Over the past few years, I have gained a commitment to creating games, constantly wanting to push my knowledge and understanding of how games work internally and what makes them so fun to play. I aim to push my own limits and create fun games, filled with mechanics that are creative and entertaining to play with. I believe that your university is the ideal place to enhance my skillset to achieve this.
For the past two years, I have been dedicated to the Newcastle College Games Design and Development course, where I found my love for creating games. While in attendance, I have developed key programming skills, problem solving, and out-of-the-box ideas on how to achieve a goal within a games engine. This has enhanced my skills with various software related to games programming and design, such as Unreal Engine, Blender, and various Adobe software.
Using this skillset, I have been able to create a diverse range of works, such as a fully realised 3D first person shooter, complete with a dynamic wave system, a perk system, multiple weapons and a fun gameplay loop, always keeping players on their toes, or various visual effects using Unreal Engines Niagara system, and models made in Blender. When creating each piece of work, I always stick to an iterative cycle of design and development, where I create something, find what could be improved/doesn’t work, and rework it, restarting the cycle.
In addition to the college course, I have also participated in various extra activities to improve my skills. One such activity was to pitch a game idea to a panel of industry professionals. Myself and 3 others came up with an idea for a game with the working title of ‘Tension’. In short, it is a game where you play as a plague doctor in the mid 1600s at the height of an incredibly infectious disease. You must navigate the city and gather as many uninfected civilians as possible, grouping them up at the city walls. As you do this though, there are patrols of guards that try to stop you from doing so. If you get caught, it’s game over. This idea was well received by the panel of people who we presented to.
As well as the game pitch, I also created my own portfolio website from scratch using the Vue.js framework. This website houses all of my showcased work, from any major/minor projects I work on, any game jams as well as any nice looking VFX work that I do. The website took roughly a month of on and off work, and was made without any major prior knowledge on websites.
In my free time, I also work at a part time customer service job, which I have held for more than a year, which has helped with my social skills. I am considered friendly and a hard worker, and often help customers with any questions they have.
I also spend a lot of my free time playing games online, with my favourite genres being racing games, first person shooters, or puzzle games, they’re always fun to play. I always like to try other game genres though since they often make a very unique and fun experience to play, which I hope to also make while at your university and in the future afterwards.
Thank you for taking the time to read my application, and I hope to study at your university in the future, it would be a massive honour.