Portfolio

As seen above, I made a mock-up layout of how I would like my experience to be. I decided to ask some peers about what they thought of this layout. I wanted to get a non-biased view, so I asked a couple of people with different experiences when it came to design. I asked another game design student, one of my coworkers, who is only vaguely familiar with games, and my mother, who doesn’t know anything about game design. I ended up getting similar feedback from them all, with them commenting that it was a layout that made sense in the context of my experience. The coworker additionally made a comment about how he thought it was great that I include some background initially. I thought it makes most sense going in order of events in my life, too, as it will make the content easier to follow as you move throughout. I also thought that an introduction with the games I grew up with and were influenced by would give someone a good idea on why I decided to get into game design. It will also give them a better understanding of how much I love games. I also decided that separating different parts of my journey with games using different displays would be a good way to get information across without it being too overwhelming. Splitting it into smaller chunks will allow me to better explain my thoughts about the games during that time when I record a voice-over for each area.
I also included different parts of school that got me interested in games, such as falling in love with computer science and coding in secondary school, and realizing how much I loved studying different forms of media in college. I think these are important to include because it is showing the journey of how I got to where I am now. It also gives some background to what I studied in school that would be relevant to a game design job to show that I’ve always been interested in that field. The area after that is a room dedicated to going to the University of Hull. This is significant as it marked a real turning point to where I decided to exclusively focus on my love for video games, whereas before I was mainly doing computer science.
The next 3 rooms I decided to showcase the work I have done since coming to uni. Separating them into the different years means that I can show my improvements since first coming to university. It will also allow me to discuss each year as a whole when doing a voiceover for these displays, allowing me to give my thoughts about the work I produced and what I learned and other interesting comments.
The end area will also have a “work in progress” area because I want it to represent the fact that I am still going down this game design journey and I have more to come in the future. This idea of a museum-like walkthrough of my game design journey could easily be expanded on after getting a job with the industry or after university. The way I imagine the end right now is to have some assets to hint at construction, for example having some gates covering an area, maybe scattered with some paint buckets, ladders, and curtains to cover what is behind. I think that is a really effective way to show that my journey hasn’t ended yet and more will be coming from me in the future.
Now I am happy with my basic layout, I will start to create the layout in FrameVR.