Dev Diary, 28 Mar 2014: Is There Hope?


Level_01_01

Last week I said I wasn’t going to tell you what we were up to at the moment. In a stunning revelation, I’m still not telling you. I will reasonably soon though and I’ll ask for your help with it too. Thanks in advance for all the awesome assistance you are going to provide.

Away from work I had an interesting experience this week, which came in two parts.

The first part of that was attending the final third year lecture for a games course module. It let me get a glance at what the student body was currently capable of producing. After viewing what was on offer I figured the best thing to do was to take the lot of them out the back and put them out of my misery. The whole thing had been shambolic mess ranging from half hearted efforts to incredible over ambition. I know what they say “Aim for the stars, and you might make the moon” and that’s true, but generally speaking you should start on the ground and work your way up. Trying to build a ladder in mid air is going to end badly, and probably with a ruptured spleen.

I found out there were some legitimate reasons for why I’d seen what I’d seen, and thankfully, I managed to refrain from executing more than a handful of students that day. I’m really glad that I spared them (regardless of avoiding jail time), and here’s why.

Last night I attended GameBridge (formally TGDN). Despite having imminent hand-ins, many students still turned up and were happy to show off what they had been working on. This ranged from simple but polished demo’s such as finger Olympics, to creative experiments such as relative gravity netball. On top of that I also got a chance to browse the portfolios of a number of soon to be graduates and was pleasantly surprised.  Don’t get me wrong, most still can’t texture to save their life, but the overall quality is much better than I was fearing.

So this is just a simple toast to the future of the games industry. Well done all of you!…

Expect the ones that produced rubbish of course.

Oh yeah. Here’s a pic of level 1 just so this post has some relevance to our game.

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