Yes, you didn’t read it wrongly. Three years of enduring my parents’ persistent question, “When are you going to graduate?” has come to an end (that is, if you do not mark it with the graduation ceremony).
I’ve learnt a lot throughout these 3 years and really enjoyed the journey. Weird thing was that it was not really what I learnt in the classroom that gave me this sense of satisfaction, but rather the friends I made and the self learnt subjects in my bedroom. No doubt the lecturers were still the main source of inspiration, like Mr Oran, Mr Seow, Mr Melvin, Mr Eric, Mr Lawrence, Ms Christina, Mr Wee Lian and yes, Mr Agus (he got me to carry a sketchbook wherever I went). All these people really made me behave like a Creative Professional and I’m pretty sure I will join the community of creativity real soon.
Most poly students go on to perform industrial attachment at renown companies but most of my course mates stayed to do a project for an entire year. Depending on how you see it, its either a really good time to slack (because no one was constantly supervising you) or to really make an impact for your portfolio. My group went with the latter.
When we started out, we knew what we wanted, to make a game. Thats where our passion were heading towards when Oran told us that we get to make a game back in year one. So we formed a group but sadly, the entire clique didn’t manage to stay together but we got 5 of 7 in it. Challenges were abound as we were trained in Interactive Media and only taught to build and script in UDK. Next we had to deal with interpersonal relationships within the team, even the best of friends might crack under the work = credit system. However, a year passed and we heeded Oran’s advice well, “lock down your main gameplay and stick to it no matter what!”
Cutting the long story short, we did have a rather decent game as rookies in this discipline. Couple our great demo with a well prepared presentation and *BOOM!* we got really good reviews from the judging panel. This nearly brought tears into my eyes as our one year of hard work finally paid off. What’s more, we were offered the opportunity to enterprise our game and creating a studio with the people I love to work with is becoming a reality. No doubt that the better route would be to let each member gain more experience in the industry but all great people start off in an orthodox fashion don’t they? (Just look at the number of famous college dropouts in the IT industry)
Come tomorrow, we’ll decide the fate of this idea…either way, I can only smell good things coming our way. I’ll update with the outcome and don’t worry…I’ll be blogging more often with my commissioned work as a freelance developer and designer.
Let me end this blog post with the awesome people of Outsiders Allowed with our supervisor, Mr Melvin Tan.
Locked in a Room 