The Order: 1886

Day 14 of 30 ... This weekend was not all that productive due to a trip out to Canyon Lake with some friends. Lots of fun, but no time for laptops and no Internet access.

I did download The Order: 1886 on Friday and was able to play a few hours before leaving for the lake. I played more this evening when I got home and, so  far, it's pretty cool. Visually speaking, the game is absolutely breathtaking. The gameplay has some highs and lows but, overall I'd say I'm definitely having fun. Quite an achievement by The Santa Monica Studio and Ready at Dawn ... worth the wait, in my opinion. 

I'm close to completing my grad school application ... all that remains now is completion of portfolio pieces for both production and level design. My stretch goal is still to have everything done by the time I return from GDC. 

Inching ever closer

Day 13 of 30 ... My essay and resume have both been completed and uploaded to the application site! I still need to request one additional letter of recommendation, but after that's completed I only need to focus on the portfolio requirements for production and level design moving forward. My stretch goal is to have everything completed and uploaded by the time I get home from GDC - we'll see if I can make that happen. 

Draft #2

Day 12 of 30 ... I worked a lot on my entrance essay today - draft #2 is now available for critique :) I think I'm close to being happy with it - one more box to check with respect to this application process.

I'm excited about designing a level in Unity and UE4 for my portfolio - I hope to have some good updates on that soon. Here's a tutorial I'm planning on following for UE4 Level Design as soon as I have the time: 

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/QuickStart/4/index.html

TouchDraw Learning

Day 11 of 30 ... Today was really busy at work, so not much to report unfortunately. However, I was able to accomplish at least one thing today and that was the creation of a flowchart detailing one of the Python programs I've written (a brief text-based adventure game). A small achievement, but an achievement nonetheless :) 

Birthday

Day 10 of 30 ... Today is my birthday and it's been a great one :) We saw "Kingsman: The Secret Service" this afternoon after a really nice brunch with some good friends this morning @ La V in East Austin. I thought the movie was really cool ... some fantastic fight scenes with excellent choreography, good music, a fun story, and lots of humor. Samuel L. Jackson is very funny as the villain which was a nice surprise. Also, the story is somewhat rooted in Arthurian legend, so they had me from the start as I've always been a big fan. 

Progress today was light ... but I did decide, very quickly, that I'm not a huge fan of Dia for flowcharting on Mac OS X. It's pretty bad on Yosemite so I've completely switched over to "TouchDraw" which I'm familiar with from the iPad version. So far it's WAY better for my purposes and uses vector graphics which are just nice looking. 

Dia

Day 9 of 30 ... I downloaded and installed some software today that's supposed to be pretty good for creating flowcharts (Dia: http://dia-installer.de/download/index.html.en). I figure this might be another useful tool to learn in the near future ... it might be nice to include a flowchart as a portfolio piece alongside a Python text-based adventure game. I expect my progress is going to pick-up from here on out ... I'm about 10 days into this 30 day challenge and, in the best case, in 20 more days I'd like be fully applied to this grad school program and through my first experience at GDC.

Grad School?

Day 8 of 30 ... today was a really productive day! I'll go ahead and say this - I've made a decision to apply to a graduate school program with the goal of studying game design (specifically production). Obviously nothing is even close to finalized at this point, but I'm happy to say that I've decided to apply and give the application process my full effort. Much more in the way of updates soon ... I'm pretty excited about the possibility.

Tangible things I accomplished today: ordered undergraduate transcript, began rough draft of an essay, requested recommendation letters from 2 folks that are close to me. 

Unreal Engine 4

Day 7 of 30 ... it's going to a double-post kind of day - this one is technically re-capping what occurred yesterday - which was quite a bit. The biggest item on my "completion" list for Wednesday the 11th was the successful download and installation of UE4. I signed up for the $19/month plan and bit the bullet there. I had time to take a couple quick tutorials and learn some of the basics as well and, so far, the engine and environment seem very impressive. I will be designing a test 3D level (likely in a 3rd person perspective) very soon.