Exams and a Walking Bush

So, you may or may not have noticed that we have been a little bit irregular with our last couple of posts. This is mainly due to exams being in the way, and it will probably continue to be quite irregular for the rest of the week. However, we have decided to give up on daily blogging and change it to every other day. This is mostly due to the fact that it continuously feels like we don’t have anything interesting to say every single day and as I result I feel like our blog posts have been getting less and less interesting.

This may be due to the fact that we spent the majority of our time revising these days and therefore don’t do anything interesting with our days that we can talk about on here nor work on Miku RPG enough to be able to show some progress every day. At the minute we are lucky when we manage to fit in a whole hour of game development into our days. One hour isn’t enough to make anything interesting.

Today was one of those rare days in which I actually managed to spent a full hour working on Miku RPG, so at least I have a little animation to show you.

I’ve been working on the side animation for the past three days, and I did the back animation this evening. I think it’s looking kind of cute, I’m excited to see it actually implemented inside the game. Hopefully this should happen soon, since Matt is trying to get the engine to the point where I can use (and make an ubuntu version of it so I can actually use it) it before getting separated into different countries. So within the next two weeks and a half. I’m incredibly excited to start experimenting on it and making little test maps to see what still needs to be drawn and added.

But in the mean time, I’ll just keep working on all my pixel art and dreaming of seeing it implemented one day.

Have a wonderful day.

-Marta

Netflix and Revision

Today we had an exam. The past few days have been spent preparing for it by doing endless tutorial questions, and watching too much Netflix. Needless to say, I genuinely believe that exam could have been attempted well without doing any revision at all.

This particular module is called “Electronics IV”, and focuses on active devices (transistors, diodes, SCRs) as well as basic power electronics (motors and generators). The exam was divided up into 3 sections and we needed to choose 3 questions from 6, but still do at least one from each section.

The first question I chose was fairly simple, and focused on the dependance on current gain for a Common Emitter BJT configuration without negative feedback. Next up was a question on Zener diodes, and its use in a linear power supply. I’ll admit this one got me sweating for a few minutes as it wasn’t as straightforward as it initially looked, but I got there eventually.

Finally, the “power electronics” section featured for the most part content we learnt in the first semester in the first year. Now I don’t want to complain too much, but at the back of the exam booklet was a 2 page spread covered in pointless equations that for the past few days Marta and myself have been trying to memorise due to our own ignorance, which is I suppose is our own fault. These were all dedicated purely to this section of the exam, and the entire question didn’t require anything more than Ohm’s Law. Well it’s not all bad I guess. If the mood strikes me and I want to calculate the flux linkage in a transformer I can … for probably the next 5 hours. Which is really my point.

I will be very honest now. I have skipped a lot of lectures this semester and yet I managed to get through the exam in half the time allocated to us. I even checked my numerical answers when I got home with a simulator, and luckily it looks like I was correct. For this semester alone, I have spent £4500 of a loan I will need to repay for the next 30 years after I finish University on lecturers and learning material designed to be taught over 11 weeks, and yet I absorbed 90% of the course in the 5 days before the exam.

Before you get the wrong idea, I’m not particularly intelligent, although others will dispute this. They are wrong though – I have had to work very hard to get where I am now. It’s just the material covered this semester has been so very easy. I was able to do most of this content 3 or 4 years ago, because the information is available for free online and is much better explained. The lectures I did attend spent 10 minutes talking vaguely about the subject in general while lightly skimming over the more challenging aspects, then doing 40 minutes of tutorial questions on the board. It’s not like we get a lot of those. I’d rather do them in my own time than be told the answer before being able to look at it properly.

This is why I thought my time could be better spent staying at home programming our game, which I haven’t actually done a lot of recently. We were going to do some work on it after the exam today which was initially scheduled for 9:00am, but unfortunately they pushed it back to 3:30pm. The entire day has been a blur of stress, tension headaches and explosive bowel movements. Oh, and getting whacked in the right bollock by Marta accidentally in the Co-op. But that’s a different story.

We have one more exam in 6 days, and then it’ll all be over. Then all I need to do is move house; get to Spain and back; take some more driving lessons; start working at my placement; take my driving test and live with 4 Spanish girls for a fortnight. Sound good?

-Matt

 

Productivity vs. Creativity

Every evening before I go to sleep, I grab my little bullet journal and write down what I’m going to do the next day. And this is absolutely great. It’s a fantastic tool for increasing my productivity, it’s very useful, especially now exams are drawing closer and closer, and it really helps me get stuff done.

Or at least, most of the time.

I’ve been bullet journalling for almost a month now, and I hadn’t realized this until today, but during this time, I haven’t had any creative ideas.

As a part-time game developer, ideas are incredibly important to me. Those little moments of inspiration, when I suddenly see a new design for a monster or NPC in front of me, a little snippet of story or even some new personality traits for my characters, are very valuable to me. And I tend to get these rather often.

But in the past month, I’ve only had one. Which happened today, making me realize how long it’s been since I last had one of these.

Now I’m not going to go around correlating these two thing and say bullet journalling has destroyed my creativity. That’s not true. In fact exams probably haven’t helped either, and I would like to test this whole planning vs creativity theory out when I’m not being completely stressed out by so many other outside factors in my life.

But I do think there might be a slight correlation here, not necessarily between planning and creativity but between over-planning and creativity.

Because every night when I decide what I’m going to do the next day, I first write down all of my revision goals, and then I write down one or two precise bits of pixel art that need doing. Note how I highlighted the need there. This part is important.

So when I’m ready to pixel art the next day, there are two factor’s affecting me.

The first one is that I’m already completely exhausted from exam revision and not really at my best any more. The second, is that I don’t have to decide on what to pixel art. It’s just there on my notebook, I just need to draw that and then I can go to bed.

And yes, this actually saves me a lot of time. You’d be rather shocked, if you knew how much time I used to spent staring at my massive list of all the things that I’m going to have to draw in between now and the release of the game (which, if you are not aware of how lengthy of a process this is, is going to take at least one more year from now).

But this also means that I don’t spent any time thinking about what I’m going to do. And that time is usually when most of my ideas come in. When I decide what I want to draw just like that, in that moment, I go with whatever the hell I feel like. And sometimes it takes me a very long time to figure out what that is. But sometimes (in fact most of the time) that is because what I feel like drawing isn’t actually on the list. It’s a new idea, a new piece of content to add to the game. And this whole process of generating ideas just doesn’t happen if I start doing what I know needs to be done right away.

Saying that, I still think planning is incredibly useful and bullet journalling is amazing and has really helped me go through all of these exams much better. And I’m not planning to stop using it.

It’s very useful to plan out the things that I need to do. But I can’t plan out my ideas. However, what I can do is leave some extra space, some extra time in my day that I haven’t occupied with all the things that I have to do. And yes, sometimes ideas won’t happen during that time and I’ll spent half an hour staring at my screen to then decide to not draw anything at all today. But I’d rather risk a part of my productivity in return for the possibility of creativity.

Anyway, that ended up sounding a bit more serious than I intended it to. I guess what I’m trying to say here is planning is great, just make sure you don’t plan out every second of your day.

So after all that, you might be curious to see my little idea from today, which by the way, happened because I really really really really couldn’t be bothered working on what I had planned to work on today and spent half an hour deciding what to draw instead.

Here you go:

It was initially meant as a monster but it’s super cute so I might keep it as a friendly companion instead. We’ll see.

So, I’m off to bullet journal for tomorrow then. Have a nice day everyone!

-Marta

Last Night, Good Night

Last night I don’t think either of us slept very well. Because of my incompetence at making gifs for the last blog, we also went to bed quite late. The combination of these factors has led to a less than productive day today.

After dragging myself out of bed, I went downstairs and made breakfast. I have to say the microwaved porridge that I made this morning was outstanding. After breakfast and showering, we set about doing some revision for next weeks exam. By which I mean I played table piano, and Marta went on Twitter.

The next exam is actually almost relevant to the degree we’re studying. It’s called Electronics IV, and on the surface there’s nothing particularly difficult about the material. In fact, one third of it is stuff we’ve done in other modules several times, and most of the other stuff we’ve had to learn independently for lab sessions. Doing tutorial questions on it, however, has been challenging. I’ve been having to look at the answers to get information necessary to answer the questions, as it wasn’t given in the questions initially. As usual, the lecture material is basically useless, as were the lectures for that matter.This worries me, because if the exam is like that I’m stuffed. So not the best day in that respect.

As well as the revision, we received an email from the estate agents today. They wanted us to sign off a 21 page contract for the apartment we’re moving to in 12 days. Which was fun.

On the bright side, Miku RPG development is steadily progressing. Yesterday I managed to get multiple maps loaded, and switched between them in the map editor. We also got a little piggy walking around which was very exciting. After tweaking a few bits, and getting rid of some bugs, I’ll be starting work on portals – that is, the ability for the player to be transported to a different location on a different map. This probably sounds outlandish, but will primarily allow the player to walk through doors into buildings. So it’s not actually that exciting, but still very necessary.

And on that note, I think I’m going to sleep for a thousand years. Good night.

-Matt

 

So many piggies!

This morning I woke up feeling incredibly motivated and excited to work on Miku RPG. Of course, that’s not what I was supposed to be doing today. I was supposed to be doing electronics revision.

For some reason, my brain has decided that uni should be a priority and that I should be doing uni work first and then game development once I’m done with uni work. But sometimes this decision can turn against me. Today, for example, I spent all morning in bed telling myself I’m oh so tired, and then suddenly feeling very awake again at 4pm, the time during which I usually stop uni work and start working on Miku RPG.

I should probably work on that, but I’m not sure whether I can be trusted with any sort of game development before I’ve done my uni work, especially with exams just around the corner. Then again, if I had just decided to take the day off uni work from the start and just worked on game development all day, I could have put in an extra 5 or 6 hours of pixel art and I would have gotten the exact same amount of uni work done.

Yeah, I definitely think I need to start working on my uni-motivation a little bit…

Saying that, in two weeks today I’ll be free to work on our game all day long, with no other sort of obligations, other than the occasional meet up at the beach with my friends.

Today’s pixel art time has been spent mostly on animated our little piggy. I was only really planning on doing the front view animations, but these only took half an hour.

This makes me incredibly happy, since last time I worked on animal animations, it took 3 hours to animate my sheep front views.

I somehow managed to do the side and back view as well, so that’s my pixel art goals for the week done in just one day… This should probably make me start working on my uni goals for the week… Or I could set a new pixel art goal. I should try my best to do both.

So without further ado, here are six little pig animations for you:

We (and by we I mean mostly Matt) also decided to put the pig into the game to test out the new animation code on it and set it as the active player (since there’s no AI code yet, so it can’t walk on it’s own). So now you get to walk on our rather empty test maps and pretend to be a pig! We should rename this game to Pig Simulator 2016! Because everyone wants to experience what it’s like to be a pig with human attributes, like being able to use camp fires and wells!

See you soon!

-Marta

 

P.S.: I just realized I’ve been referring to the situation with not wanting to do uni work as a “problem” which, according to all the how to get motivated articles I’ve been reading as procrastination for actually getting work done, is the last thing I should be doing. So let me rephrase that a little bit for you (or for myself, for that matter): I’m going to seize the opportunity of not having any motivation to increase my potential at being more focused and discipline, since this is going to be an amazing challenge to learn how to stay focused on a task in the future.

Okay, I actually feel like doing uni work now… Can’t believe that actually worked! Let’s see whether it works again tomorrow morning.

Hidden Stories

Today was the first out of our three exams. I initially thought it would be the hardest exam, which it probably was, yet one of the questions was basically primary school algebra with some complicated words around it to make it look difficult. This question was also about Minecraft, which I find very amusing.

I’m not sure how I feel about this exam, but I think it went generally well. Then again, when you are expected to write code on paper without any means to use a compiler to check for errors and debug it, it’s very hard to know.

I decided to take the rest of the day off and work on Miku RPG (despite my next exam being in 1 week). I haven’t really made that much progress, seeing how the exam finished at 2:30 and I had to sort out a couple of household things as well (mainly killing ants, which seems to have stopped being against my morals now that these creatures are trying to invade my kitchen).

There’s a certain feeling that comes with pixel art, a feeling I would define as being rather close to magic. It’s amazing how sometimes something with such a low resolution can look so much better than something with a higher resolution. There’s a feeling of nostalgia behind it, but it’s also due to our own imagination. If we have less detail, our brain seems to have a tendency to fill things in, I have come to realize. And that means that everyone sees pixel art a little bit differently, making every pixellated world feel so much more personal.

But there’s something else to pixel art, that can only be seen by the people creating it (or by the people who look at it very very closely). It’s the factor of story and narrative. With every little pixel piece I draw, my mind has a tendency to wander off to the regions of the pixellated world, where this story can be found. Of course, this feeling is much stronger with some pixel art than with other, and the experience of drawing a bush doesn’t quite compare with the experience of drawing a graveyard.

Saying that, I have been working on a graveyard today. And in the mean time, so much story has happened in my brain, I don’t think I will be able to fit all of it into the game. But that just makes Miku RPG even more personal. I want every pixel to be oozing with story, I want there to be a backstory to every character, every tree, every creature, every stone (okay maybe not every stone). I want to create a wonderful world full of story, and if some of the story manifests itself only in my brain, I think that’s okay. And maybe if this story is happening in my brain, it can happen in the player’s brain too, making it a different experience for everyone. Giving you exactly the story you were dying to hear.

Have a wonderful day.

-Marta