The end of the first year

So it is almost the end of my first year at the university. I remember my first days on this course as it was a week ago. I was shy, curious and I didn’t know what to expect. The first term was fantastic, when I met all these new people, my tutors and I started the university life. I also begun my adventure with 3d modelling which was a bit intimidating at first but I quickly realized that it isn’t that scary, it just required some patience and practice. One year ago it took me a whole week to create 3d model of Dalek. Now I feel like I could do it within an hour, which I’m really happy with, as good time management as well as being efficient in short amounts of time are essential on this course. Its quick pace was sometimes killing me and it was hard to keep up, but… well I have to get used to it if I ever want to work in the gamming industry! I found both visual design and game production projects very interesting and I feel that every each of them thought me something new and valuable. Generally I preferred projects that allowed me to design something like the evil character project or the 3d gladiator project. Nonetheless, I’m aware of the importance of drawing from life and I’m glad that this course program required me to do it quite often. Life drawing sessions helped my to better understand the human anatomy and it’s noticeable that my characters are more coherent now. However, life is not a dream, so there were also some things on this course that I didn’t like... For example it happened to me a few times that I came to Fletcher just to be informed that there was no sessions that day. It’s probably not a big deal for students that live in halls that are 3 min away from University, but there are also people like me who live away and a simple note on Facebook or blackboard would prevent them from wasting time/money on traveling. I also found formative assessments a bit disappointing. I believe that it would be much more beneficial for us if Chris and Heather instead of assessing our works on their own would seat with us just for 30min, get through our drawings/models and give us some short verbal opinion on every project… But back to more pleasant subject now: critical game studies. Even though I hate writing and it was really hard for me to get through all the tasks from handbook I’m really happy that I did it, because they gave me some knowledge on how the gaming industry works. I was never good at standing in front of people and talking so I was really terrified when it came to doing the presentation… but after doing it three times my confidence got much stronger and I’m not so worried of the presentation that I’ll have to do in the future. Concluding – my first year at the university was fun, I’ve learnt a lot and I’m looking forward to the next year!