Chris Goodswen Lecture

I had a lecture from a man named chris goodswen last week. He was an ex nuca student who moved to dundee to do a masters degree in game design. He gave us all a talk on how he found everything and how he managed to stay on top of all his work.

The reason he joined the course in the first place was for a number of reasons. He had a boring office job which he disliked but he was always an artist and specialised in traditional art techniques such as sculpting and painting. He was a keen drawer and would often doodle everywhere. Eventually he was made redundant and decided to join the game art and design course due to him being hugely into gaming.

He enjoyed the course itself because he discovered the benefits of research but mainly because he found it to be a very good way to express himself as an artist. For the 3rd year he decided to specialise in 3D character art of which he enjoyed because it was a good chance for him to focus on one specific area of game development.

The game Chris designed was a horror game based on the 1980's fashion craze. this was influenced by pop culture and the fashion industry. He designed a character who was based on children stories of which he turned into a rather synester story of how the character used to eat children etc.


when the course was over chris still didn't feel confident enough in his own abilities so he just kept working on his 3d models and drawing. once his website and portfolio were all ready to exhibit. But once he graduated he was stuck as to what to do next, during this time the game industry was at a job crisis so fresh graduates were finding it extremely hard to recieve work from even small time companies.

Due to this chris decided to go into further education and study at The university in Dundee which is a centre of excellence when it comes to game design. The course there helped him grow technically and artistaclly. It was also a good chance for chris to work as part of a team due to all the units involving having to make a game from scratch. For example chris and a man named stuart had 10 weeks to design a whole game. eventually they created a game called quad which was a shooting game in full 3d with animations and voices. The game itself was powered by the unity engine.

Now chris works freelance and found that the masters degree from dundee has helped him find work everywhere. many people contact him via twitter asking him to do certain things for their advert or game etc.

My personal opinion on all of this is that i found the whole lecture extremely interesting. although it was definately intimidating to find out just how much of a constant battle the game industry is. The 3d work he displayed was excellent and to find out he tought himself the majority of it was a good morale boost for me mainly because if i want to become good at programs such as zbrush and mudbox i'll also need to do a large amount of personal research myself.