#planninng

[rosiemansellprogression]

5 year plan

I have recently been making a small plan to help me through the next 5 years on where I hope to study and what I wish to have completed within those 5 years. At this exact point in time I’m in college two and a half days a week (not including my math’s classes) and working then another two days of the week at the Coteheel National Trust property; the rest of my time I find myself meeting up with friends and finishing off work from the week. I have realized through talking to a range of people and trying out different photography techniques that a more documentary/ journalism side of photography is what I’m more interested in.

From this I now know for certain that I would love to carry on photography onto a BA Honors course in University. After looking into a selection of universities I really liked the Gloucestershire university and the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography (BA HONS) Course. Also I was Quite interested in the University of South Wales and its BA Honors Documentary Photography course which sounded really interesting and focused a lot around what I’m interested in as a photographer. Because I wanted to keep the courses solely around Journalism/documentary it really limited my choices of universities as most don’t run this course, so these were the best that I could find.

Entry requirements for both Universities are I think easy enough to achieve as long as I put enough commitment and hard work into my work now. For the University of Gloucestershire I would have to achieve a DMM or 112 UCAS points to be able to be consider into a place in the course this is including Maths and English at GCSE. I think that this is a reasonable mark to get and I like to think that I would be bale to achieve that grade by the end of the course. The other University of South Wales on the other hand has a slightly lower boundary between MMP-DMM which levels out to around 112-80 UCAS points.     So far from looking at both Universities I am more leaning towards the Gloucestershire University as I am interested more in the course and the surrounding area.  

The locations of the university are in slightly different areas as the South Wales Universities is located in threes places around South Wales these are Cardiff, Newport and Pontypridd. I think that If I had to choose one I would choose Cardiff as Im interested in the city and it holds both a Photography BA Hons and a Documentary BA Hons. The second university I’m looking into and my favourite so far is the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenum. 

[blog-emerald]

newProject = new Life();

We just started our new project, FSC (which I'll describe better as we go further into its production), and, like with all new projects, we are all very excited to start working on it. Nevertheless, before production comes pre-production and planning. And that is where we are right now, so I feel like talking a little about it. Some people feel planning is boring, but even if you've worked on just a  few projects, you can tell the difference between planning and not doing it.

Setting a clear clear scope from the beginning is crucial for the project and the developers' sanity:

If you don't set clear goals, you'll never know if it's actually progressing.

If people working on the project don't feel the progress, they'll start losing interest in the project.

If people lose interest, they'll (most probably) find other projects to work on.

No planning = very poor chances of seeing your project come to life.

Setting clear goals -tasks, features, etc. - is key to another important thing: Testing. Remember: a game is not a game until someone actually plays it. If you wait too long for someone to test your game, and you realize some mechanics are flawed or the game is unbalanced, you may have wasted a lot of time. The earlier you detect flaws in your project, the cheaper it is -both in time and money - to correct them. I have learned something from some projects I've worked on over the past couple of years: it really takes a toll on one's mind to leave a project unfinished because its scope and time required were underestimated.

Bottom line: be as clear as possible about your goals with your game. What are its key features, mechanics, and so on. As soon as you have something that works (even if it's a small piece of it) test it. Get someone else to test it again. Ever wondered why there are alphas and betas before a game gets released? There's why! Then, when the game's core is done and validated, you could say your project was successful. Ship, deliver, publish! Then you can start adding value and new features, and... yes, you guessed right: test them too.

Hope you get your planning going. :)

Juan Castillo.

P.S: You can ask us anything here.