Get ready! UPGRADE’s 4th game jam is returning for Fall 2024. It will promptly start at 10 AM on Saturday, 11/2, and end 25 hours later on Sunday, 11/3, at 11 AM. Food and drinks will be provided. Join our Discord to get more information on the location, format, and theme as the day approaches. See you there!
What's happening?!
See all our upcoming events and catch up on previous ones. Subscribe to our Google Calendar so you'll never miss out.
No upcoming events~
Archive
- UPGRADE Game Jam #FA24
- Speaker Event: From Demo To Published w/ Adrian Sandoval
Adrian Sandoval, a game developer by trade and the Game Development & History professor at Drexel, will be giving a presentation on game dev pipelines and production management. As always, it will be held in Levine 307.
This event is open to everyone so feel free to invite your friends!
- PennBoy Demo Day
We hope everyone had a nice Fall Break. Our first meeting back will be PENNBOY DEMO DAY! This is the deadline for the minigame demos that you’ve been working on for the past month or so; time to present your work to the club, enjoy some free pizza and drinks, and GET KNIGHTED TO OFFICIALLY BECOME A DEV!
Afterwards we will also be hosting an optional karaoke celebration at Ken’s Seafood. Please react to the message in the
#announcementschannel on Discord so we can get a rough headcount! - Edward's Debugging Workshop
Oh no! Your Unity game is acting up, nothing is going right, and you have no idea where to go from here! Don’t worry, Edward is here to save the day. Come to our dedicated debugging workshop and we’ll help guide you through an example Unity project so that we can squash all the bugs together.
The team that solves the most bugs gets donuts!
- 9/21 GBM slides
- GitHub repo for the workshop. Please clone on to your local machine to begin.
- Grading rubric
- Google Drive resources folder
- Penn Esports First GBM (ft. UPGRADE)
Come out to support a fellow gaming-adjacent club and learn more about what Penn Esports does, their active rosters, and the professional esports industry and how game development (that’s us!) fits in. It will be in Tangen Hall, and please bring your PennCard as you’ll need it to enter the building.
Free pizza and drinks will be provided, and stay behind afterwards as people are bringing their consoles for a fun game night. See you there!
- Viraj's Unity workshop
We will finish Viraj’s tutorial on Unity basics during this week’s GBM. As always, the slides are posted in our Discord (and accessible here as well), so you can always revisit it if you’d like. Unfortunately we did not record the session, but we’ll definitely try to for the next workshop!
- First meeting of the year!
Join us for the first official UPGRADE meeting for the 24-25 school year! We’ll go over some general announcements (new mem form, Godot side quest), do an icebreaker, and then introduce this semester’s club game, PennBoy! If we have time at the end, we’ll also begin setting up everyone’s GitHub and start Viraj’s Unity workshop.
- ESAF (Day 2)
Catch us (again) at the second day of ESAF and try out some of our games! We are located in the Levine Lobby.
- ESAF (Day 1)
Catch us at Penn ESAC’s Engineering Students Activities Fair and try out some of our games! We are located in the Levine Lobby.
- Fall 2024 info session
Join us as we talk a little about who we are, what we do, and what to look forward to this year. We’ll also show off some games and tease what we’ve been working on over the summer. Finally, we’ll probably spend the rest of the time chilling and playing some Jackbox games :)
- SAC Fair
Catch us at our SAC Fair table on College Green! We’re located near the LOVE statue. See you there.
- NSO Preceptorial 2024: Developing Video Games for Fun and Profit
Description taken from the NSO website page:
Hi, we’re Penn’s game dev club! We’ll discuss what we do, our development process, and how you can (freely) join. We’ll also demo a prototype of what we’ve been working on over the summer, and let people ask questions and try out our past games.
- I3D Symposium 2024 Trip
UPGRADE is partially subsidizing the cost to send a few students to this year’s ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, or I3D for short (what a mouthful). Luckily for us it’s being hosted by our good friends at Cesium this year, who are based out of Philly, so getting there is simply a SEPTA ride away :)
You should have received a message from us if you filled out the interest form in the
#announcementschannel a few weeks ago. - UPGRADE × Penn Esports Game Night Fundraiser
We’re holding a game night fundraiser in collaboration with Penn Esports! It will be on Friday, April 26, from 7 - 11 PM, in the McNeil Building, room 309.
We’ll be playing a number of games, including Jackbox, Gartic, HumanBenchmark, a Minecraft server, and more! Food and drinks will be provided.
There is a $5 entry fee. This is because all proceedings will be donated to AbleGamers, a charity that is helping people with disabilities play the same games as everyone else.
We hope to see you there!
- Speaker Event: Mobius Digital Q&A!
We’re hosting a speaker event with the team at Mobius Digital, known for developing Outer Wilds! Yes, that Outer Wilds. You’ll get a chance to hear them talk about working in the game industry and some advice for us current students. This is especially cool given their own career trajectory.
Join us in person from 7 to 9 PM EST in Levine 307 or you can join virtually via the Zoom link, which can be found in our Discord! See y’all there!
- PAX East 2024 Trip
Winners of our Spring 24 Game Jam received free tickets to attend this year’s PAX East, located in Boston. This was Team Rizzmaster 999, who received the most points, so congratulations again to them!
- ESAC E-Week: Game Jam SP24 showcase
As part of Penn ESAC’s E-Week we are hosting a Game Jam showcase at 10:30 AM in Towne 337! Hangout and chill with us as we play the games that we made during the Spring 24 game jam. There will be food and snacks! Hope to see you there.
- UPGRADE Game Jam #SP24
Join us for the Spring 2024 rendition of our 24 hour game jam! This time we’re using itch.io to manage everything, so here’s the link to join the jam:
https://itch.io/jam/upgrade-game-jam-sp24
You can find the theme for this year on the page. GLHF!
Oh, and did we mention that the winning team will get free tickets to go to PAX East 2024?! More info about PAX East here!
- Hello world!
New year, new website! Please bear with us as we start putting all our previous games and events up, this will take a bit.
Pssst the website is open source and viewable on our GitHub so report any issues that you may experience! Thanks 🫡 —Charles