Blog Conference 2014

 On Wednesday of this week the entire day was put aside for our Critical Studies work. A whole day about blogs! If I had to review the day in one word, I'd give it a resounding 'Meh'.

 The day was split into multiple sections, with different classes you could choose from. In my case the first two classes I went too were in all honesty boring. I didn't feel as if I learnt much which kind of defeats the entire point. These two tasks were 'Writing for your reader' and 'How to write when you don't want to write'. They felt entirely seperate to our course and unrelated, filled with fairly useless and often contradictory information. When tasks like these aren't engaging or interesting then people in return will stop caring. It really started off the Conference in a bad light and really frustrated me and others.

 Not everything was bad however. The next two tasks 'Being critical in your blogs' and 'Practical strategies for getting on with it' were really good! They were engaging, they were interesting. They ticked every box. I felt as if I learnt something new and actually enjoyed the sessions. MRW :

 This wasn't just the subject matter, although that was significantly better; it was also down to the tutors giving the classes promoting far more discusion between we students and themselves.The first classes didn't do this, just leaving us with some task. This meant everything about these last two lessons was a lot more personal and alot more relatable. We could apply things we learnt more and often get personal advice for our own individual situations. This is good. I like this.

 While I seem to be negative about the day I am not. It's more just averages. What I learnt was extremely useful and the good times were good. It's just a shame that some things were disappointing. I am totally glad that I attended however (as it turns out we were missing over half of the year which is just insane) and I feel that the things I learnt will definitely help out my future blogs.

UDK

I'm having great fun playing with Unreal Development Kit for Game Production. There's something so satisfying about creating a scene which you can then walk around in. I had to make a scene using the assets of all the other projects we've had to do. 

The issue with this is that my older projects we're exactly built to export so I've had to do a lot of changing. I don't mind though, it's been a learning process. It's made sure that I know how to import into UDK and more importantly how to make assets that work in UDK. 

I'm pretty happy with my scene. The assets don't really match but it's actually all worked out okay.

I think I'm going to add more though. I have all of easter, so I might aswell fiddle abit more and see what other cool things I can find. I do find the best way to find out these things.

And there are still several things I still need to fix. For example all of my trees look like they're on fire. That's something I might want to change.

I've made my gladiator into a statue, standing imposingly above the scene. 

So overall I'm loving UDK. Making scenes is extremely fun and I know I'm going to do more of this. Theres still much more to learn, but there always is.