Meeting with Andy/New thoughts and ideas

I just had a chat with Andy about what my plans are for the future and what goals I have, both then and during my remaining time at University. It really made me see clearly what I should be doing. As it is 3D which I want to go in, I should probably use 3D within my project Candy Island. His idea was that we should have 3D backgrounds, but not in the normal sense. Rather to use the plane effect, by building the backgrounds in Maya and using the paintings of them over the top. So it will still look 2D in the finished product, but have that sense of depth from the 3D.

Very similar to the backgrounds for this game, which Andy showed me. Very beautiful and very pleasing to the eye, it's much more interesting to look at than just a simple 2D background - or even a standard 3D one:

This is the sort of look that I think we should go for. I think it would make the backgrounds much more interesting, and it also gives me the chance to create some 3D for my project. Me and Andy both agreed that games are having to change their aesthetic look and feel to remain interesting. The likes of an indie game such as Tengami or a big budget console game like Borderlands 2 are changing the ways games look, and are making the games of old with their 'realistic' graphics looking rather boring.

I need to fully know what I want to do once I finish Uni. At the moment I'm a little confused as exactly what path I want to go down, as I've literally done a bit of everything on my course and haven't really focussed on one particular skill. 3D is what I've always wanted to do, to model characters and landscapes, and possibly learn to rig as well. I still want to do this now, and whilst I haven't really done much of it so far, now is my chance to really get going.

We had to write a statement of intent a few weeks ago to give to our lecturers so they can get a better understanding of what we want to do. One of the questions was "What is your career aim". I wrote that my main aim is to be a 3D modeller, but I also said that I enjoy animating in 2D and feel that I'm quite capable of doing so and would consider doing more in the future. Furthermore I stated script-writing and storyboarding were two things I felt I was strong in, as well as editing. As you can see, there is quite a bit of variety in all of those things and I do really need to settle one just one or two of them, and put myself out there in the future as a 'modeller' or '2D animator', as two examples.