First week of lectures of the second year

Well its Saturday and it has been a fairly interesting week. In Introduction to 3D programming we started working with GDI+ to program windows application with graphics. Off the back of this I have been making a paint application.

In Console Development we took apart some console to have a look at the hardware. My group took apart a PlayStation 2.

This was a fun activity and looking around the room at past consoles ranging from the Sega Megadrive to the Jaguar it was interesting to see the technological advancement from the different generations.

The other big lecture this week was Games Development Technique. In this lecture the course leader, John Sear, drilled it into us how important putting all our effort into this year will be. There are approximately 10,000 jobs in the UK games industry and only about 6,000 of those are programming jobs. In this academic year there are roughly 10,000 students studying games related courses. It doesn't take a genius to work out how competitive getting a graduate job will be. John estimates there there are about 40 undergraduate placement spaces in the UK, about 20 of those are from Derby.

The rest of the lecture was about project management. We learnt about the important decisions that the project manager must make when developing a game. This diagram below graphically shows the decision a producer must make when starting the development of a game.

If you make the game fast the cost will go up and the game will not be as good but if you make a game cheaper then there is a larger amount of time that your company is not gaining any money from the project. As a programmer I want to make the best games possible, the problem comes when I am part of a large company and the bottom line is that the company is there to make money and paying 200 programmers for 10 years to make the best game ever is not economically possible for very many people.

With all this project planning talk I made a spreadsheet with a schedule for my games development technique project as seen in the picture at the top of this article.

Back to work for me, I should have a new portfolio website up soon so watch this space. Also note that you can now get to the blog from www.ajongamesdev.co.uk.