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.
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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).
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.
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. This week I got the car asset into unity, and made a few different iterations of it, and have delved into the coding for getting them to spawn. It's been difficult, but I'm slowly making progress to try and get a random car to spawn into the world every few seconds, and then drive down the street towards the player. Next week:
- Get the spawning script ready - Get the project ready for presenting This week hasn't been productive. Between my college visit on Wednesday and the various jobs I've been assigned and had to accomplish, it's been difficult to get work done. It also doesn't help that the damn animator in unity that I was working with deleted the animation of the truck that I was trying to get working, and the wheel animation got messed up since the last time I worked on it, so now only one wheel rolls. So, basically, squat got done with week. - Fix the animation
- Start coding the animation to work properly - Start coding on UI This week I worked on sculpting the area around the bridge to more naturally integrate it into the environment, as well as animating the wheels for the truck. Next week:
- Coding. Dun, dun, duuuuun! *Error in line 25, except the error is actually in line 12 but its still kinda right, but it only being kinda right screws this area up so I'm going to point you here
*You forgot a semicolon *You forgot a semicolon *Stop forgetting semicolons *You forgot to capitalize something *You forgot to put a space here *You screwed up *You screwed up *You screwed up You screwed up. That pretty much sums up coding in a nutshell. So many little things can go wrong, that just, absolutely tear hours of work down, and create even more work trying to undo the mess you made. And I can't even blame C#, its doing its job fine (though Unity crashing doesn't help), I'm the idiot telling it to look for "score" instead of "Score". It doesn't know what the hell "score" is, so because of that it doesn't destroy an asteroid flying at a spaceship. And everyone on that spaceship would be dead, if the asteroid didn't just pass through the spaceship, causing an explosion, but not actually damaging the spaceship in of itself. Its frustrating. Very, very frustrating. But, little by little, I'm getting a better understanding of what I'm actually doing. And the more I understand, well firstly the more I don't understand because everything works and meshes together and if you understand one thing you have to understand the 20 other things it works together with, but the more power I gain over the medium I'm trying to manipulate. The more I can actually do in virtually constructed world of error messages and semicolons. And that's encouraging, and very invigorating. If I develop the skills necessary, I'm sure I'd enjoy doing this for a living. My introduction to the Unity interface has reasonably well, though there are some issues. Though its quite similar to 3DS Max, which is what I'm used to using, its slightly different. Getting used to the new camera controls is slightly annoying when every thing else looks and works the same. As for scripting, I'm fairly used to seeing it. The only real difficulty should be memorizing C Sharp's language. From there, it should just get easier and easier. The Roll-A-Ball tutorial was a really good introduction to the software. If you actually pay attention and follow what hes saying, its also a fairly decent introduction into scripting. Overall, this has been a much more intuitive and interesting experience then Game Maker, and more useful in the foreseeable future.
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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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