13/03/14

For today I recorded my first attempt at a video tutorial, and started planning my second video tutorial. To be honest this project has been a bit more time consuming than I thought it would, but I feel that this is fine, because I still have quite a lot of time before the project deadline. Also, I am currently on track with this project, which feels good. I plan to make one video tutorial each week until Easter, and then I plan to edit and improve my video tutorials if necessary.

My second video tutorial will continue from the first, where I started to model a 3D version of the classic Pac Man Level, so my second video tutorial will be basic texturing using solid colours. In this tutorial I will show how to texture the walls of the classic Pac Man Level, and to make things more interesting, model Pac Man and the ghosts as well. Modelling the characters proved more difficult than I thought they would be, even though the characters are really basic shapes. I especially wanted to model the Pac Man ghosts to show the transparency option for textures, where I can make the ghost's textures slightly transparent to give them a more ghostly feel.

Also to help me cope better with Thursdays, because with not much atmosphere in our room Thursdays can feel quite long, I have decided to break down the day into hourly segments, and wrote down the tasks I feel I need to complete for the day. To be honest this has really helped me cope better with Thursdays and helps me feel more motivated and productive and less bored. I will definitely use this strategy in the future, because it has worked so well today. 

I also showed Neil the video tutorial I had recorded last weekend. I knew that it wasn't perfect myself, and it could improve in terms of confidence and speaking clearly, but I feel I did well considering it was my first ever video tutorial. Neil did seem rather impressed, but did say I forgot to explain certain controls, and wasn't as technical as I could be. In one part of the tutorial he pointed out I described one of the navigation controls after extruding an object as a "yellow circle thing," which I agree isn't very technical. I also rambled a bit towards the end of the tutorial, and Neil said that mentioning I wasn't a games designer or programmer wasn't necessary. I feel quite pleased with this feedback, and I will consider this when making my next video tutorial. If I have time over the Easter Holidays, I may edit or re-record the video tutorial, but I don't think it was terrible, so I won't be too stressed if I don't have time to edit/redo the video tutorial. If I do decide to edit or redo the video tutorial, I will need to consider which will be the best and quickest option. If I feel I have missed out too much detail, I will need to re record the video tutorial(s), but if I have made mistakes in only one or two sentences, I should probably just edit those parts out of the video tutorial.