It's been a good long while since my last post, a new year has kicked off and I have plenty to discuss!
Graduation.
I am overjoyed to say my graduation ceremony has finally come around after being pushed so very far back, you know why. Alas, I can now finally say congratulations to the entire Solent University Video Game Software Development class of 2021. I have had a fantastic 4 years studying along side them, many individuals kept me well motivated studying through lockdown, and really made our student online learning environments feel like a classroom of is own.
It feels like this is the second time I have celebrated leaving university, and even though it is a whole 8 months later, it was just as sentimental. Walking across that stage, tipping my silly hat, and saying goodbye to all those I have worked alongside. Sombre as it may sound, it's quite inspirational really! I feel like it's time to kick it up a gear. Goodbye University!
2022.
Graduation out of the way, its time to talk about what lies ahead. What are my plans? What of old projects? What has change? Well, after finishing up my internship at Solent university, I essentially took myself a gap year. I really put my all into studying, I hope my grades can attest to that. But after 4 years of hard work I felt I could use some time to relax. I started a few blogs, and started a few projects, but I kept myself to a hobbyist mentality. Learning is still fun, development too, and it is of course a smart idea to keep the skills I've learned fresh in my mind.
Leapfrog!
Moving forward I'd like to really amp up my work schedule. Define work days, work hours, blogs days, be consistent. And with this new attitude, I have decided to kickstart a new round of prototyping for games. To achieve this I have dusted off a considerably old doccument. A design Doccument that I created in 2019 for university!
The design doccument details a mobile game rogue-lite where you play as a frog. You hop with drags, and use your sticky tongue to grapple about. You collect powerful items and progress through stages. Of course I have learned a lot since the creation of this doccument, but I still adore the core concept. The unit I created this for was "Gameplay and Game design." and I was awarded a 100% grade for the design design doccument. I think the concept deserves to be given a chance.
So what happened to DFNDR?
My previous year of blogging was, pretty much dedicated to the creation of DFNDR. I made a lot of mistakes with that product, but my largest one was prototyping poorly. After my first 2 weeks of development I was so excited for the product, and thought it'd be great to kick it into production! I was very wrong, as I added more core features I SHOULD have prototyped, everything that made it fun stopped being fun. And I spent countless hours trying to figure out how to bring the fun back.
Throughout university, it was rather loudly echoed that it was more important to finish a product, than it was to have many half finished projects. As true as this is from a hire-ability standpoint. It could just hurt it that much more if you force yourself to working on a project you know isn't fun. Know when to quit, know when to move on.
It's helpful to remember that the development time was not wasted, I had developed a large range of useful snippits of code to use moving forwards, I have already used code from the DFNDR to speed up figuring out touch screen controls for my new project. I of coursed also learned a lot, from design choices to programming patterns. And I had some handy new assets to use too.
Minor works.
These major projects haven't been the only things I have chosen to work on in my spare time. You may have seen my shader blog, that was lots of fun. I also had a few smaller projects letting me learn some unexplored programming challenges, for example, I started testing unity's own multiplayer solution which certainly holds some protentional. That can be seen below.
But it never reached a developed enough point to become an entire blog.
Closing thoughts.
With everything said in mind, I am going to be working on my new leapfrog project, I haven't said much about it yet, that is merely because it is going to be the bulk of my next big blog. I plan on release a blog at the start of every month after this one, but will create a more rigid schedule as I progress.
See you in the next one!