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. 

Travel to university?

My university traveling experience and if it is actually a good idea.

Well firstly, I wouldn’t recommend going to a university just because it is local. That’s not the best idea. But if they have a perfect course and degree field, then why not. It’s actually what happened to me. I live around a 20 minute drive from the University of Bedfordshire. But there can be a huge amount of issues with public transport. That is the only issue. It takes over an hour for me to get to university while on the coach. But it takes about 30min talking to the bus station itself. So overall is a tedious and expensive thing to do daily. There obviously is perks to living at home. But if you are like me, your parents will still ask for rent. This means you probably are almost better off living at campus. The only reason I decided to stay at home was because first year, I was only going in 2 – 3 days a week. This is mostly because I could fit all of my lectures for the week into those days. This means that traveling isn’t really that expensive in the long run. But! As I’ve said, public transport can be extremely late as well as just an overall bad experience.

Uni traveling experiences

•                 People being sick all over buses (Yes, when the bus did turn, it would spread all around the bus) Really discussing, but obviously couldn’t have been prevented from that guy.

•                 People seem to be ill and travel all the time. I would have about half of the people are either coughing, sneezing or sniffing from a runny nose. I’m not really a germaphobe but even I used to carry hand sanitizer every time I used the bus.

•                 Driver rage – I’ve seen my bus driver spit at other people... Swear, smoke and even eat while driving. Some of those are even illegal, but when it happens on an almost daily bases, there’s not point complaining to the company. Nothing will be done and the last thing you want to do is annoy the a driver you see on a weekly bases.

•                 The correct change or else you can’t get on – Price changing weekly because student discount fluctuates as well as the education of the driver. Some are unaware of student discounts so you basically have to bring a pocket full of change to even confirm a seat.

Now I actually use a coach rather than the bus. It’s a little longer to get into university, but they run all day and night. Plus they are much more hygienic and comfortable for just a few extra pounds a month. There are cameras on-board and GPS. Makes it much easier to track and makes it a much more professional environment. Oh and free wifi.  

I’ve probably got paragraphs of bad experiences and the occasional good experience while traveling to university. But the overall outcome is that you waste a huge amount of time travelling, but everything is on time, then actually traveling is a nice time to brainstorm and have a bit of time to yourself to think about things which is something you don’t often get to do when leading a busy life.

None of these transports are affiliated with the university, it's just public transport. Pretty much similar where ever you travel if you use them often enough

My experience on the department

This blog post is basically an overview of the computer science department from how I’ve experienced it so far. Because I’m a third year student, I’ve had 2 full years of the university. There are a lot of positive points about the university. I firstly think that almost all of the lecturers and professors are friendly. Even the demonstrators are friendly and will help out where ever they can. Basically if anyone needs help on any topic in the computer science field, there generally is someone who is willing to help you, even this is out of “learning hours”. I’m not saying that 11PM on deadline day that they will help. But if you approach most of them with problems you are having and show that you’ve actually been working on a certain project/topic. From my experience they will help. Not that I’ve emailed a lot for help, but I know there are some cases with deadline dates and what is actually due.

There is always a machine to work on. Even if that means going to the LRC and working on some written work, you generally can get a machine with specific hardware/software you need on a daily basis. I know that I can get access to 3Ds max which is specialist 3D software almost whenever I want. I can’t obviously talk for other departments in the Computer Science field, but from my first year experience, I know that networking departments seem often free for those who don’t have their own machine with expensive hardware and software on. Because not all students can afford to buy the hardware needed.

A good example of that is today, we had a quick demo of the motion capture room. If a student books in advance, they can get access to this kit. This is a very cool thing for students like me, knowing that they can get access to very expensive kit which wouldn’t be possible while being at home.

I don’t have experience at other universities so I can’t really compare. But from what I have experience at the university of Bedfordshire, it is a very up to date university with kit almost always available.  

Dreamspark Premium

I did a presentation this week at UoL City about dreamspark and imagine cup. I thought that I would write a blog post here about it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a Microsoft Student Partner. Now this blog is aimed for students that are already studying at the university. In particular the STEM departments (Science, Tech, Engineering and mathematics).

I managed to get the University of Bedfordshire Dreamspark Premium free for 3 years. What that basically means for you, the student. Is that you can get free software from Microsoft! Everything ranging from Visual Studio Professional to Windows 8.1 and Office 2007! That’s right. You can get your office package absolutely free. There’s a huge amount of free software you can download all you need to do is register.




I’ve also left a link about FAQ’s. Leave a comment if you have any issues, I can try to help or advise you onto who to contact.

https://www.dreamspark.com/ - To register

https://www.dreamspark.com/Support/FAQ/Default.aspx - FAQ

This blog post is a little off topic, but I thought the best way to inform people about this would be to post about it! The presentation went well, people seemed interested in the programs and I’m thinking doing a small presentation for the University of Bedfordshire on the same topics.

Applying To University - My Experience

This is my first blog post on here, so I’m going to start with a little introduction about myself and my university application process. So at this moment in time I’m a Microsoft Student Partner, a Third year Computer Science student in Computer Animation. I will not disclose the university names that I applied for mostly because I don’t want to alter your university decision as you should apply for a university based on your personal course and preference. 

I applied for 4 universities while in sixth form. I got accepted to 3 of the 4 universities I chose. Being accepted into one of them involved doing a written exam and interview. The exam was about an hour long and generally job interview style questions. Although there was a practical test. We had to draw something in a few minutes which was contrasting. So I actually drew an elephant on a bicycle. It wasn't the artistic skills they was looking for but more the fact that you can be creative and think on the spot. This shows that getting adequate grades won’t confirm your place at university. That being said, I got accepted, but I decided not to got there because of the machine OS and their primary software focus.

Another university I got accepted at looked amazing from the outside. Contrastingly inside was completely out dated. Paint was pealing from the walls. Both hardware and software needed huge upgrade all round.

Machines that looked like this running Win95 in the room...

Now at the University of Bedfordshire there was up to date hardware and software. I’m giving my honest opinion here, I’m not being biased but for me it was perfect. It was the only university that had good motion capture technology and it used software that I had prior experience with.

Learn from my mistakes! Attend as many open days as possible. Know exactly what you want from the course, especially in a computer science degree. In this field, courses are named very vaguely. Game Development can mean primarily Photoshop/3D editing. On the other hand it main flash/2D based so it's very important you know what your getting into!