It's hard to believe that it's already the third quarter of school, it feels like just yesterday was the first day but I suppose time flies sometimes. Now realizing that the year is already over halfway over, I figured it would be beneficial to see how far I've come and what I can do with what I've learned. Early this year we primarily focused on careers and the various aspects of games that come together to make them, though I still didn't expect us to get much experience actually making games for some reason. At that point, actually being able to design and create a game seemed like a far away goal I'd eventually achieve at some point in my life, but not this year. First quarter was also when this class was most different than the years prior. Instead of assigned blog posts as well as our own personal additions to our portfolios, we started to focus more on drawing assignments. If I have to be honest all of the drawing was somewhat grueling as it wasn't something I was necessarily used to, but I came to accept it as a way to improve my art on paper that I otherwise don't practice much with. I'm glad we changed up the process of turning in the drawing assignments though, as it made my life a lot less stressful. Often working on the drawing assignments was either a multi-day or several hours in one sitting kind of task, that even when I looked on the bright side, still burnt me out. Now with only having to turn in the final drawing I can focus more of my efforts on that drawing in particular, as the templates become repetitive rather quickly and whittle my brain away. I still find the provided resources extremely useful in understanding exactly what I should focus on, but the template work was always numbing. Aside from being relived of my stress regarding the drawing assignments, I'm glad that we are now able to move along at our own pace in the class. After second quarter I got a good understanding of the exact process used to create games and now with my knowledge of coding from this quarter I believe I can apply all of what I've learned to actually create a game. We don't always get to move at our own pace with learning, but I've always enjoyed it as I find it helps me to understand the content better when I can move quickly through things I have a deep understanding of, and take more time on things I find more difficult. Overall this year has been great so far and now looking back I'm starting to see all of the pieces coming together that will aid us in creating our games.
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Now that we have practiced with the fundamental mechanics that make game concepts feasible we are finally moving on to actual game development with code. I've always looked forward to coding, in fact the primary reason I'm in this pathway is because I wanted to learn how to code, and now we're finally doing it. We may just be following simple tutorials to teach us the basics of coding for now, but I'm fine with that, as long as I will someday be able to code on my own in order to achieve what I want to accomplish this course can take as much time as it needs. So far based on what I've been working with it looks like coding will be easy, it all follows a logical flow which all makes sense except for a few parts that I'm sure I'll understand the reason for later. Obviously, as I've only been coding for about a week now, I still don't really know what options I have if I were to code on my own, only what has been covered in the tutorials, but even with just that basic knowledge I could make the framework for a simple game. I hope to one day create my own game from scratch, as I often play games created by small development teams and have created a few of my own low quality games using software that works out the coding for me. Of course I never get a true sense of accomplishment from creating these games, as I don't even know how the code works that allows them to function, and knowing I didn't entirely create everything I'm seeing when I play the games I make causes them to feel like they're not mine. I hope to one day be able to understand not only the code that goes into the small games I've created but also how to create games so that I can have a project I can entirely call my own.
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AuthorMy name is Andrew Prichard and the this is my first digital arts class, I look forward to a good year with lots of hard work. Archives
May 2021
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Last updated 5/14/21
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