Front cover designing!

We started off today with a talk from Catherine about what we can do after Develop. One of the options is going to university but I'm not sure about that yet. Next Friday we are going to a university open day to see what it is like. Catherine did this talk now so we could think about our future options we can take.

After that we started to learn about the front covers on games. The front covers normally are split into three parts. The top or middle is normally where the logo goes because that's where we look first and how we read. Also the 1st and 2nd sectors sometimes have the main character so we know who we are playing as. The 3rd sector is usually where the game info goes and the producer goes.

Then we got to start to design the front covers for our own games. Here is my cover what is nearly finished:
The background was royalty free so we had to manipulate it. I changed the brightness and contrast of the picture so my main character stands out. I tested out some of the effects I can add to the font and overall I am pretty happy with it. We started just before lunch and finished at 2.

After we came back from lunch we watched a video about Comic Sans MS (Adams favorite font). This was about how bad it is and how it shouldn't be used for a designing point of view. I found this quite interesting and it has shown me how I should not pick that font.

Overall I am happy with the front cover I made today. Tomorrow I will finish off my design log and finish off my front cover at home.

Photoshop day

We started the day off finding out the blog starts today who was Tom and myself. I was happy that I was one of the blog stars because it shows that my English is improving and that I am going into more detail in my blog.

The rest of today we were working on our game designing on Photoshop. Today I have finished my main character, the power up version of the character, the power up item and two of the items to collect points. I had changed my main character quite a bit from yesterday and in my opinion he looks quite good. Here is a picture of my final character:













After I finished my main character, I moved on designing what he would look like when the power up is activated. The power up I have selected is a speed boost. It would last for 10 seconds and would change the look of the character. The changes what would happen to my character is that his skin would turn darker and his boots would change colour. The item to pick up for the power up is boots so the boots on the character changes.






The final design I did today were the two items to pick up. These are a jeweled statue and a coin. The jeweled statue would give 20 points and the coin would give 10 points. I will add one more item in what would give 30 points but I did not have the time for that today. Also I have not made the enemies so I will finish that off at a later date.

Overall I am happy of my progress I have made today and my Photoshop knowledge is getting better. I never knew you could make 8 bit characters this easily in Photoshop.

An amazing finish to the week!

Friday is here again. A nice relaxing weekend! The main part of today was starting to make our characters for our games. Adam sent us this helpful link on drawing 8-Bit Pixel Art to start us off and give us some help. I followed the guide and it really helped when coming to drawing the body of my main character. My main character is an explorer and at the moment he does not look like one! As you see the character is quite small. He is only 50 by 50 pixels so I did not have a lot of room to work in. In the end I manged to get his body looking good and I'm pretty happy with him!




Today we also had a talk about hygiene. This was just explaining about why we need to keep ourselves clean and look after our hair. I did learn some new information from that PowerPoint like how the most sweat glands are in your feet. I thought the most swear glands would be around your armpits but it's not.

Also today we got to play Pictionary again! This was a nice break into the day and it also it helps me get more ideas flowing when creating objects for games. Adam used some of the same words multiple times so we had to think up of different ways to show that object. I found it really helpful doing that because I never knew there was so many ways you could show a certain object.

My favorite part to the week was starting to create our characters. I'm excited for getting more detail on my character and hopefully he will look good.

Quiz Thursday!

We started the day off with a little English lesson. The lesson was about improving our vocabulary in our assignments. Adam put up a list of words up on the board and we had to come up with some words what mean the same. For example one of the words was big. People suggested words like large and tall. The aim of this lesson was to help us not keep on repeating the same words all the time in our assignments.  I found this exercise very helpful and it has helped me improve my vocabulary.

After this we started assignment 3. This is the assignment when we get to make our graphics for the game we are doing in a different unit. We got to do this till lunch however we did get to do some after lunch. I have finished what part we got up to so I am quite proud of that.

Finally because it was Thursday we had to do a quiz. It was about Artificial Intelligence what I found very interesting and useful. We had 15 questions to answer however I only got 5/15 because I did not make enough notes from the video and my spelling was off. The quiz Thursday really makes the day good and it is also good learning about new things.

I'm happy about the progress I have made today and I can't wait tomorrow. Bring on Friday!

Tuesday

Today we got to learn about fonts. This was quite interesting because I never knew there was so much about a font. There are several different parts to fonts such as the serif and the x height. Also I did not know how much fonts had changed over time. For example the old English writing is a lot different to the current types of fonts what are around.

Also today we played a game like pictonary. For the first round we had 10 seconds to draw a  picture of the word Adam told us. For example the first was to draw a cat. My first attempt did not work at all. We had 8 words to draw for the first round and 8 words again for the second round. For the second round we had 20 seconds to draw so we could get into some detail with the pictures. This was fun to do and it helped me work out different ways you can represent things.

After that we got to start to develop some ideas for making a game. We need to get 5 ideas down before we move onto the next stage what is knock it down to 3 games then 1 game. At the moment my favorite idea is a platformer where you have to collect artifacts to escape the jungle. One of the power ups would be a temporary speed boost what would be acquired from one of the artifacts.

This has been a fun day today and I will finish off all the game ideas tomorrow.

Colour Theory!

We started the day off doing some colour theory. I quite enjoyed learning about colour theory because its quite interesting learning about what colours mean. For example red is quite evil and angry but yellow is more happy and cheerful.

Also today we got to do some more Photoshop and we were changing pictures to Monotone, Duotone and some others. This was quite fun because I had never used the settings before and it was cleaver how you can select certain parts and just change their looks without affecting the whole picture. I selected to do Luigi because he is quite good to do and has quite a few different colours.

Another activity we did in Photoshop today was making banners. The size of the picture had to be 750 x 200 pixels and we had to base them on 3 things. The first was happiness then technology and lastly royalty. I did ok with all 3 banners however they didn't look as good compared to other ones in the room. The best banner I did was the royalty one because it looked quite royal because of the purple colour.

Here is the picture of one of the Luigi's I did:



Overall I'm happy what I did today and the information I learnt today and it will help me later on.

Friday!

Another week over at Develop. Today we carried on working on assignment 2 what I will be finishing tonight and tomorrow. I've got a little bit more to go on M2 because I didn't decide to do D2 because it was a bit confusing.

Also today we got to play some games and evaluate them what was quite fun. The games weren't the best but they were quite fun. My personal favorite game was called The Pill. You had to pick up objects to get to the next level. There was some not so good games such as Shopping Rush because that was quite basic.

Another thing we did today was peer review someones work. I reviewed Ashley's work and it was good. It helped me work out what I should write in my work and it has made me more confident in finishing off M2.

I can't wait for Monday! Time for a nice weekend break.

Bad internet!

We started the day off as usual with finding out the blog stars who were Adam and Joe (who was not here today). After that we were going to be doing a quiz about there, their and they're however the internet down for most people so we had to get some paper copies. This activity was to help us remember which type of there we use in certain situations. 

Next off with the internet down with everyone we went into 3 groups of 6 to discuss about certain words. The 3 words were discussion, evaluate and conclusion. Once we had discussed that in our groups we fed back to the whole of the group to share our ideas. I found this quite helpful discussing the words because I was not entirely sure what they all meant. Then we got to do a quiz about the words what I got 9/12 what I was pretty happy with.

After that we had the option of doing D2 or not. I chose not to and carried on with the M2 work what I had started yesterday. The people who were going to do D2 went off to the other tables so they could discuss there. At the moment I am onto the second part of M2 discussing the software needed, tools, file format ect for printed game related artwork. I'm hoping I can finish that off today and get onto the next one. 

So far it has been a good day except how the internet keeps going up and then down. It really shows how much you rely on the internet everyday. That is one limitation of Google Drive because you need the internet to connect to it!

More assignment work

So here we are again. Another day has passed at Develop. Today we started off finishing P2 what was the table. I finished it just before break and I proof read it twice just to make sure that I have done it right. I am pretty confident with P2 after proof reading it twice.

After that we moved onto M2 what is quite confusing at the start. Adam talked through it and then we got on and started doing it. I wasn't sure how to start off but then Adam put up a slide with how we should lay out the work and that was very helpful. I had a look and wrote down all the sub headings then I got to work on writing it all up. We had to add some examples of the tools what can be used. One of the  tools I selected was the Magic Wand tool in Photoshop because that is very helpful.

I should be able to get close to finishing M2 on Thursday but if not I will try to finish it on Friday when the deadline date is. I'm not sure yet if I want to go for the distinction but I will decide later on. I have looked at the distinction part on the Scheme of Learning but I'm still not sure on what to do.

The best thing today was the activity today and finishing off the P2 table.

A start to a new week!

Today I have finished my assignment 1 and I have sent it in ready to be marked. I think I did well with the assignment but I'm not sure with the distinction one because I got a bit confused on it. If I get a merit I will be happy but I might send in the remark for the distinction if I didn't get it.

Now with that assignment done we have moved onto the next assignment what is about file formats. I am quite confident with this next task because I know about the file types however I didn't know about the lossy and lossless formats. When I first saw lossy and lossless I did not know what they meant but now I'm pretty confident with the two meanings. In assignment 2 we have to make a table and explain which type of file would be best. For example we had to decide which picture format would be the best for a webpage. I chose PNG and GIF because they are both quite a small file size and they would load fast.

My goal for tomorrow is to finish off the table and explain why the file formats are good to use. I should be able to finish it off tomorrow but I might not be able to.

Thursday!

Another day of doing the P1, M1 and D1 what I have nearly finished!

I have just got to finish off a bit of D1 then proof read it all over and make sure everything is correct and everything is referenced. Looking at the information about the cites and the references really helped and I think I did all of that correct. Today I finished off P1 and finished off M1 what I was quite happy with. My goal for today was to finish it all however I was very close and I will finish off that tomorrow. In D1 I looked into the iPhone 6 and how it could help with graphics and game design. I did not know that they added so much to the new iPhone because I did't watch the revealing of it. Also the Apple Watch seems quite good because it's not just a watch. You can do so much different things with it like view photos.

We did some more Adobe Illustrator as well today what I am finally understanding more! I found the "Add Anchor Point" tool what I found was very helpful because I could be more precise with the selection. Also I tried out the paint brush tool because I noticed I was missing out some of the areas with the Pen tool so I just went over them area with the paint brush. I have not tried out the text tool yet so I will try that soon and see how it goes! There is quite a lot of tools what I will be trying out to see what I can do with Illustrator. It seems like a quite powerful program but I just haven't got my head around all the different tools.That is the same case with Photoshop at the moment so I might have a play around with that soon.

Overall it's been interesting at trying out more of Illustrator and I hope to get more out of both programs and hopefully post some photos of what I have done.

Another Day

Another interesting day at Develop. Mainly today we were doing the assignment work and a Illustrator tutorial. When we first started Illustrator it was really annoying and confusing but then I started using it more and it was making more sense. I prefer Photoshop over Illustrator but once I start to understand Illustrator more I hope it will be a lot easier.

For the assignment work I've done most of P1 and all of the references (Thank you Adam for that slide explaining it). The PowerPoint slide really did help. Also we looked at how much technology has changed throughout time what was quite shocking at how fast technology has evolved. The new virtual reality devices what are coming out look really good. I prefer the Oculus Rift because it can be used for so much stuff. The Google glass seems quite good but I'm not too interested in it because it looks a bit silly walking around talking to it. I can't wait to see it being released to the public because I'm quite interested how the sales will go for it and how the final release will work. I think it will go for about £500 but then the price might drop. It's just so amazing how fast technology can change and I'm really excited on how much its going to change over time. In 10 years time it will be quite shocking looking back and seeing what it was like then and what we were using compared to that 10 years time.

Overall it's been another fun day with more learning!

First day of graphics!

This has been a really good first day today! I have learnt many new things with Photoshop such as  removing certain objects from the photo. I had never used Photoshop before so I did not know what I was expecting with the program. At a first glance I was wondering what all the different tools did. I knew some of the basic tools like the eraser and the magic wand tool but I did not know what the other ones did. We had to compare Photoshop and Paint to see which one was better. When I switch to paint it just showed how little you can do with Paint. My favorite part of Photoshop has to be the layers because you can draw on 1 layer and it doesn't ruin the picture because you can just remove or turn off that layer. I'm hoping I get to learn more about Photoshop because this does look like a very powerful piece of software. Overall I really enjoyed the first day of graphics and I can't wait for tomorrow.

Induction Day

This has been a fun 2 days at Develop learning new things. The best bit was when we made the balloon chairs (What we won!). The information about Prezzie and Survey Monkey is very helpful because I have never used them before. It's nice to be meeting new people and people that have the same interests as me! The unit i'm looking forward to the most will be the programming unit because I enjoy making programs :D I've used Python before but i'd love to learn different languages such as Java.

Overall I'm very excited for my time at Develop and I can't wait to learn new things such as graphics.