Final Prototype - Unreal, no restrictions, choose your own team, history and expectations.

For the final prototype we were to develop a game using the Unreal engine. This announcement got some applause in our class, as evidently many of us were waiting for a chance to make a game and gain some experience using this engine. To add to the good news, Bob and Roger also allowed us to create whatever game we wanted, no restrictions or parameters, and they also let us divide up into the teams we wanted to. This was great news for me as it allowed us the freedom to have the kind of experience I felt would be the most beneficial to all of us.

I understand the principle of restrictions being important in creative endeavors. I also understand that having those restrictions are part of the industry, and is the environment that 99% of us will work in for most of our careers. However, that's exactly the kind of experience I was looking to get away from when I chose to go to school at the U. I've been working in the industry for more than 10 years, I've been working under restrictions, and outside requirements for all of my career. I came to school to get away from that, and have a chance to freely develop what myself and my team members were capable of and wanted to develop.

As I learn about the kind of environment that existed in the computer science department at the U during the 60s and 70s, I realize that's the kind of experience I was expecting in a graduate multidisciplinary video game program.

We know that much of the graphics technology we use today was developed by University of Utah computer science students under the direction of a couple key professors at the time, David Evans and Ivan Sutherland. Some of these students included Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar, John Warnock, founder of Adobe, Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, Jim Clark, founder of SGI, and Alan Ashton, founder of WordPerfect to name a few.  In hearing some of these former students talk about their time at the U, they often cite the environment created by Evans and Sutherland as a key contributing factor to much of their success. They relate how these 2 teachers provided a free, open environment where students were self-directed and motivated to study and explore whatever facet of computer graphics they wanted to. To be fair, they also cite the timing of their time at the U as integral to their success. At the time these students were attending school, the government was throwing a lot of money at the program to help develop the graphics technology they were developing.

In hindsight, it's probably unfair to expect lightning to strike twice at the U, but when this final assignment came to us, I felt it was a chance to work, even if for only a few short weeks, under the kind of environment that I was expecting to find when I began.  So I was pretty stoked.