Wednesday, 25 July 2018

Week 10 - Wednesday: Tutorial Session

Hofstadter's law is a self-referential time-related adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter and named after him. Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law". In relation to my major project this means that even factoring in my additional contingency time on my schedule, certain tasks are going to run beyond my allotted time frames.

The last week of my project plan. Week eleven will be the last week I will spend on project development.

I am aiming to have all the development work of my major project complete by the end of week eleven. However factoring in Hofstadter's law, I have decided to spend the last week polishing what I already have in my environment as opposed to creating any new major assets.

During my tutorial session I was introduced to the concept of "triage" which is a medical term used to assign degrees of urgency towards patients with wounds or illnesses to decide the treatment order of a large number of patients or casualties. Whilst grim, the concept is quite helpful in determining what areas of my project I should spend my remaining time working on. I was demonstrated vividly that if something couldn't be salvaged then it was optimal to let it go and work on something that was achievable. With this in mind I will be aiming to perfect the debris and finish adding foliage to my environment. I have been using elements such as grass and trees from the Unreal Engine "Open World Demo" as these are high quality vegetation assets that have saved me a great deal of time that I haven't had to model myself.

As these foliage elements are not the focus of the environment and I am not gearing my portfolio toward naturalistic objects, I feel it will be acceptable to use them as window dressing to flesh out the mansion environment. Doing this should save me time and enable me to meet the deadline I have set myself for week eleven.

HOFSTADTER, D. (1979) Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, 20th anniversary ed. New York: Basic Books.

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