Education

I remember my first Game Production class in the first year as if it was yesterday. I was really stressed, I knew no one there and I didn't know what to expect. Of course, I realized that it wasn't high school anymore and teachers (I mean tutors) won't pat us on heads and spoon-feed us with information we needed to know. But still, I didn't expect what was coming...

After brief tutorial that was an introduction to 3ds max (which I haven't use before) we were given a task - to model a Dalek. Wait... what? What do you mean by 'build a Dalek'? How? I've never used this strange program and now you expect me to model this elaborate robot with it? Is that some kind of sophisticated joke that tutors have came up with to have fun of scared and helpless first years?

But that wasn't the worst. The most terrifying thought was: what if the whole university is going to be like that? What if we get projects to do but no one is going to guide us, tell us how to do them? Well those nightmares eventually came to life, but they weren't so scary as I thought. 

But let's get back to the Dalek task first. So, after the first shock, with all of those visions in my head I thought 'aaa... fuck it. I'll do my best and even if I fail, it will only mean that I wasn't the right person for this course anyway'. So, with that in my mind I started modelling. I don't know how exactly did that happen but after few hours I end up with this:

And I was so happy and proud with it! I felt so excited that I learnt this new the thing and I wanted to know more, learn more and become better at it. I even decided to have a second go and I modelled this one:

If Heather would, back then, walked us by hand through this project and told us step by step how to do it I would not be even in a small part that happy with it. I would not be so excited about learning those new skills. And every project since then was like that - was a challenge. Every tutorial we had was on how to use program, not how to model specific things. I really like that because each new project requires me to research and learn new things. And I believe that it prepares us to work in the industry better than if we were lead step by step on how to do specific things. If I work in a game studio in the future and art director asks me to model a horse I can't say 'I don't know how to do that but hey, I can model tree instead!'. Even if I have never modelled a horse before and I don't know how to do that I was prepared to deal with similar problems. 

So, to conclude, despite of the big shock of my first contact with it I believe that our course structure is extremely efficient and it prepares us to work in the industry very well.