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| All the faces shall be eaten with glee! |
Happy New Year!! Wait, wow this place is sparser than my football knowledge and common sense combined, there's hardly any substantial bodies here to direct my yuletide cordialities! Something must be done.
This calls for a New Year's resolution. From this moment hence I will be keeping this blog up and running, spick and span, with all the brass grubnuts and dolphin pipertublets polished weekly to an immaculate sheen. This machine is going to run like a dream! This is how it should have begun in the first place.
Spurring this action is not only the need to document my zany ideas and schemes, but also to keep any interested peeps abreast of my activities. The next change in my life will happen in just over 3 weeks time. I will be starting a second Masters degree on Jan 27th, but this time slightly removed from the realms of Physics. Instead I'm taking a large leap towards the games industry by enrolling on the National Film and Television School's course in Games Design and Development.
I'm still amazed that I've journeyed so far from my original goal of living in Japan. Remembering my absent minded approach to it all - never really making the effort to learn Japanese, dodging the JET program applications etc - makes me realise I was submerging myself in a glass bowl that I couldn't see or define. Being a goldfish is fine if you're okay with that lifestyle. But it was depleting me, causing me to fade in and out of poor decisions, watery words and aimless wandering.
Without wanting to drag out the dramatics too much longer, I have to admit that the NFTS course may well be a personal miracle for me. As soon as I found out about the narrative-focused, cinematographic influenced degree I couldn't help but feel a tug at those long suppressed creative cords wrapped up within me. Something felt right, even if the financial situation didn't. I'd just lost a job after moving to Leeds and was feeling broken and bewildered. I was back to barwork and being completely misplaced. However two magnificent creatures emerged from the wilds. One was the NFTS course, an elusive beast that sent me hunting far and wide for the necessary skills to capture it. Suddenly confronted with tools like ZBrush, Unity3D, Blender, C#, and a myriad of other essentials the going got tough fast. Still I managed to reel in an interview with the school after submitting a hastily constructed portfolio. Getting accepted on the course couldn't have made me happier!
The other animal was a job with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe back in good old Liverpool. I've been riding this one for the last 7 months now, and that will soon come to an end when I move to Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire.
I was given an incredible window of opportunity to fly headfirst into the career I'd only ever dreamt of - that of a games designer. I'm so grateful for the nudges, encouragement and support along the way. How impossible it would be to do anything like this alone.
From here, I shall be posting about my time at the school. I'll also be discussing my other projects, one of which is an augmented reality app game called Forgotten Futures. With just four months to go before it kicks off at the Threshold Festival of Music and Arts, I'll be attempting to document the monumental changes I undergo as I try balancing a new university course with running a Kickstarter and delivering an app game to the general public! Also stay tuned for some tips and advice on applying for the course and for funding, and know that you are not alone in struggling to reach those lofty goals.
2014 looks set to be made of something special!
~Peace
