My standards, regarding myself, are a lot higher than it’s healthy. I compare myself to experts of any given field, forgetting the years of hard work they’ve had, and sometimes panic. At times I’m ashamed of my personal portfolio, and wish to improve it. But I know that at the time there was nothing I could do about it, I had already done my best. And even though today I could take my work and change it, make it better, I chose not to. The vision I had at the time is not the vision I have now. And trying to change what I did is a lesson in futility – why improve my old mp3 player when I could use my new understanding to create another from scratch, unconstrained by the old limits? Why waste my new vision so foolishly?
I therefore submit the most relevant work so far, along with comments.
First is the mp3 player. I wrote the entire code myself and created the interface as well. There are features I wanted to add at the time, but didn’t get the opportunity to do so. It has no mouse capabilities, a huge drawback which could be solved with roughly 50 lines of codes. The playlist isn’t as capable as I want it to be, but I am somewhat constrained by the Processing rendering engine. And the interface isn’t nearly as “Web 3.0” as I’d like it to be (that is to say, not modern and good looking enough), and it also has a few bugs, but, again, I am constrained by the rendering engine. But, for a week’s worth of work, done by someone nearly completely new to programming (apart from a few sad hours of Pascal 5 years ago), I have to say it looks rather good.
The paper on the mp3 player can be downloaded if you right-click this link.
Second comes my artwork. The pieces shown here are concept art for the indie game I’m working on with my friends – they are links to my deviantArt gallery (which can be found in the About me page and the links on the right). The gallery contains some of my recent digital paintings as well as a majority of my completed artistic photos. The drawings are largely irrelevant at the moment, but will prove crucial farther down the road, as our game begins to shape up. I have numerous other works in progress (about 200 different drawings) that I keep on my computer until finished. Some are concepts and ideas for the game, some are directly related to my school work and portfolios. Until they are done and ready for submission, few see them – a small community of concept artists and enthusiasts like myself, that provide me with feedback and critical help.
Third comes this PDP. I had considered this some sort of cheating, initially, but I’ve put a lot of work in it and I feel it exemplifies best my current skills. Moreover, it is a variant of an infinite loop, seeing that it refers to itself and is thus, recursive. The concept is dear and amusing to me and I often reference it in my work – at one point, the story of the indie game was largely a big infinite loop, but quickly grew too complex and out of my control, as an infinite loop is wont to do.
According to my current understanding, the PDP is as good as I can make it. Perhaps in a year I will think of ways to improve it, but at the moment, this is the best I’m capable of. I had to discard numerous ideas, constrained both by time and by the fact that this is, after all, just a PDP, not an autobiography. Maybe in a decade, such a work will be deemed necessary, as, ultimately, I want to innovate in the games industry, and also to change the current perception of video games, as a simple past time for teenage boys.
In the end, video games are interactive storytelling, fulfilling an aeons-long dream of the everyman: being the hero, saving the world and kissing the princess. I’m just the narrator.
Go here for part one: The Story.
Go here for part two: The Quest.
