Assignment hand in day

It's finally come to the last night of working on my project and making sure everything is as good as it can be, and included. I do keep looking at my game and thinking about things I wanted to add, but simply run out of time. It was a bit of a nightmare trying to get my discs burned in the early hours of this morning. I realised the DVD drive on my laptop was no longer being recognised, another problem to sort out later, but I had my desktop I could use instead. Next the files wouldn't copy over to the desktop, seriously it crashed 3 times! Then, when I did get a disc burnt, it hadn't burnt all the files! Why did it say it was complete? In the end, I FINALLY got two discs burned, and they worked (I also made sure they worked on the university computers). 

I have enjoyed working with Unreal, you can get some nice results fairly quick using the blueprint system. It also makes things a little clearer on how different components are working with each other through the nodes, compared to Unity. I would have liked more time to work on the final game though, I feel I did waste too much time with my first attempt that I later abandoned. I did learn quite a lot from working on it, and it did make it easier to produce a second game in such a short time.

Maya is both enjoyable and frustrating in equal measures. I found modelling to be very time consuming, and getting the smaller details in could be quite tricky. I do feel that I have become more proficient the more I have used it, making less mistakes, and relying less on reverting to back ups. I would definitely recommend making plenty of back up copies of your work though, especially when starting out. I did spend more time working in Unreal, but I could of easily spent just as much working in Maya.

The blog. I do actually think its a really good idea to write a blog throughout rather than just writing a report at the end. It does take a bit of time to get used to writing about the process of creating part of the game or model as you go though, hence my blog improving over time. I was going to go back and edit the posts, but its more of true reflection of how my skills and confidence progressed over the semester as it is. I must admit though, when I was frustrated with something not working, or something took a really long time, the last thing I wanted to do was write about it. Also, sometimes I would have to recreate my actions in order to take screenshots, which sometimes made blog posts take longer than actually working on that particular aspect of the game.

Overall, I have enjoyed the module and working in both Unreal and Maya. I've learnt a lot in a short amount of time, and thinking about what else I could create with them in the future is an exciting prospect. Gary and Dominic have been excellent throughout the semester, and have made understanding the tools and software a lot easier with their support. I'm tired now (unsurprisingly), but I'm already looking forward to what we'll be producing in the next semester!