The Journey Begins

Welcome to my new blog covering everything there is to know about my dissertation for my third year on my computer games design course.

I have been thinking about which areas of the course I wish to explore in greater detail or embark into for this year of work. It seems stupid that for a project I can practically do anything about (within reason) is the most difficult to decide what to do, simply because of the sheer amount of choice available, and the breadth of the skill-set I seem to have acquired over the past two years.

The obvious choice to make would be to do a code-based dissertation project, as this is one of the areas I have expanded upon the most throughout the course. I have spent  considerable time improving my skills at Actionscript 3.0, to a point where I am quite proficient in using it; Doing a project in Actionscript 3.0 for the third year would be turning over the same stones yet again, and wouldn't really be utilising or expanding my knowledge as much as I could (although I haven't ruled out re-thinking my complex/broken node/number based game I came up with a while back).

Anyway, the simple fact is, that although I enjoy the accomplishment of some working code after a few hours of working on it, I really don't want to spend the whole of the third year staring into the matrix; that's just not fun or enjoyable, and possibly quite demoralising.

This is what I see.

I have quite enjoyed modelling throughout the years, and I'd like to think I've gotten quite good at the geometric side of it; unfortunately my texturing and UV mapping skills aren't that great at the moment which is something which I'd like to improve on. I did think about modelling, rigging, UV mapping texturing and animating a character and implementing it into UDK. in short, this task was advised to be too big (I think I'm glad at this point) and that I'd use my time better if I explored a more simple program I already knew of more fully (rather than a tiny bit of a hugely complex program)

Then I came up with an idea of creating a game in Unity - Unity is less complex, relatively new to me, but becoming increasingly popular on-line against flash gaming. Creating a game in Unity requires many skills; which include modelling, texturing and coding, which are the main areas I wanted to broaden/improve/deepen.

As for the distinct direction or focus of my dissertation/unity game... I'm still deciding EXACTLY what that is I have a feeling readings might help.