We Made Alpha Now on to Beta

Well congratulations should be expressed to everyone involved in my Senior Team Project. We made our Alpha milestone and the game is a lot of fun. Now we need to buckle down and really see if we can tighten up the (graphics on level 3. Just kidding couldn't resist joking about that silly comercial) game. We still need to balance the game out a bit and make sure that we include the necessity for the player to strategize. But I have a good feeling about it, I definitely think it will all work out.

I offered my Lead Designer and Producer to get in touch with the Vice President of Steam and see if they would be interested in putting our game on their service and they said yes but they wanted to talk to the rest of the team/not in it's current state. So I'll let that sort itself out some more.

I'm still working on my portfolio site. Tomorrow I'm required to have my second piece included for my Portfolio class. I hired a Graphic Designer to help me and he made a wicked sweet logo. He also gave me a business card layout and a gave me a suggestion for what I should try to make my website look like. So right now I'm going to try and get all of my content up there that I want up there, finish my resumé because I need to have it all on one page but looking good, and make my business cards. Then I will try to make a version of my website that looks like what he suggested from scratch. Because I like his layout better I just don't have the time for it at the moment so I need to prioritize getting a website up that looks at least presentable before trying to get it all up perfectly.

As for my Advanced Seminar class. It's going. I'm definitely going to have something done by the end of the semester that I can put in my portfolio but right now Unreal is being a little sassy so I have to make a lamp post from scratch on my own and import it into Unreal. Then I need to make sure that the light mechanic of my level works perfectly with it and then it's just a matter of making it look pretty. So that shouldn't really be a problem.

My C++ class is moving along just fine too. We've started discussing and using classes and pointers. I think after I graduate I might take some online courses to keep learning C++. The reason I'm thinking about this is because I'm in the IGDA QA SIG mailing list, that's actually a bit of a mouth full, but a common thing said in the mailing list is that if you're in QA, or Design I'm inferring, you should know code. So that you can understand and talk to the programmers a bit better as well as point out problems because of how something was coded.

How Champlain College teaches us designers requires us to learn some 3D art skills as well as programming. But I'm startting to think of taking it to the next level. Who knows maybe I'll find myself not getting a job in the industry when I graduate and will have to do the part time job thing while I continue to learn programming and maybe even getting a certificate in it.