Hallo again!
It is the end of the first week back at Uni and I’m feeling optimistic about the up-coming term. I have had lectures for each of my subjects mostly just describing what I’ll be doing for the next 3 months.
We have four main modules running this term.
Applied Game Development (AGD).
I think that this year AGD will be my favourite module. The main focus of the module is to be working as a team and has been designed to mimic working in a real development studio as close as possible.
We have been given the task of creating a game in a team of 9 before Easter, the game has to be a management style game like SimCity so there are a lot of options available for us. The tools that we have to use are UDK, as a platform to build the game in, then SVN and Hansoft for source control and project management.
The team are made up of 5 Programmers and 4 Artists. The Programmers have been picked randomly from across the year and will be paired up with Artists next week. I’m quite happy with the Programmers that are in my team so far. I know two of them and I’m sure that they’ll do their fare share of the work, but I do not know about the other two. One of them I’ve seen around and the other is a known waister who somehow did not use UDK last year, so that will make things interesting.
The teams have been deliberately put together so that there are people of different levels to simulate what it would be like in a real game studio. This is something that I have been looking forward to for a long time as I really enjoy working in a team towards a goal. The structure of the teams will be 1 Tech Designer, 1 Lead Artist and 1 Producer. It is very early in the project so far but I would definitely like to take the role of ether the Tech Designer or particularly the Producer as I want to manage the team and make sure that the project gets done.
Mobile Devices.
Mobile Devices is the first proper introduction to Java that I have had. After the first weeks excercises have come out it seems pretty straight forward so far, not that dissimilar from C#. Next week should be much more interesting as we’ll be doing inheritance and more interesting things with it so that’s something I’m looking forward to.
The most exciting thing about mobile devices is that there will be development on Android and as I have a shiny new Android phone it’ll be a great module for me.
Interactive 3D Graphics Programming.
In this module we use DirectX and building on what we did last year in Introduction to 3D make a basic game engine. This is very interesting to me as it is quite low-down programming that will give me a much deeper understanding of the processes that do things like get input from the user, putting in sounds at a low level and most interesting of all the physics simulation.
Overall I’m really looking forward to this upcoming term.
Dan.