Using blog as portfolio good idea?

       Where as having a blog make it accessible to anyone willing to search for it, it is rather poor with navigation between posts. To defeat this problem I have added tags to the right of this blog so my audience can easily see what topics interests them, according to the content I provide/create.
   
      Since starting this Video-Games Design course I have became very fond of cloud-storage as I have as of recent installed MediaFire to my desktop so I am able to easily 'drag and drop' my documents to cloud-storage and access it from any available computer with internet access.

I was rather skeptical before using it, as I did not think I would use it more than two or three times - but now I am tempted to purchase a monthly subscription so I own more rights to my own created content.

Currently I am using the free 'Basic' price plan but gaining 1000GB of data for $4.99/month (£3.20/month) using the 'Pro' price plan seems very beneficial to my work capabilities. Although I am willing to wait for a sale as I have seen a 50% sale recently.

Project Planning

Should games be started without planning?

      Maps, character design, controls and even fundamental gaming aspects should all be thought about before anything is started. Brainstorming to figure out how and what things will work will identify and often eliminate problems before they arise. 

      As a class we have been advised to use Microsoft Excel to identify weapon and damage statistics. Excel is a great program for seeing how well weapons can be integrated into games but I believe there should be a better program for these kinds of instances. 

As a group we were asked to produce an Excel file examining weapons from an existing game to see what is worth investing time and money into. Here is my evaluation of weapons from 'Gears of War 3' (http://gearsofwar.xbox.com/en-US/AgeGate?source=%252f) created by 'Epic Games Studio' (http://epicgames.com/).

      http://www.mediafire.com/view/cld0f65vqf49dk8/weapons_evaluation.xlsx

     They used the Unreal Engine similarly to what our class is using to create our games. Clearly they have their own business and management team where everything has been decided. So they have jobs specified to certain employees with desired skills.

 "You would not employ an animator to program, or a programmer to animate." - Reynolds, Tim (12/12/2014)

 Below is a video of an interview of Cliff Bleszinski explaining what he included in 'Gears of War 3' and reasons why and how his game plays for the fans and the new players.

Project for minimum cost.

      If we were given multiple different choices we would have to identify:

• How much money it would take.
• How long it would take.
• The quality of the product.
• Estimated demand at different intervals. 

The biggest revenue is the target for most projects but for example, if you had a car that has recently broken down. Would you risk paying less for a lesser quality service that lasts for three months - or rather spending double for a better quality of service and potentially lasting a year or more. Researching or word of mouth is a great source of how well services are provided.

'Plan, do, check, act' should be used at nearly every instance.

• Plan - Creating ideas and how to overcome problems faced by said ideas.
• Do - Participate in the plan.
• Check - See if the ideas worked and how problems were created and solved if they were.
• Act - Evaluate how things worked and plan a future event or task.

11 Lessons to learn from war

Here is 'The Fog of War', a documentary telling the story of Robert McNamara. He explains his position in the cold war, Vietnam war and confrontations with past Presidents of the US and the press.

His 11 rules are as follows and what I have learnt from each one:

1. Empathise with your enemy. - Think of what will happen after your actions, don't do onto others which you do not want done to you.
2. Rationality will not save us. - Take a step back and assess the situation at hand, maybe even bring in a new mind in-case of tunnel vision.
3. There's something beyond one's self. - Respect the professionals and the geniuses.
4. Maximise efficiency. - Don't waste resources.
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. - Know what your results mean and anaylse them against something you understand if you're struggling.
6. Get the data. - Predict the future according to the data you've found.
7. Belief and seeing are both often wrong. - Assumptions can often be wrong and you may feel regret after knowing.
8. Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning. - Look and look again before acting.
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. - Do what is best overall; even if there are negative repercussions initially.
10. Never say never. - Expect any result or outcome,
11. You can't change human nature. - Mistakes will happen but you will just have to learn. History will often repeat itself.

Sustainable Development

      A part of a low carbon knowledge economy
Previous generations have used much of the earths resources
Is it okay to pollute china to get cheap goods? no because the economy is going down and we need to get this economy sustainable

 "Sustainability is like teenage sex. Everybody says they're doing it, very few people actually are doing it. Those that are doing it are doing it badly."

Available at: http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/andrew-maynard-on-sustainable-design.html .

• 9 billion people are occupying this planet. Joel Cohen claimed that in 1995 we needed 4 planets for a good lifestyle for all, but as I'm righting this it is 2014.
• 10% of the world own 90% of the resources.
• Screens from common smart phones today are made from rich rare earth materials that are often smashed from
• Lily pond one leaf grows per day per lily (concept of exponential growth).
• Many minerals from the periodic table will soon become extinct.

Many argue that 1st century industrial revolution was more sustainable than 22nd century.

• Abundance of materials.
• Low price of fuel.



http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/home.html

• Optimisation and mono-cultures.

Hewitt Packard are taking back broken down printers because they know sometime in the future the resources required to make printers in the future will be unavailable or too expensive. 

What we can do

• As professional engineers we have an explicit responsbility to design sustainable technology solutions.
• Global Green economy is worth $1.3 trillion (1,300,000,000).

      We have an obligation to come up with new ideas to save the global resources. 

For conferences why can we not use video streaming for meetings?

Earth Summits

United Nations Conferences (Margret Thatcher. 1990).

• Virtually every week we lose multiple different species and gaming is used to simulate the lose of species.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/09/a-study-the-temperature-rise-has-caused-the-co2-increase-not-the-other-way-around/

      There is a clear trend between global temperature and carbon dioxide. There are unfortunately many ways that carbon dioxide is created, but one of the main ways is production of electricity. We burn many resources that produce carbon dioxide that flies into our atmosphere and destroys our ozone; to cause global warming.

Library Resource

      Once I have finished this extended degree year I would like to move onto Video-Game design. So I have searched the universities libraries resources for "Videogame design technology". 

      
      There were 221 results over 23 pages of 10 results. You can do a more refined search towards a specific resource but unfortunately you can see how many specific types of resources there are available as this screenshot on the right shows, It is showing all the different types of sources there are available from my search. 

      The only book I believe I would be interested in taking from the library is Mastering Unreal Technology. As it was not available on my initial search but I knew of its existence previously, which is a problem.

      It tells me what is available from the three different sites of Anglia Ruskin. Its location is denoted by a series of numbers. This one is 794.815262 BUS and through those series of numbers i can detect whether I'm getting closer or further from the certain book by viewing the numbers on other books around me.
      

Digital age removes need for ink?

      Ink is one of the most expensive liquids available for public mass purchase. It may also dry out while stuck in the printer being unused for a few months, and even if it is used, the ink most probably will not last more than 200 sides of A4.

     With the invention of digital tablets and cloud storage it has made the need for print out almost useless. As you will be able to see web pages and many of other web documents on a digital tablet. 

Creating a discussion post

      There are many different free programs available to the public and as many people struggle with mathematics there is a program called GeoGebra that allows you to create your own graphs and sub-programs to save and even store online for the public to use. Soon it will be available on mobile phones but currently there is a download for PC and Tablets.

It is available here:  http://www.geogebra.org/download

Tutorials: http://wiki.geogebra.org/en/Main_Page

      I made a discussion post on the Core Skills VLE page so all other students can see the post and become aware of the software.