HND session notes

Just a quick blog post here to remind my HND2 students of a few things..

Videocopilot is the site for after effects tutorials that I couldnt remember :)

Remember, design principles, visual materials, production considerations AND academic thought processes and theory are all intended to infill into this level/envronment design and animation breif. it's a biggie, so please try to take on board all of these features.

Narratology/Ludology of your design process so far can be a start point, but remember reward/risk/punishment models too.

monday - we will talk about your body of work, your portfolio and your representation of yourself, so remember to bring work!

HND2 Student forum

Level 5 students, working with CryEngine 3 have made themselves a forum on the web to collaborate when not in college.

if you fancy seeing what thhey are up to, or even contributing yourself, take a look here

A Hot Topic

We see articles like this one from the BBC all the time, and sadly, we agree.

Any of you out there who have taken the time to read Ian Livingstone's report will find a very well written and reasoned case for raising the game of digital education in Britain.

The rationale behind the setup and the structure of the courses that you guys at PIXEL are a part of was exactly this, to provide industry-relevant education in the skills that game designers need. We "buy in" art units, we encourage use of technology blended with traditional art skills, and we constantly push the college to provide us with current and emerging technologies to keep you guys up do date; and we think we're doing it right.

What do you think?

VADS

College now has acess to VADS, which is a free web-based image resource.

http://www.vads.ac.uk/index.php

It's akin to istockphoto and other such resources except that you can be certain that all the images are royalty free for educational use, which is nice.

Although searching for "games" did give me this...

Crydev Halloween competition

Likely of most interest to Y2ND and Y2HND as we are using this engine with those students as we speak..


this link will take you to a wee level design compo running on the crydev forums. might be worth a punt.

This is one person's WiP entry. this got reposted on the front page of the crydev blog... think you can do any better?

ThisisPixel

Welcome to the new Birmingham Metropolitan College Games Development Department Blog.

This less formal web presence will allow us to communicate across the four levels and seven groups of students we have in the college and grow to become a place where all games development student activity can be shared.

A studio community and collaboration space, outside the walls of the college if you like.

That said, I will still encourage all students to behave on this webspace as they would behave inside college, the rules aren't different because you're sat in your lounge posting.

Cheers, welcome, and have fun!