For a handful of students, the basement of the Dempster Building is the place to be on Tuesday night. That's where Southeast Missouri State University's Game Development Club meets.
"As the name suggests, the Game Development Club is a club dedicated to the development of games, specifically video games," said Kirk Tolleshaug, vice president of the club. "[The club is dedicated] to the entire process of conception, to planning and design, through creation, play-testing and to final release."
Tolleshaug handles the internal affairs of the club, such as assisting running meetings and the president, and making sure the design of the game stays focused.
According to the president James Reinholdt, the club tries to dig a bit deeper than just making video games.
"The purpose of the Game Development Club is to give people a place to meet, and to learn and to make something good, and if not make something good, at least learn," Reinholdt said. "Each time we meet, we try to go over and discuss something involving the game industry to help us think like developers."
The club tends to watch videos from a web series known as "Extra Credits" to get their minds in a game developing state, though they've also watched episodes from the web series "Sequelitis" as well.
The club recently held a 24-hour video game streaming event on twitch.tv in order to raise money for a speaker from "Extra Credits" and for charity.
The speaker that the club is hosting is James Portnow, the writer for the show and a professional game designer.
"We'll be trying to get this to be a recurring thing to raise money for charity," Tolleshaug said.
"We might also discuss or analyze a game in a lot of depth to make sure we understand fully how it works and why it works so well," Reinholdt said.
The club was established in the fall 2013 semester and members immediately started to create a game and are currently working on a tower defense game.
"It's your objective to defend these towers from being destroyed by the enemy while another ally goes off and charges these towers and once all the towers are charged that's how you win," Tolleshaug said.
While the game is nearly completed, Reinholdt is focusing on what the club needs to do to prepare for Portnow's arrival.
"We want him to come here and talk to us about really anything. Just get a chance to meet someone who works in the industry and get some words from behind the scenes. Maybe information on how to start or where to go and everything in between," Reinholdt said. "We want to get more developers, more designers, maybe a publisher to speak sometime in the future."
Portnow will be speaking at 1 p.m. on May 3 in Dempster's Glenn Auditorium. The event is open to the public.
Both Reinholdt and Tolleshaug encourage anyone who has any interest in developing video games to come to the club.
"The idea is that we want to make video games so that these people who don't know anything about it and these people who do something about it can create something with their knowledge," Reinholdt said. "You may not be able to help us with the application aspect, but there's always a learning aspect and everyone deserves to learn."
The club reassures anyone who joins that they'll be able to help in the creation of a game since professional developing companies have so many different experts.
"You have your marketing team, you have your programmers, your artists, and your writers doing their thing," Tolleshaug said.
The club meets at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays in Dempster Room 024.
