Last week, on Wednesday and Thursday, my game design class and I went to the East Coast Gaming Conference, or ECGC for short, in order to take a look at professionals in the game industry field. One of the things that I enjoyed about attending this conference included the indie game section where I could take a look at what indie developers are creating and to gauge what is possible within the realm of indie game development. For the most part, these games were alright for being created by one individual or a group of individuals and I was impressed with what was possible with only yourself and maybe some friends. Another thing that I liked about the conference was seeing some of the latest games and improvement to VR in the VR section. Although I didn't get to try any of the VR stuff while I was there, seeing people play the games was enjoyable none the less. I also enjoyed the wide variety of talks that were offered at the conference that allowed for everyone interested in different fields of the game industry to find talks that they would enjoy. The talk that interested me the most out of the ones I went to was the Gameplay Programming Patterns talk by Bartlomiej Waszak, a gameplay programmer for Ubisoft Quebec. In this talk, Waszak covered a multitude of solutions for data structures and data design, resource management, using a physics engine. logic patterns, and interconnections between systems. He went over each one in detail in order to explain methods of improving your programming that would enable less stress on your system when you are trying to run your game. Since I want to become a programmer, either within the game industry or not, I thought that this talk would help me out if I do decide to go into the game industry since it would help me program my game to better perform overall. Although the talk was a bit difficult to understand since I am still new to programming and he was using C++ for his examples, I was able to take away the gist of what he was trying to say and I would say that it can help me down the road. After that though, nothing else really caught my attention at the conference. After going to this conference and talking and listening to professional in the field, I would say that my feelings toward becoming a part of the game industry still hasn't changed much from a neutral "potentially". I could see myself liking the job, and if I was to get a job as a programmer, I would be glad to do it. Other than that, I don't really mind becoming a game designer.
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So, my family and I have just returned from our small vacation to Wilmington in order to just get away from the house for a while and enjoy the coast. While I was there, I was able to schedule a college tour and I was able to take a look at a more traditional college setting than VCU which kind of blended in with the city. The campus itself was pretty nice and it wasn't too large or small for my liking and all of the campus buildings were within walking distance of each other. I would need to get a car if I was to live here though since the campus isn't incorporated into a city where I could walk to the grocery store if I needed to. The class sizes were generally the same size as the ones I currently have at DSA, about 20-30 students, however there were some cases where there were large auditorium style classes for the basic classes and some cases where there were only 10 students in the upper level classes. I was mainly interested in the computer science major that they offered there as I stated back in a previous post about shifting my attention towards computer science. Luckily, I was able to get a hold of one of the computer science professors after the tour to go over what they offered and how the class is structured among other things. The talk I had with him was great for reaffirming my choice of pursuing computer science since they also had a digital art major coming up when I start looking to enroll and he explained what that major entailed. I told him that I am a lot more interested in the programming side of video games rather than the art since I don't find my art skills to be all too great and he told me that I should definitely look into computer science more for a major if that is what I am interested in. Despite being tired afterwards, I found the college tour helpful in broadening my choices for colleges that I will apply for when the time comes later this year.
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been following multiple tutorials for creating games in Unity for my game design class. Out of all the material that is covered in the tutorials, simply knowing where to find everything withing Unity has been the most useful information that I have retained. Being able to quickly and efficiently navigate the Unity interface will allow me to get more work done in the future and it will save me the time it would take for me to go look up how to find what I am looking for. Another thing that has I ave found to be useful is learning how to program in C#. It not only allows me to understand Unity's interface better, it also helps in general to know how to code to make future projects run smoothly. However, I still need to learn more C# in order to actual code from scratch without the help of a tutorial or online resources. Since Unity is the engine that I will be using for my video game next year, it is great that I have already learned so much about the program so that I don't have to spend time next year learning how to navigate the software and how to code in C#.
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AuthorMy name is Timothy Czerniejewski and this is my blog for my Game Art Design interests. Archives
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