Ourcade Goes Great!: First Student-Built Game Night a Success

Great news: the first Ourcade: a Student-Run Night of Student-Built games, kicked off at 7:00 Tuesday April 27, and went down in Siebel Center history as an unqualified success. Gamebuilders, the organization planning the event, demoed several games, including Nightmare, an Alice-In-Wonderland-esque puzzle game that angered, delighted, and confused all who played it, and the Galactic Strategy Game, where planets were invaded based on orbital mechanics. Classic Gamebuilders games like Steel Potato, Vortex, Frantic Elevator, and QuantumS remained popular.  Zombies lurched through the CS 498 game building class project Patient Zero, devouring brains and splattering blood, while terrorists invading a high school were thwarted by an alliance of cheerleaders and nerds in TekFront's epic 20 player board-game Die Hard: the Next Generation. In a delightful display of artificial intelligence and real fun, the Turing Game tested both students and computers on their common sense. 

Using the Pizza method of crowd estimation (there were 40 pizzas, it is assumed that each pizza fed four people, and all the pizzas disappeared) about 160 people came and played a dazzling array of 18 student-built games.  Students, fueled by free pizza and sporting free red Zynga t-shirts, played until 9:45 at night.

Ourcade was an idea born during Engineering Open House as a result of a conversation between Gamebuilders and EOH staff.   "Since I was helping coordinate the event," recalled Tara Roys, EOH staffer for Siebel center, "I never got to play the games they were showing." "So I said, 'It would be great if we could have some sort of game night,'" added Kevin Dressel, Gamebuilders chair.  One week later, a group of Gamebuilders and former EOH staff got together and pitched the idea to the Computer Science department.

Cynthia Coleman, external relations director, pitched the idea to Zynga, a company that developed the highly popular Farmville Facebook game with the help of several CS alumni.  "I loved the concept of the event and knew Zynga would be a great sponsor,"  said Cynthia,  "They were just as excited to be part of the event as I was."  Zynga agreed to sponsor pizza and sent a representative. 

Even so, Ourcade staff had a month's notice to put together a large event.  "It was hard," said Kevin Dressel, Gamebuilders Chair. "This was the first time we had ever done something like this, so we didn't know what to expect."  Since the first priority was to get people to sign up, Quinn Baetz and Rob Kopp worked together to put up a simple and secure registration page.  That turned out to be more difficult than expected, because, as Quinn said, "We had to continually adapt the design of the site, to manage security and account for changes with the event design and backend."  Finding tables, power strips, and computers was also interesting. "Organizing equipment was difficult," said David Goldstein, equipment coordinator, "because most of the groups did not sign up until the last few days.  We basically just guessed what we would need, based on what was used for EOH."  "We had some issues with advertising," said Harry Hsiao, "Jennifer LaMontagne and I planned to list the exhibits on the poster to attract people to attend, but since no one registered early, we just had go with what we had the week before." 

At 7:00 the pizza arrived, and so did the crowd.  Cameron Kikoen noted,"in the beginning at lot of gamers were left gazing at the first rounds of players due to the low numbers of laptops to display the games." The free Zynga t-shirt and the Zynga representatives also acted as an initial draw, but long after all the medium t-shirts were gone and the pizza was eaten, people were gaming.  "It was a success," said Kevin, "And we have all sorts of refinements for next year."

"As a gaming company, we liked this sort of event," said Bryan Larson, Zynga recruiter. "We are definitely more inclined to come to events like this, where we can do more focused recruiting with exactly the sorts of students we are looking for."  Zynga game developer Adrian Roe added, "It's also fun to play games like Nightmare and Steel Potato, and to see the impressive stuff the game classes put together.  It was good that the Game Night cast such a wide net, because we got to see a variety of games." 

 As one Brian Smith, designer of the game Helena the 3rd, said, "Thanks so much for setting this up! What a great idea!"