Intro
It's almost time for us 3rd year game design students to start applying for coop jobs. I suppose we should've been doing it already, but I haven't :P
One of our most important tools as prospective designers are our portfolios - a place to show employers that we can actually do things. This website is mine (I guess).
Over the break I've been trying to update my website a bit, making the layout better suited to showing off my work. I'm gonna write a little bit about what I've been doing.
New Layout
Basic change, but the home page and nav bar got a refresh:
Taking inspiration from other portfolio websites, I decided to add an "about" page so people can learn a bit about, yknow, me. I also got rid of the "portfolio" sub-page, and moved some featured projects to the home page instead.
Projects
I've done a lot of game dev over the years. The problem is that most of my projects are half-finished prototypes. I go in to explore one concept - maybe procedural generation, or FPS weapon systems, or bullet physics, or heavy IO, or AI, etc. So what should I show off?
In school we are given lots of advice on what to put on our portfolios - things that are complete or published, things that are recent, game jams, personal projects. They suggest against school projects, unfinished projects, or old things. But that's a pickle for me! Most of my personal projects are unfinished and older, and most of my recent or complete stuff was done for school! Gah!
I also want to show off my strong suits - programming and 3d modelling. I did a CS2 level recently - quite a complete project - but that is level design.
Anyways. I'm not sure at this point what I will feature and what I will include on the website at all, but I just need to show that yes, I have been doing this for a while and yes, I can do it pretty well (ego, I know).
Web Design
I don't know much about html, css, or javascript. I'm basically learning as I go along ("learning" meaning stackoverflow). But I want to talk about some of my theory behind my site (web design vs web development):
- Lists and images. They add some variety to the blocks of text and draw the eye. For projects, images are especially important
- Visually distinct "categories" of pages. If you look at how the blogs are formatted vs the home page vs a project page, you'll notice the layout it quite different. I want people to make sure they can recognize that what they are looking at has changed.
- Simplicity. Look at these pages - lots of white, not much distraction. Easy enough.
Images
Images are better across the site now. I finally added the ability to click on images to zoom in on them - the images on all the blogs and projects should be zoomable now (though I may have missed some)
Images also scale better with screen size now. I try to clamp images to a max height, but that means they can run off the edge of the screen if they are wide enough. I learned about CSS media queries and made it so images should get smaller on smaller screens.
That's it
Just wanted write about the evolution of the site, moreso so I can look back on it later. Cya.