Personal Year 2 Review

When I think back to the first year, I know for a fact I didn't do enough as it reflected in my grades. This year has been an interesting year, to start off my knowledge about the game industry has improved. I think one major thing that helped was the group project. It basically got me thinking more about how levels are made and how to get them working in engine to play. Looking at this, this year I've realised that Art is now for me, I'm interested in the management side of things within games, as I've said before within game design and level design it requires excellent organisational skills and planning.

I think I showed my ability to organise things by doing and completing a lot more work this year and actually not forgetting files that are needed.

This year has really bought the work out of me, I think I originally said that I wanted to do at least about 3-10 times the amount of work that I produced last year and I can happily say that I have.

(building/toy model)

I was able to set myself my own personal projects in 3D and complete them drawing up my own plans and taking my own texture images to apply to them. It proves that I can do it, though the quality of my work may not be the best I know how to get it done, in example:

·         Have a neat folder structure

·         Make sure the scene opens with texture paths set and loaded

·         Put everything in its own uniquely named folder

·         Make sure everything is named (objects, textures, lights and cameras etc)

·         Make sure the pivots are reset and the asset is set to world 0,0,0

and so on...

In 2D this year I was able to plan my time well. I remember back in October we discussed time management and worked out how many hours we had worked each week. I was able to make extra time throughout in my schedule to draw still life objects and make contour work out of them, this improved my ability to draw objects without having to keep applying the long process of working out the perspective first, I think life drawing definitely helped me improve with this.

I bought and drew about 10 tons of fruit (not seriously that much) and made digital work out of them, at least one for each week and I think I can gladly say that I definitely improved on drawing organic objects and render them.

Also traditionally.

I've built a basic understanding of UDK.

Due to circumstances that have arisen in m personal life, I felt unable to take much part in the group project, now I don't want to talk about this much and I don't want to think about the so called 'FMP' or the third year yet as I don't know what I'm doing. I was able to see how levels are built piece by piece but that's about as far as I got, I never got to see them built in production or learn UDK further.

I'm hoping that it would be possible to retake the second year so I can do the group project properly next time, I wouldn't mind spending an extra year to do it as I feel it may affect my performance at job interviews when an interviewer would ask for evidence or group work and then I have none. Game industry is all about working in a team and I feel this would affect my potential to impress potential future employers.

Also I was quite upset at the fact that all the ideas to the group project were decided on the first day without me and thus was unable to take more of a management role which caused a bit of controversy. Let's just say I got an early taste of industry...

Overall it's been a successful year I would say. Even in my blog, I've done a lot more work and added a lot of images and links in my entries to support what I'm talking about, which was something I lost marks on last year. I've looked into a lot more things, researching about games online etc but there is so much more I wanted to talk about eventually.

I'm happy with what I've achieved in all modules of the course but I still want to give the group project a try if it's possible, I'm very eager to sit it again properly.