#essay project

[ella-ba1b]

Essay research project: 30/01/19

[ella-ba1b]

Essay project: 17/01/19

today i began work on my introduction, using some of the research i made previously. i also made some changes to my essay plan ,mainly structural changes. i used the ideas i already had and changes the plan from three paragraphs, to five paragraphs not including the introduction and the conclusion because i felt that some of my points were too much to put into one paragraph. i also did more research on the purpose of the story, using interviews from satrapi. 

[jezraka]

Being Adaptable to Change

A project management advice that everyone should follow

When change occurs too many times, we tend to get overwhelmed and frustrated. Working on our Video Game Clone project, there was never a constant vision of the final product. However, we also had a goal in mind at the very beginning which consisted of various possibilities that we hoped to achieve. Due to a number of different limitations and unforeseen time constraints, however, we had to limit our goals and aim to meet deadlines rather than the initially desired highest quality standards for the project. This was as a result of being overly ambitious at the start of the project and this meant that we needed to make various changes for us to get the project completed. Change is inevitable, therefore, managing and being adaptable to change is vital for every project management.

One of the biggest changes we had to make for the game “Scorched Earth” was the landscape. Scorched Earth is a turn-based battle in 2D terrain, in which tanks adjusts the angle and power of their turret before firing. Each shot destroys the terrain creating a gap in its place. The terrain, along with the tanks, can fall down when a gap is created. This was one if not the most difficult features of the game that we needed to implement. However, we overlooked this problem and left it halfway through the project in order to move on.

During the first few weeks, we worked on implementing the more obvious physics features of the game. At this point, we still had no idea what visual style we wanted the game to have. Given that we still had a lot of mechanic implementation to do, we used a tank sprite that my partner initially designed. We decided to use it for the prototype until we needed to change it.

However, when I started implementing turret rotation, there was a couple of issues. In order for this feature to work, I needed a separate tank body and its turret. The sprite had to be redesigned to adapt to this feature. It was easy to disregard later features that required changes to the sprites and art style while working on the prototype. We needed to be able to adapt to these changes as we progress.

When we finally developed a functioning tank, complete with mechanics and features, we decided to face our biggest fear, the landscape issue. However we eventually realised that the software is incapable of creating the landscape feature as we initially devised. This software limitation led us to create a new “style” of the game. We made the landscape into a 2D cuboid terrain. However, this didn't fix our art style indecision issue, it just made it worse! Now we had to think of a tiled landscape that will look appealing.

Implementing features meant changes to the art style. We altered a significant portion of our art style to suit the new tiled landscape. I also had to cope with an unexpected change that my partner decided halfway through the project. She had designed the menu art and changed the title of Scorched Earth into Tank Wars! This introduced a whole new themed art style into the game and we had to redesign the Tank sprites entirely to suit the Space theme. We also had to deal with the terrain styling again and experimented with a lot of Outer space looking landscape.

All in all, we had to adapt and re-adapt our art style due to indecision and limitations discovered during the design process. Constant change meant we had to be able to quickly switch the direction of our workflow. Communication about these changes was also crucial especially when working on a team. Deciding on the changes, however big or small, should be discussed within the team to avoid chaos. People often fear change or fear to change themselves. It is important to remember that change is necessary in most cases for us to meet our goals. Management of change is probably one of the key aspects of project management and I highly recommend people not to limit themselves with one possible outcome. A project can drift into different direction in a matter of time and we should all be prepared when this situation occurs.

Jessiel Cabasan

[madistuartresearch]

John Hilliard - skewing perceptions.

[madistuartresearch]

Mini documentary by Danny Cooke. ‘An affectionate portrait of one man’s deep sea diving career, told through his extraordinary collection of marine artefacts’.

[madistuartresearch]

George Butler’s time in Afghanistan, documented both in the moment and further in a home/studio environment.

[wigglebox]

devildoescry replied to your post: Question for Non-Americans

Okay, I know I’m an American, so I’m not supposed to answer this. But I’ve been noticing that the blind patriotism of old is dying off. Besides uneducated people, most of us 30 and under are starting to call bullshit on it. Do you feel similar?

I think my generation, the later part of it in our mid twenties, we still have that TROOPS! PATRIOTISM! AMERICA! GUNS! thing in our blood some what like. The 90′s kids we toe the line between much like we did growing up knowing the time before the internet was a thing and then learning it as much as we do now. We’re caught between two different lifetimes and I think it’s the same ATM

But I can only hope as the younger generations keep growing, they stop listening to their parents and actually understand that having a flag doesn’t mean you’re a patriot and having a gun doesn’t make you a patriot nor does racism and sexism and all the batshit things americans do in the name of freedom. 

[mentalwires]

Essay 2: Thinking, learning, doing

If deliberate thought is a rarity, how should we change the ways we go about acquiring knowledge?

The reason why I'm writing these essays is pretty simple. I often have what I think are interesting thoughts or ideas, but for the most part I don't do anything with them, or do anything that would keep them with me; they occur and pass away. And because they're transient, they don't accumulate into any larger understanding. The main reason that I'm writing these essays is that I want to make myself capture and integrate these transient ideas to a greater degree.

Notice the phrase "make myself". I understand this project, in light of the topics mentioned in yesterday's post, as a form of forced intellectual work: even though knowledge is very important to me and I'm aware that gathering my thoughts is a prerequisite to a coherent understanding, I won't do it as a matter of course, because it requires effortful thought. I can only make myself mentally exert myself by making myself complete a task that requires the desired mental exertion — these essays.

I think this is a very broad phenomenon, and one of the reasons that the higher education system has the form it presently does. Self-education seems like it would be a highly desirable prospect for anyone interested in learning for its own sake, given that checking out a textbook and reading it is a fast and cheap way to acquire large amounts of knowledge, as well as affording much more intellectual freedom than taking a class does. The problem is motivation. One of the major things that colleges do is create extrinsic incentives for students to do things that are unpleasant (because they require intellectual effort) but result in learning. I usually feel resentful about having to write an essay until I'm actually writing it and realize that I'm learning much more than i ordinarily would in class.

It's probably also why learning out of textbooks is so incomplete, even if you can manage to do it. If people could devote as much intense thought as they wanted to whatever they wanted, you could build a full knowledge base just by reading a few textbooks and then spending a while intensely thinking about the facts and their connections and their implications. But that's not how it really works: people don't usually learn much that isn't explicitly stated in their textbooks, and they need teachers to point out the connections and implications.