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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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.
The project is going great. I've been setting goals for myself, and I've been achieving them with my own skills. Be it coding, rendering, modeling, I've been able to power through and solve problems myself, and while my methods might not be the best, most streamline in the world, they work, and that's what matters. This project is going to prove that I know in ins and outs of every step of the game design process, and that is going to go a long way in the game design industry. Once it's done, I can add it to my portfolio, and actually have a fully fleshed out game to point to when people ask "Why should we hire you?". And honestly, I'm excited to see the final project. I've still got a long way to go, and the final project probably won't be exactly what I imagine it will be. Though, I will admit it's extremely satisfying to have everything exactly how I want it to be, and only settling for changes when I realize I genuinely just can't do what I set out to do, instead of having other opinions (as much as I should probably be asking people for those).
This quarter as a teaching assistant has been fairly uneventful. Besides running the odd job, such as posting flyers in the hall ways or running an errand, I've mostly been left to work on my CTE Advanced Studies project. However, I did get to evaluate the work of other classes as they did board games, which was entertaining.
The project has been going fairly slowly. I've been running into a bunch of coding issues that have been slowing me down a lot. I'm thinking of taking a break from the coding and just work on some modeling instead, to get the scene better set. Get some trees in there, some buildings, get rid of the ugly mountains in the background, make it look a lot more like Durham. But beyond that, motivation has been running low. I'm sure it's just a slump, been dealing with increased stress and personal stuff, but it's just made tackling issues a lot harder. Hopefully I'll get back on the ball and get everything running again.
I've picked up a couple games over the past few months, and done some reading on the state of gaming, and the state we're in right now is interesting. Indie gaming is sky rocketing, big AAA games are failing, and people are getting fed up with EA's shenanigans. Well, actually this is the second movement of people getting upset with big gaming, with new results. Before, there was a wave of satirical "games", such as Rock Simulator, where the main gameplay is literally just looking at a rock. This satirical gaming brought the definition of a game into question, allowed people to experiment, allowed the Indie scene to gain publicity. Now, we're seeing the satire start to die down again as the big corporations actually genuinely struggle to make profits, and the Indie scene realizes that they can capitalize on the general upset by putting out games that lack the stupid trends AAA games have been taking on that people are upset over. Now is the time to join the field, as smaller companies begin to have more hold over the industry, which makes my future look fairly bright. I, along with my peers, will pioneer a new age of gaming. The Indie Age.
It's been really interesting to see how differently I play games now a days. Instead of just suspending my disbelief and skimming over details to try and immerse myself into them, I'm picking them apart. I see the edges, the seams at which they're pulled together, and the patchwork for coding and modeling becomes clearer. It's, actually kinda takes away from some of them. Makes it harder to use them for entertainment when I'm analyzing them, and even coming up with better ways for the mechanics to be run. Fallout 4 specifically has been getting on my nerves, because of the leveling and Vats system. You have to put more points into a broader skill such as Perception to unlock a new skill to put levels into, and it's just a bad system that takes too much time and effort to actually manage. And the Vats system, while cool, kinda gets rid of the skill factor in gunplay and puts it to a coin toss. But it's certainly been interesting to be able to see more about how the games I love have been put together.
Working on a project alone has a lot of ups and downs. It's great because I get to make all the executive decisions, I make the rules, I can take the game in the exact direction I want to, and I don't have to worry about anyone else getting in the way. It's also great because I can make everything up to my standards, and make it all fit together as cohesively as I want. I also get a great sense of what I'm lacking, what fields I enjoy doing, what I'm good at, and what I need to improve. For example, I really enjoy modeling, but I'm really lacking in my ability to code. And that brings me to the downs of being by myself. I have no one else to fill in for those flaws, I just have to make up for them. Which is also kinda good, makes me learn, which is the whole point of this project.
This week has mostly been watching tutorials and trying to work out coding. Progress has been difficult and slow, and it's really hammering in the idea as to why projects don't typically only have one person on them, and usually have a team of coders, writers, artist, etc. I'm still not going to ask for help, this is my project, and I'm going to see it to the end, but I probably should've put more effort in last year to learn how to code so that this process would go by a lot faster. Next week:
- Keep on figuring out coding. |
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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