Winter Quarter '25 Recap

Hi everyone! Happy Mario Day! We hope this quarter was good to you, and you're all finishing strong. This can be a busy time for many people, so we appreciate you checking in here. It's been an eventful couple of months here at VGDC, so let’s recap what's happened as we say goodbye to the quarter.

Internally, VGDC held executive elections. All executive positions were up for grabs, meaning current executives were required to rerun for their positions, but more emphasis was placed on ones held by graduating incumbents. Candidates prepared a speech and created a presentation to be shown in front of the entire officer base. From there, the audience of officers cast their votes. It sounds intimidating, but it was a positive and insightful experience where we discussed many new avenues for club improvement! Everyone, both campaigning and voting, had a lot of fun.

VGDC needed to fill the positions of President, Projects Director, and Treasurer. The votes determined that Aslan Chan, Ethan Schwartzman, and Andrew Khov, respectively, will take these roles. We look forward to seeing the ideas and innovations our newly elected executives bring to the table!

It wouldn't be a quarter of VGDC without our events and workshops. We kicked off the new year with our Winter GBM, where we discussed our club and gave people a sneak peek at events we had coming up.

This quarter we started a brand new TCP season - we have a whole other blog post dedicated to this project if you'd like to check it out! The kickoff was a blast; it was an excellent opportunity for people interested in participating to learn more about the game and meet their respective teams and leads.

We also welcomed back four VGDC alumni as they returned to UCSD to give members some insight on what it's like to work on games professionally. Thank you to our panelists Alex Ferbrache, Patrick Traynor, Stephen Trinh, and Alex Hawker, for making the trip down here!

Our End of Quarter Equinox Social just happened one week ago today! It was a ton of fun; we served loads of free food and handed out raffle tickets, doing about three waves of Pokemon card giveaways throughout the night for a total of nine packs. Boy did that get people's attention! We also showed off a live demo of Mariposa and had the project leads give a few words.

Now, the workshops we held this quarter… There were a lot of them! First off, we collaborated with MIAC to host an introduction to Blender workshop led by Jaiden (the president of MIAC), Kiichi, and Jonathan. Attendees were tasked with following along with the workshop to create models of Pichu; take a look at some of their creations below!

We also hosted an Intro to Unity workshop! Hosted by our programming leads Ethan and Jonathan, this workshop walked attendees through a live demo of Unity basics to create a simple platformer. Some steps included creating basic objects and parent objects, scripting, etc.

There are too many more workshops to mention, but I still wanted to thank all the attendees and our talented officers who helped lead them. I also would like to thank the VGDC Events and Marketing committees for organizing and promoting these events. VGDC wouldn't be what it is without all of your hard work.

In terms of game development projects, work on Mariposa is set to continue past the demo we showed off at our EOQ social throughout the spring quarter. Next quarter, we're also set to host one of our game jams, open to people of any experience, including beginners! Check out some games made during them here.

I'd like to acknowledge Breanna, Jess, and Olivia for their edits and suggestions to this post. Keep an eye out for more information on our Spring events towards the start of next quarter! Thanks to everyone reading and anyone who attended any of our events this quarter. It means the world to us. See you all in spring!