Progress Made

Time keeps on tripping. :)

Let's talk about grades. My average is sitting around the 94% mark, even with a disappointing showing in Visual Design Principals (if you're coming into the program, spend five hours with Photoshop and some online tutorials and you'll be fine). I suspect I'm in the top 10th percentile in my class. Having said that, I would be surprised if many of my classmates are not sitting above an 80%.

Good grades like those are easy to come by in the first term of the program. Really good grades—honors are 90%+—are pretty hard to hold on to as an average, and it will only get harder as our instructors expect more from us and the technology keeps expanding. So far this term we have ProTools, UDK, Flash, and Maya on our plates. I'm gotten pretty comfortable with UDK, but the others are still relative strangers to me. Hopefully I can change that over the next few weeks.

Grades are not the point of the program, but I want to market myself as an honors student and I have no doubt it will provide a small edge over the many people competing for those same jobs, assuming my portfolio stands up. I'm still waiting on a few grades from last term, and I am especially anxious to learn how my board game stacked up. I'll post about it when I can.

The Flash project keeps rolling, and while there are still some questions to be answered, everyone is doing their part and the talents are fitting together pretty well. Most encouraging of all, I can see a bit of excitement from my group members as Pistol Reef comes together. I love to see the art assets being pushed around by the code, and with hand-drawn vector art our game is going to have that very strong Castle Crashers look I was hoping for. We worked on some sound mixing today, and I layered a shotgun blast over a water balloon releasing air under the surface of a pail full of water. The result is a pretty convincing bit of foley, and it should make for a perfect "super claw cannon" sound effect for our game.

We have a big week coming up, with a half dozen assignments due alongside our first Flash milestone, so my long weekend will consist of 18 or more hours of homework at the school. It's just how it goes. I'm looking forward to seeing my finished UDK map and hand-drawn character sprite when I'm done on Sunday, though.

Anyway, that about covers it for now. Have great weekends, all.