zurich Games Festival 2019

A picture of volunteers who participated in the RoundTable.

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Global Game Jams

Game jams being one of the most fun activity for indie game developers. Working together for 48hrs (or more fixed duration) and developing awesome games from scratch. One can simply learn a lot in that specified time and also diversity makes a perfect team. All the game jams always follow a specific game theme and teams have to build their game around it. In all the jams, I have worked within teams and it's a great experience to learn and share ideas. Also, good exercise for team management. So, far I have attended a few gamejams@Otto-von-Guericke University organized by Acagamics- Student Game Development Club. 

Acagamejam Apr15

https://github.com/Wumpf/penguinpirate

Acagamejam Jun15

https://github.com/YsenGrimm/penguin-quest
Acagamejam Apr17

https://github.com/asemahassan/Acagamejam17

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Fighting Game AI Competition 2016

In the last summer semester '16, I got an opportunity to be a tutor with Prof. Dr. Sanaz Mostaghim for the course of Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG)@ Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. The course covers the game theory, evolutionary algorithms in detail to give students about an insight of how to program or design an intelligent agent for their game. 

Students who participated in the CIG SSoe'16 course with Prof.Dr. Sanaz Mostaghim

For the tutorials, we decided to give students some practical assignments where they would actually implement some algorithms in Unity3D. But the major part of the tutorial was to write an agent for a "Fighting Game AI Competition" which is basically held every year and is organized and maintained by the Intelligent Computer Entertainment Lab., Ritsum eikan University Official Link. The competition was also hosted at IEEE Computational Intelligence in Games 2016 CIG 2016

The students of class SSoe16 participated in the competition held at OvGU. There was a total of 15 teams, each containing 2-3 students. The competition event at OvGU went very well by the active participation of all students and also the student council organization FaRaFIN and Acagamics supported the event. Acagamics IGDA Student Game Developer Club

Some of our teams also submitted their AI to the actual competition and one of the team Ranezi won the competition by holding the second position. Second Place Winner (Ranezi)

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In the gaming industry, the most famous and biggest name in conferences is the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Every game developer dreams to attend it once, to meet all the industry peers under one roof. I had similar plans when I was in Pakistan, so I convinced my father to arrange a trip. But later on, I realized its a fairly expensive deal and I shouldn't just go there only on self-funding for a conference. So, I dropped the idea at that point and later headed towards Germany for master studies in March 2015. In 2016, I finally got to attend my first GDC Europe as Student. I applied there as Volunteer, which is apparently not a very simple thing, as you have to write a motivation letter to be accepted. Unfortunately,  I didn't get the chance to be Volunteer, which could have saved me some bucks. But this didn't demotivate me so I went there on a student ticket. Since there were few of my friends who came in as Volunteers, it was an amazing trip overall.

So, if you look at the bigger picture it's not a bad deal to get a student ticket. If you get access to all other conferences as well in one go. Personally, the experience of GDC wasn't so WOW for me, its because I already attended Quo Vadis and Nucl.AI the same year where I fairly met the same people, mostly same speakers, and workshops.

Reunion of #nuclai16 volunteers at #GDCE16 featuring @VelvetYuki, @AsemaHassan, Lily and myself :-) pic.twitter.com/CklQc8ai0d

— Jens Bahr (@jens108) August 15, 2016

The conference was held in Cologne Messe, Germany in mid-August following with Gamescom'16 which is a trade fair for video game industry. GDC student ticket is comparatively expensive from other conferences in Europe. It cost me 475 euros, but it includes GDC All access pass + Gamescom-3days trade fair + Respawns conference (This conference is held in exact same dates as GDC in Cologne).

Conference buddies @gamescom'16

Robinson:@Crytek Gamescom'16

Gamescom 2016

The GDC talk's content was bit different, and it wasn't too technical if I compare it with other conferences. Still, I will not say it was not a good experience, definitely, the conference was on a bigger scale, with more business-oriented crowd and sessions.

P.S: The latest news about GDC Europe is that it will not be held anymore from 2017, so I got lucky to attend it as a student. But don't be sad, most of the content of GDC Vault is open to the public and that already contains a lot of information that you need to know. 😎

If you're a student studying in Europe, I would suggest going to other Europe based conferences and they are also really fun such as AMazeFestival, Quo Vadis, Devcom, Ludicious Zurich Games Festival, etc

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NUCL. AI 2016

Quo Vadis Berlin 2016

The conference was held in Station-Berlin, which is a pretty big space and has an amazing spacious hall. I tried various VR projects, as its the hottest field of 2016. Also, as I was working on simulation games of VR. I wanted to explore more about the games coming out in the market. So, I tried  "The Climb" a VR game by Crytek, an amazing experience with Oculus Rift (though I got a bit dizzy afterward) but overall I liked the whole experience.