Games That Inspired Me: The Oddworld Series

I'm a decent way into my final year of university now and it's time I have to start properly considering where I want to be when I graduate. During a visit home I found a bunch of old documents I made almost a decade ago. Back then all I wanted was to grow up to make games, with not really a clue how. There were a few studios and games that gave me such a strong dream as a young one. During this time of job applications and portfolio tweaking, I thought it might be prudent to go over these studios and games that got me where I am now, and see if it will help with wherever I go in the future.

Review: Dune

Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Huge disclaimer here, I am far from being an accomplished book reader. Aside from self help books and anything I had to read in school I have never used my time to read books. I wanted to change that in 2016 so I picked a book I have heard about for years. I'm a SciFi addict so it made sense to get something to appeal to that. This review is meant for someone in that situation. Anyone who has read more than a handful of books in the past year will probably find this review quite trivial at best.

Greetings To 2017

2016 became a meme for being bad but despite everything that happened I still think 2016 was a fantastic year. I wish I had made set of resolutions for 2016 as a good way to remember what exactly I wanted out of the year. Here I am, enjoying a comfortable night in Cambridge and thought it would be a good idea to write out some resolutions for the highly anticipated 2017.

How A Programmer Deals With Depression

It is (or was) World Mental Health Day. For many people, this will be a day to see mental health as a problem 'over there' that does not and will never affect them. I used to be one of those people who saw it this way. I always appreciated the seriousness of the issue but never imagined it affecting me. How can it? If it's something in my head then it can't really affect me. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, most of all when focusing on the errors in the past. If I wrote about all my mistakes in my blog then it wouldn't have months long gaps. No, this is about where I was in August, and where I am now in October.

Depression and Gamification

This isn't an easy topic. In fact, it's the hardest thing to think about let alone talk about. The very concept of depression is downright frightening if you consider yourself strong willed and stable. The reason why it's scary is it doesn't care about your strengths at all. It will tear all your defences down in seconds and leave you to cope with your darkest thoughts with a wall to climb each time you want to feel like yourself again. It is completely apathetic to what you want and can arrive at the very worst of times. It knows your every weakness including the ones you ignore.

What's This About A Development Society?

With ComSoc having the AGM soon I thought it be important to say I will not be going for the Game Development Coordinator role next year. Instead, I’m going to be building a whole new society on the role. The reasons why I think that’s a good idea take a bit longer to explain. In true computer science style I’ve decided to make a blog about it. So here are a list of reasons I think it’s a good idea. If you’re a computer science student and/or someone in the university interested in making games, please read on. People who aren't into making games but are into making software please read the * at the bottom. Also, I have added animal gifs.

Global Game Jam - From Failure to Success

Two years ago had a big moment for me. It was the first time I had the opportunity to not write about success and how great everything is in University. Instead it was about failure, which is something no one likes to talk about but has plenty to learn from. What I’m talking about is the Global Game Jam 2014 blog post where I made a list of the essentials in a game jam. Now in 2016, I want to see what I still agree with and have taken to heart, what didn’t matter to me and what new things I have learned.

First off, Global Game Jam 2016 went really well for me and my team. We placed first locally with a small, mostly newcomer, but still dedicated group of contestants. Before I speak any more about me and my team I think everyone at the Hull site did amazing work and my respect goes out to the Hull College team who persisted. Well done to all. If you'd like to see the game check it out at the Global Game Jam page.

STEMNET, Code Club and Being An Ambassador for Education

It feels weird that I only really started to learn how to code 2 years ago. I wasn't taught in the worst schools really, they weren't poorly funded and academic performance was above average for the area. My secondary school, The Whitby High School, was and still is proud of their GCSEs at C-A* yet my experience didn't leave me any more qualified to do what I wanted in life. In Sixth Form I struggled with Information Technology and ultimately wasted my time taking the module. I spent most of my time in those classes trying to learn C++ instead of whatever useless material there was and usually got asked to leave because the teacher wasn't a fan of me. It's safe to say my experience of secondary education was less than stellar.

Website Is Up! A Few Thoughts

Sometimes the biggest cliché statements in the world are absolutely correct. In this case "the hardest part is starting" heavily applies to making my current website. I bought the domain and hosting at the end of last year which hosted a site so basic it was barely worth having. I had excuses. As much as it should be embarrassing for a CS student to say I don't have much experience with CSS and HTML. CodeCademy got me sorted on the knowledge but I was pretty lazy throughout my second year at Uni. As soon as I started working on it this week though I couldn't stop. I have a few thoughts on the process though.

Jam Packed in Hull

Teaching kids is a weird experience. I'd like to say it wasn't really that long ago since I was in high school myself (for some reason folks don't say high school here). Now I'm volunteering to help teach kids things I would have loved to learn at their age. What I quickly learned is teaching or even just helping is super exhausting but so incredibly worth it. In this post I'm just going to chat a little bit about Jam Packed in Hull and why it made for a pretty awesome weekend.