In the beginning of the course I was really confused about what this all could be about. Especially Anton Eliens’ homepage improved this feeling of being confused. I was wondering what he is expecting from us and tried to figure it out of his lectures. After a while I realized two things. The first thing is that he wants us to be able to present ourselves and how to sell ourselves in a good way (hopefully an understandable translation of the German phrase “sich gut verkaufen koennen”). The other thing is that he wants us to experience the web, which worked really well at least in my opinion.
To underline that I am going to explain you what I already learned. The first thing was the blogger. I have never read a blog before (shame on me) and never searched for something like that. But in case of your assignment I created a blog on blogger which was really easy to do. Then I searched for things I can add to the blog (beneath these simple things like links or pictures….). I found out that it is very easy to add many gadgets to your blog. I used a list of interesting links, a video bar gadget as well as the blog archive and the fish gadget (the one window where fishes follow your mouse arrow and eat the food you can put by clicking).
Most other things I learned are because of the interactive video project (I will come later to this). At first I experienced the Google documents and Google presentations, which I never even heard of before. It was kind of fascinating for me that you can edit your work with multiple persons at the same time because I had the problem of not being able to even open a Microsoft Word document while another person is editing it.
Another important thing I got to know is the Google groups. There it is really easy to create an own page with several features. We did so for our group RiG (come to this later too). But because of the fact that this is repeating with the blog thing I am going to switch to the XIMPEL part. For that I need to explain our interactive video assignment first.
Well we had to form groups which members have the same interests in case of what the video should be about. My group is called RiG which stands for “Reality interacts Gaming”. Our themes are fitness and education, so that our interactive video will be about that. Our concept for the video is that we introduce a fat, lazy student who got just broken up with his girlfriend because of him playing too much computer games. Then there is an opportunity for the student to change his life, he sees an advertisement about a new game which makes the player do more sports and learn more for school or university. As player of this interactive video you can decide whether to play the game or not (of course this is only one of many choices). If you do everything right you can make your avatar an attractive, intelligent and sporty person. To realize the interactive part in the video we needed a program called XIMPEL.
I already have some programming experience so I am the one of our group who does the XIMPEL part. After realizing that XIMPEL is not a user friendly click and drag program as you often have nowadays I started to figure out which data of the XIMPEL-package stands for what. Then I started to read the code and tried out my own examples. In the end I really can say that the name (S/X)IMPEL fits. Furthermore I learned how to edit videos using the Adobe software. After editing I had to consider the problem of how to convert all the videos we made into the same format, size and so on. Luckily I already had a program for that before. The program is called SUPER and I think it really is. It is not only for free it can even handle more formats than I know. Therefore I made the first interactive video part we already showed in our course.
Now I would like to change to another theme than just the ‘We Create Identity’ course.
I would like to tell something about my expectations and hopes concerning the whole study program. Many things we did so far are the creative part of our study and almost only what we did on our own belongs to the technology part. Regarding this I hope our study program will become a little more technical. I am especially interested in C++ game programming as well as game programming in any other language. Therefore I would be very delighted if we implement these themes in our study program. What I would like to do is a simple game like for example the classic Mario. This is because I am very interested in how you design these “progressive environments”.
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