UMKC’s Game Development Club might sound like an excuse for students’ gaming addictions, but the club stays busy with projects and deadlines.
They divide up roles, getting to choose which department of game design they want to be involved in, from coding and programming to crafting narratives and world building, creating music and sound design, and learning to work as a group.
The team behind the club has remained busy, welcoming new members and preparing to compete in new events.
The club will be at the University of Missouri from Feb. 20-22 to compete in their first in-person, weekend-long game jam. A game jam is where participants create a game from scratch, following guidelines and themes, with deadlines ranging from a month to as low as 24 hours.
“The virtual, month-long game jams we do in the club have been a great way to learn skills and create games for fun, but they have always lacked the high-stakes elements of a competition. This game jam will have almost 50 other college students, all working in teams to create a game in 24 hours over three days. I’m expecting this experience to really challenge my teammates and me,” said Cianciolo.
Last semester, the club created its own game, “Love At First Bite”, for a game jam, giving three randomly generated themes: romance, end of days, and restaurant. “Love At First Bite” is a zombie survival game that switches into a serving and cooking game that then turns into a dating simulator.
When not competing in game jams, the club works on previous games to update them and fix bugs to hone and apply their new skills.
“For ‘Love At First Bite,’ I’ve been working on adaptive music for the game. I’ve spent most of my time working on new music for the game since that’s one of my main specialties in game design. I’ve been making music that will change in intensity with higher amounts of enemies on screen,” said Sam Souder, a junior music composition major.
The club has also been introducing new members to get them up to date with learning new skills and bring them up to speed with the rest of the crew.
“This semester has been the busiest; every meeting we have a new person, and we have to introduce what we do, which is a lot. So it is really cool to have so many people involved and interested,” said Cameron Cianciolo, junior computer science and urban planning major.
March will start them off with another online, month-long competition to get them back in the rhythm of coding and creating more. The team hopes to have more opportunities in the future for in-person game jams.
If you’re interested in checking out the club’s work, you can play “Love At First Bite,” visit https://umkcgamedevclub2025.itch.io/love-at-first-bite
