Project Intro

So this will be where I display my project, for this post at least I am going to talk about what I intend to do, why I intend to do it and how. I'm using blogger because, well I've gotten used to it now, I used this for my final year of uni to document my progress on projects, and I only really used it well on one project. In hindsight I think it was probably to make up for the lack of work in that project, some sort of self justification. I see the benefits in creating blogs, only too late. Now that I am finished uni and am in the process of looking for work, I know that I don't have any work from there that will help me get a job in the games industry and I do not feel confident in my abilities in their current state. Therefore in the meantime whilst I get whatever job I can for money I will be working on this side project to help further my abilities in my desired field. 

One of the main issues I had at the start of my final year of uni was that I had no direction, I started off as a concept artist but my enthusiasm for it faded, I never managed to progress in skill fast enough and once I learned new areas of games design I found I was able to focus on them better. When it came to choosing my Honours project for the final year I found I didn't feel confident enough in the areas I wanted to use to actually do the project I wanted to do so I just picked the "safe" option and did character designs for a game and tried to incorporate aspects that I really wanted to do into it, like character gameplay abilities and narrative.

Moving on from this, the project that I actually wanted to do was to look at methods of storytelling in games and attempt to create a level that explores a new or interesting way of communicating a story through gameplay. One of my major flaws in previous years has been that I always put story first and had gameplay serve the narrative, something no doubt many designers before me have tried to do and found that it just doesn't work. My issue was that I wasn't competent enough with a game engine, in this case UDK to actually try and complete this project. I know now that the help I would have gotten from my new tutors that work at White Paper Games would have given me enough technical skill to make the project I wanted to. Alas that was not the path I took. I now feel i have enough skill and understanding to get this project underway and use my foothold to further my design ability in practice. 

To firmly lay down my goals for this project i'm going to write up a project plan for it, another aspect I've picked up from uni, i may as well use what I've learned. This will detail my aims and outcomes for the project, hopefully it will help me keep on track. I won't create a schedule as i never found them helpful and i don't exactly have time constraints now anyway. I will still lay out a predicted work order but i won't plan out each day.