Bringing a game to life

The creative process behind game development club’s latest projects

Staff Writer

This semester, the AHS Game Development Club is creating three unique games to be released at the end of April. Rayan Ghosh (12), became president of AHS’s Game Development Club three years ago and has been leading it ever since. “I look over everything in the Game Development Club,” he said. “We teach all our members Unity and C# (a coding language) in the first semester, and in the second semester, we split into three groups with 7 to 8 members each and create games based on a theme I assign.” This year’s theme? “Keep it Alive.”

The theme was intentionally left broad in order to encourage unique interpretations. “I wanted to keep it vague to leave room for creativity,” Ghosh explained. “It’s kind of an experiment on human creativity. Everybody’s really unique, and when they come together, they can create completely new, unique, interesting things, right? By isolating all these groups and having to brainstorm individually, they all come up with completely unique takes on the topic of ‘Keep it Alive.’”

Each group is currently taking the theme in completely different directions. “One group is creating a tower defense game where you have to protect a certain object by placing down towers. Some people are taking the theme of “Keep it Alive” in a more story-based fashion. A lot of different game ideas, different game mechanics as well,” Ghosh explained.

However, with the creative process comes different roadblocks. “The challenge right now is consolidating ideas. We had so many interesting ideas going into it that it was really hard to pick one specific idea that we were going for,” said Ghosh.

Working in teams has also introduced logistical challenges,such as in managing code as a group. “We use GitHub to collaborate with a bunch of people to work on the same project, but when two people are working on the same file, it causes a merge conflict,” Adrian Yuen (12) explained. In order to fix this error, developers need to manually edit the files in order to decide which ones to keep.

Justin Wang (10), is the concept artist for his group, but he also faces his own unique obstacles. “Sometimes I don’t know what idea to use or what ideas to put together, so I just have to find the right idea and then it’ll get me started really fast.

For members like Yuen, the hands-on aspect of making a game is part of what keeps game development thrilling. “Every single meeting, you get to learn something new, you get to do something new, and you get instant feedback. You click the run button, and you see what you made come to life. It’s really exciting.” For others, the exciting part is how active the club is. Dylan Ashraf (10) said, “In some other clubs, you just learn things. But in the [Game Development] Club, we’re actually making games and showing them off.”