It's Surprising.

It really is surprising how a day can turn into a week and a week can turn into almost a month without posting. I apologize to anyone that tries to read my blog regularly. I understand that I should be keeping a better pace with these posts.

I have three major things to talk about today.

1. Champlain had a speaker come down named Scott Macmillan come down and speak to us. Or up rather as I believe he was from the Boston area. He spoke to us about he got into the industry and what we should and should not be worried about as we attempt to get into the industry ourselves. The two pieces of advice he had for us that I remember best are "Don't Panic" and that networking is important. So relying on the fact that I will have a degree and a decent portfolio thanks to my work at the EMC right now I'm focusing on not panicing and trying to meet as many people in the industry as I can.

2. The Information Literacy project that I'm working on came up for review this past Wednesday. We presented what we had done so far to the librarians so that they could give us a yay or nay on whether we should continue on or stop working on the project. It was a little stressful but I wasn't too worried about the whole situation. In the end they wanted us to keep working on it so I'll be finishing that up during the rest of this semester.

3. The Montreal International Game Summit is starting this Monday. I will be at it. My Lead Designer for the UN project will actually be speaking at the Summit which is pretty amazing. I wish I could be up there on stage with him, but I understand that you don't want to have everyone that's ever worked on a game up on stage when someone's talking about it. In most cases the stage wouldn't be big enough. That's not the case here but the same logic of don't send up 5 people when you need one speaker applies. In addition to my Lead Designer, Brian George, there will also Heather Conover, a designer from the other group, Wes Knee, the artist from my group, and of course Ann DeMarle, the General so-to-speak of the EMC, there speaking as well. So there will be a good representation there from our whole team, I think.

On a more academic note. I had to redesign my level idea for my Level Design. I had originally structured my design so that it would be an assault and defend map so that one side would be attacking and the other side defending. But we've discovered that this is just not possible to do in Unreal Tournament 3. So I am changing my map into a Capture the Flag map. This should make the map simpler and easier to build and play. After I've got it built and we enter the play testing portion of class I'll try and post up some screen shots. That's about it for me. I promise that I will try to get around to posting that comparison post, comparing my trip to South Africa through this project and my trips to Brazil and Japan through People to People Student Ambassadors at some point in the next week.