Newsletter 1/8/25

Greetings everyone! This is Aidan, in case you forgot what this is, I’m sending out my newsletter again to update everybody on what I have been up to. It is a new year and hopefully you are looking forward to what this year will bring. I certainly am, as I will be going abroad for the summer and fall quarters. But before we get to that I should probably cover everything that has happened over the fall quarter of my second year at UCI.

This quarter felt far shorter than any of my others at UCI, likely because I am finally settling in nicely to the school (my first year was a bit turbulent) and am enjoying everything the school and the surrounding area has to offer. Over fall quarter I took 3 Game Design classes fulfilling more of my major requirements. This first class was about emotional design in games and how games are designed to create meaningful and impactful emotional moments. The second was a stats class which taught me about statistical analysis using R Studio. The third class was a special topics class meaning that the class is taught by the same professor every time but the topic changes, this quarter it was card games, for this class we made card games and analyzed various types of card games and the design opportunities and difficulties card systems bring. Outside of the classes for my major I took a music theory class that helped me build my knowledge of how music works. The music theory class was interesting and fits nicely with my music production, which I have been doing in my freetime along with DJing, which I started at the beginning of the quarter. 

I have also been working on a game project with some friends and a larger team throughout the quarter and will continue doing so until the end of my second year. Every quarter, the Video Game Design Club (one of the larger clubs at UCI) allows members to pitch game ideas to the Club and if people like the idea, they can choose to work on the game with them. My friend pitched her game idea at the start of the quarter; it’s a narrative dialogue-based game which takes place on a floating island that is falling back to Earth. The player must work to save everybody on the island through dialogue decisions throughout the game. I have been helping her with design, narrative, and writing but mostly have been doing 3D modeling for the project, essentially I am responsible for making all of the objects which build up the scene the scenery the player sees. I have been 3D modeling for a bit now but actually working with the pipeline of getting things from the 3D modeling software (Blender) into the game engine properly has taught me a lot. Initially we were going for a more realistic style using photo scanned textures and detailed modeling but ultimately the game's art style will soon probably be entirely revamped due to performance concerns/ better optimization, also to give the game a more unique visual style, something that was not being achieved originally. I think I’ve learned just as much working through the massive amount of issues that have arisen so far over the course of development on this project as I have from many game design classes I’ve taken. Working with a team obviously has its difficulties and I will be doing it for probably my entire career so thankfully I am getting more experience on how to resolve issues between people when the stakes are lower than they will be later on. I am not quite sure when the game will have a playable demo but I will be sure to update you when it is ready.

This quarter I am taking two more game design classes and two other general ed classes which both seem interesting enough. Looking further into the future, this coming summer I will be going abroad and doing an internship in Singapore, then after a few weeks back home in August I will head abroad again to spend my fall quarter studying in London studying abroad at the University of London Queen Mary. After hearing about how much my brother enjoyed his time abroad in Paris I am really looking forward to going abroad later on this year. Overall it's been a good fall quarter. I cannot believe it's already 2025.

That's everything for now… Aidan Hart