After employability week, I was feeling a little bit better about things in general, but rushed to try and find work experience. This outlook changed yet again when I received my books back from the assessment last Monday.
I can honestly say that I have put every bit of my effort into doing the tasks demanded by the course and have done at very least 12 hours SDS per week. It has eaten into my weekends... What weekends? Stayed up till the early hours of the morning, only to get up 2 hours later at 7 o clock, to drag myself through the next 6 hour day of either visual design or game production. I may not be able to give it any more than what I have been doing, but maybe there's a chance I can timetable things better so that I do get time to relax, and not just stay up 'till the morning getting things done.
Monday's visual design was a pretty bad day in terms of drawing, for whatever reason, I was just terrible; couldn't draw a line to save my life! The side profiles of the cars look like a child's drawing... Truly awful. I'll have to do the rest of the thumbnails later in the week as I've always done, but this time I feel so bad about what I've done, I'd preferably like to do more than 12 to practice it more.
Now, here comes yet another day full of ups and downs that I'll just have to get used to having. Already dreading walking in to the labs knowing that I don't know how to do the textures properly, and an unfinished uvw unwrapped model, Steve pokes holes in my model. This is totally fine, I know it's not the best and I know I can improve on it. However, I ask "If I go back to change geometry from the uvw modifier, will it affect the uv's", I got a clear "No, it shouldn't do". Fine, let's go back and clean up the model a bit...*an hour and a half later* "Right, time to carry on unwrapping". *uv's have reset*... Great! Now, baring in mind I stayed up until 4, 5 hours straight, painstakingly dragging every face of the 1200 poly model to where it should connect to, rotated them, stitched and positioned them, using possibly the SLOWEST method, but the only method I knew at the time.
After all of this, I tried for just 30mins to see if there was a way I could save the uv's and transfer them to my 'cleaner' model, but had no luck. I decided to unwrap the cleaned model all over again; still not finished as of now, but I did manage to ask Steve for help for the tiling textures. I know we went through it very fast in class, but as I haven't actually done it, none of it got picked up. I have got the first 2 tiled textures applied, and feel more confident in texturing, but the deadline is soon, and I don't want to 'muck it up'.
During game production, I arranged a meeting with Chris as I felt I needed to discuss the recent assessment, and how to deal better with the workload, since it is literally going to burn me out if I continue down the path I have been going of late nights, stress, and not eating as well as I could be. In terms of my visual design work, it is ok... Not great, but ok. It is a little disheartening that you're trying your very best, and yet it is only just about passable. We also discussed making sure that I have time to relax by working all throughout the day, and having nights to myself, essentially, ensuring that I am putting in about 8 hours per day. Therefore, that's the plan I'm going to follow and I am hoping that it works for me. This will allow me to 'work smarter', and plan out my time, instead of just leaping onto something when I feel I'm under severe pressure to get it done.
The Critical Studies lecture with Michael was again, extremely interesting and I loved hearing about the next 2 decades of video games. For example, the Gameboy & Nintendo 64 is for me, my early childhood experiences with video games and despite the 3 pronged controller, the N64 is a console that I just absolutely love playing. Even though it is the history of video games, it is good that Michael includes snippets of history that may not be directly relevant, but indirectly affects the situation. Now, I didn't do History for gcse, I did Geography, and even from that I don't remember much from it, so my knowledge on history is basically non-existent. Therefore, I do like knowing about the time periods for these large events that I have heard of, but have no idea when then happened. E.g. The ending of the Cold war in 1992, 1st Gulf war and collapse of Soviet Union in 91, the Trade Centre being bombed in 93 - all things I've heard of, no idea of when then happened.
The seminar afterwards by Emma Ash linked into the history of video games, but it was her personal history of games that she's worked on. The way she talked about working on completely different titles in the past and had fun on ones that may not have been particularly interesting for her, is another reason why I picked this course. You could being doing pretty much anything i.e. a bin... but still enjoy doing it because it's the process of doing something you enjoy. I also found it interesting to know that a game I played when I was extremely young, was worked on by Emma - "Adibou". We also went through the kind of person you had to be many years ago, and what you have to be now. For example, back in the days you had to be able to do almost everything, from a bit of coding to animation to full on works of art. Whereas now, you mainly specialise in one particular area. In addition, the discussion about how smaller indie developers are rising was great, and in a way, we've gone from tiny teams, to big teams, and back to small teams. Although, the success rate of an indie developer is far lower than that of a big title, but if you hit the right spot then your work can be a huge success.
Overall, another very engaging week of studies and I just hope that I can pull this timetabling off for the sake of my health and my studies.
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