First Days

As we first started our first of three years on the computer games arts course, we were sat down for an introduction to the course, within this we learnt who would be teaching us this year and what they would be teaching, we have Robin Ledger, who would be covering the 3D side of things, such as Maya and Zbrush, then there is Steve Brown who will be covering the 2D area, like Photoshop and digital drawing, then finally there is Ewan Armstrong, who will be teaching us Unity, a game engine which over the course will be used to design and develop video games. There is also Bill Balaskas who will be giving us lectures on the understanding of art.

Throughout this introduction, we were shown examples of what we can achieve if we work our hardest. There was a video game that had just been released that was made by several students on the course. We got to see the trailer of this game and to be honest, that's when the course really started to excite me. I then knew I had made the right decision in doing further education.

Once the introduction was over we were given the task of finding our way around the campus by answering various questions such as"where is the pigeon hole located?".

We then had a lecture on the history of video consoles by Steve Goss, a team leader at supermassive Games. he taught us from the very start including space invaders and pong and how they affect the society today. How video games are art and how to achieve being a successful video game artist. I really did enjoy the lecture given by Steve Goss and I am extremely looking forward to when he next comes to Farnham. I have extra notes within my sketchbook.

On the next day we we all gathered into a hall, curious to what we would be doing next. Ewan Armstrong walks into the room and tells us that we would be getting into groups of 8 and will be creating our own story off of a word that he would be handing us. My group approached Ewan, anxiously waiting for our fate. We would be handed Penguin. Straight away we headed to the library and the ice breaker took full effect. We all liked the idea of having this hero penguin in a post apocalyptic world, so we decided to create a mind map. from this we all had different stories of what was going to happen with this penguin, after a mass debate we decided that we would have a new ice age which would affect the roles of humans and penguins. This is our story:

Penguin life starts to flourish and they end up all over the world, on the other hand, the humans are isolated to England, where penguins have become a protector of the human race. Humans are promised a paradise if they win this lottery that comes with this high fat food substance, so the humans just eat more and more until they are critically obese. when the winner goes to paradise it turns out that this paradise is no more than a death camp, when the obese humans are fed to Shamu the killer whale. It was an effort made by the emperor P-penguin to protect the penguin race. When Jeff the king penguin discovers of this deed he goes to the camp himself to find a prisoner by the name of Franz and frees him. Franz and Jeff gather the last remaining human leaders who have not been brain washed by the penguin propaganda and get them to rise up. Some of the humans don't believe and act as an penguin guard, they didn't last long. Jeff needed to overthrow the emperor penguin. knowing that Shamu the killer whale fed on human flesh, Jeff stuck a homemade bomb to the emperor penguin and threw him into the mouth of Shamu. The bomb had worked and Shamu was blown into a million pieces and the human race could rebuild their race.
The End?

As you can see, we really got stuck in with the story and enjoyed working as a team to create this completely absurd story. All together I feel that the ice breaker worked extremely well and that was evident when we were presenting it to the other members of CGA.

The two quick drawings that I did to represent the story.