Day 1 Post Show

So I finished my first day yesterday at Full Sail. I'm going through my morning routine before my second (and I'm actually a little short on time).

The First Day went okay overall. I met a lot of people and I have to say that I am really pleased with the mentality of all the students at the school. Everyone is very friendly and over-the-top willing to get to know each other. I am sure this all comes from everyone wanting to find what class mates would make good team mates in the up coming projects.

So the first class is a English Composition gen ed class "Full Sail Style." This means we are writing a "preliminary game design document" for a game idea we think up with our randomly assigned team. I am not very crazy about this class because I want to get my hands on doing some actual game development work. A lot of kids I met were liking this class because they like the idea of being a designer. I think designers are awesome but I would rather get going on how a game works before trying to "design" my perfect game.

I had a great discussion with two new guys I ment, Shawn and Ian, about prototype development as a method of game design. My argument was that students should focus more on developing a few key feature ideas and work to develop small prototypes that reflected that idea. Focus on those before proceeding to develop a document that is too large or crazy with details. This philosophy comes from my past experience on a student project. Shawn and Ian, being super cool and very nice about the whole thing, disagreed with me. Ian's point was that prototyping would tend to "diminish" designer's ideas and keep them from dreaming. He did agree with me that a promised concept in a game that usually fails is a result of a dream list that was never truly thought out.

My big brother/mentor Raj threw a good point into this whole discussion. According to him, people who believe that through testing of ideas destroys dream of designers is really more afraid of being proven wrong then anything else.

I feel that the development of all creative products (games, websites, ads, etc) are in the end an excercise of creative engineering. There is a science to it all.

Well I am continuing programming my 2d game. I got my tile maps up, basic collision grid and spacial paritioning up and working. Now its time to actually do some freaking input and test!

I'll post some more later hopefully.