University of Bedfordshire GameJam 2014!

Last weekend (#dates) I attended a gamejam at the university. For those of you who don’t know what a gamejam is, it’s basically where a bunch of nerds get together and create games/apps. If that wasn't geeky enough, it’s a 48 hour constant hackathon. I've attended similar events at the university, but this one had a rather strange theme which was…

"We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”

This is a broad subject for a theme so it took quite a bit of planning to get the right theme and style game. My group members were:

Artists – Sean McGee, Robert McGreal and Chris Hadjimbeis

Programmers/Unity Developers – Kyle Field, Grant Wade, Tareq Ahmed and Daniel Nelson

Planning the game

We decided to create a horror game. In the 48 hours given we achieved a rather unique and scary game. We also had access to an Oculus Rift.

                                

Oculus Rift Device

This is really fun device which allows users to look around a scene using their heads. So they just move to look; we thought this would be perfect with a horror game. We decided to create a game similar to that of “Alone” which is an existing Oculus Rift game, but we tried to implement quite a few new features. I’ll update this blog when I get my hands on the project files to show you how it looked. The project we called "Synced" might be available soon on a few devices to play for yourself, so I'll let you know when I get more news.

Events like this will always be good to go to. Not only is it a personality test as you need to work in groups in harsh situations with a very fast deadline, but you get to test your own body without sleep.  Most people can’t handle it and end up sleeping under desks for a few hours. This time I actually stayed with local friends for the weekend but I still managed to get a lot done. I personally think no matter how good you are at time management, there are always things that creep up on you at the last minute. A gamejam is a nice way to test how you do under pressure and how much work is physically possible in the time given. 

Open days

I attended quite a few open days before settling on my university, one of which was at the University of Bedfordshire. I visited the labs which had all the previous students displayed on all of the monitors. There where lecturers and demonstrators on hand to showcase and to answer any questions that we had about the course.  

I already had some questions ready for when I visited, I think I got a wrong look on the course when visiting on the open day. What I mean by this is that the content and things they showed me on the open days where exactly the type of things I wanted to do, but when actually studying and doing the course I came across things I wasn't expecting, and which were not in the prospectus or mentioned in the open days itself.

Render I did, it's similar to what open days are like (stats on screen)

If possible talking to ex-students of the university - or even talk to third year - to get a better overview of the course. Just to give an example of this: on the universities website its bullet pointed on each topic which will be viewed. One of those was “programming” and the other was “video editing”.  Actually studying the course so far, all of my assignments, lectures and seminars are 50% programming or scripting related, whereas we've had one 4-hour lesson on video editing. It’s not saying that the prospectus and open days are wrong, it’s just you might get the wrong impression of what the course is actually about.

I'm currently looking for places to study my Msc. I'm attending quite a few open days again and I'm already starting to narrow down my choices in universities. I'll attend an open day at all those universities and will have some questions ready to ask the students/professors present.

Decision to go to university

In my last year at sixth form I decided I wanted to go to university. I was unsure on the application process and had a few other questions I wanted answering. This was rather tricky for me as I don’t have any direct contacts with anyone who went to university so personally I had a lot of questions but no one really to ask. For example…

•           Funding
•           Qualifications
•           Is it worth it?
•           Is it too difficult?

The reason I thought I would blog about this topic is because I’m in a similar situation now - I need to decide what I want to do after I’ve got my degree.

In sixth form you have a quite a few different paths to take: college, university, internships and jobs. All of these paths can lead to a successful career but I decided to go to university. This was after a lot of online research into the subject area. Generally going to university will give you a better start in your career and this is why I decided to go. At the moment, I’m debating whether or not to do my master’s degree. I know that it will cost a lot of money and I’m not sure if it’s actually necessary for the time being. I could do my masters in the future if my career needs it. My plan at the moment is to either get an internship or a job in the field and then, in a few decades, get a master degree and do some lecturing.

Me working on a biped rig for an advert aged around 14

If you think of a plan while in sixth form it will definitely help. I’ve always liked computer animation but only started thinking about it as a career while in my last year at sixth form. I think what aided this choice is I had a job in my first year of sixth form. I realized how hard and tedious it is to work at a retail company. This gave me inspiration not to do a similar job for the rest of my life. You should enjoy working, even if it means working hard to get that opportunity. I noticed my own talent around this age and understood that computer animation could be a viable career path. I decided to go to university to improve my understanding of the field and educate myself further.

Reflection on my university application

I remember the application process being very tedious. I didn’t think about what I wanted to do after sixth form until late in my final year. I started the application process on time although, from what I can remember, it took a long time to register. One of the annoying things about the process was not knowing  how many UCAS points I would get. Predicting my grades was rather difficult especially because some are exam based.

I started looking at universities based on how many UCAS points I guessed I would get and shortlisted 5 universities. I could only visit a few local ones because I didn’t drive and had a job in my last year at sixth form. I researched online before visiting my final choices. For my industry it’s heavily based on portfolio work so I looked up people who had graduated from my selected universities to check what their standards where. This gave me an idea of what I would be able to achieve after finishing that exact course. This helped narrow my decisions down, as well as reading the university course briefs. It’s rather ironic that the more research you do on what university you want to visit, the less time you have to revise for you exams and do coursework to achieve the UCAS points you need!

If I could give any tips it would be to visit the institutes yourself. For some people it might be difficult to choose a degree area and course. I cannot give advice on this topic because I’ve always known what I’ve wanted to do since I was young. Although I did have my personal preferences in software and operating systems. I’ve already written a blog post on applying to universities available here.

A simple search for show reels and showcase work for a university does give you a good overview of the tasks involved for the course. So if you can’t personally attend all open days, maybe consider attending the virtual open days. Some universities even use a virtual tour which seems to be filled with info about the course. You need to know as much as possible about a course before attending university, as it is a life changing decision.