As a Teaching Assistant, you can be an invaluable asset to both your teacher, and your students. Picking up questions and solving problems to ease the workload on your teacher can help them provide a better education for the students, and generally make their teaching experience easier. Students benefit from having more than one person they can turn to for problem solving, and hearing multiple opinions on an issue has a better chance of helping them solve it. Specifically within the Game Design field, extra eyes on code can help spot issues that would have normally gone unnoticed, and due to visual design being so subjective, multiple opinions can provide more objective and useful criticism. Additionally, being a teaching assistant is greatly beneficial to the TA, and provides a unique educational opportunity. I greatly enjoyed being a teaching assistant, and I learned a lot about working with students, problem solving, and how to present myself as a role model to my fellow students. I would love to do this kind of thing again, and recommend it to anyone who is passionate about their pathway.
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As we end the year, now would be a good time to look upon my project as a whole. And, as a whole, I did great. I set out to make a product, and even with all it's flaws, glitches, dinks and bumps, there is one aspect about it that I can be uninhibitedly proud of.
It's fun. Other human beings, other people, played my game and had genuine fun. It's very gratifying to have an idea, work on it for so long, and have people actually enjoy it, and I feel this game is going to very much influence what kind of games I'm going to make in the future. I've always wanted to make experiences, games that make people feel certain emotions, and this has only added fuel to that fire. And, for the first time, I can really see this whole game design thing working out. If I, by myself, can make a product people enjoy, with a team of people helping me I can make a polished product that people enjoy. I'm excited for the future, and for what I'm going to make, and the stories I'm going to tell. Lets just hope my career hasn't peaked already. This year with Mr. Bourgeois has been a blast. Working with students, helping Mr. B help them learn, running errands, and working on projects for him has been informational and fun. I've expanded upon my ability to teach students and help them through material, as well as increased my familiarity with the materials they're working on, such as Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Unity. I've greatly benefited from being Mr. B's teaching assistant, and I believe that both the students and Mr. B have benefited from my work and effort.
Yesterday we presented the current state of our projects to our peers and parents. Seeing what everyone else got done in the time we've had to work on this, seeing a side by side comparison of our products, made me realize a couple things. Firstly, nobody besides me likes coding apparently, which makes me excited for my job prospects. If my future peers dislike coding, that means I get to be paid to make it so they don't have to. From what I've seen, everyone likes either 3D modeling or character design, areas that I'm capable of working in and understand, but am certainly not as adept in as my peers. I also learned quite a bit about how far my presentation skills have gone since freshmen year. If I make a complete fool of myself, I'm much more relaxed and capable of presenting in a fun and entertaining way. And, generally, if I treat a presentation as entertainment, rather than a serious production for serious people, I can actually get across more information in a much more comfortable fashion than if I stood up there awkward and stuttering. So, generally, a good learning experience.
I threw out the last method of moving the cars, in favor of NavMeshs, which are paths on which NavMesh Agents can move. So, now my cars have actual AI, which controls acceleration, top speed, and makes them automatically swerve to avoid obstacles. I've also figured out how to instantiate NavMeshs, and have set it up so that the meshes line up with the roads, allowing cars that are instantiated along them to drive down the road. Unfortunately, right now, I have not figured out a way to link the meshes, and the cars will just stop dead at the end of the mesh they were spawned on, even though they overlap. But, seeing them swerve to avoid stuff and actually collide rather than phase through each other is really nice. Next Week:
- Get NavMeshs to connect - Get back on creating a speed dial |
AuthorI am 17 years old, and currently enrolled in Durham School of the Arts. Within the Game Design field, I'm looking to become a game writer or a programmer, preferably a combination of the two.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public School Archives
June 2018
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