End of Exams

Well, exams are now over for me and most university students here in the UK. It's been a tough month but I'm just glad it's all over. I've already been binge-watching youtube videos for the past day or so and I keep feeling as if I should be doing something before realising that I have no work to do and can pretty much do whatever I want all day and not feel guilty about it. 

I have now got another three months of this more or less. I have a data input job for six weeks with the local exam board in Cardiff which should cover my summer rent for the house that I will be moving into in just over a week and then leaving for three months, and some more on top so that'll be nice. Maybe not while I'm doing the job which sounds  little on the boring side but hopefully it won'r be too bad, and after all, I'll take pretty much any job at the moment to make up for being a poor student.

The rest of the summer looks reasonably balanced between activities and relaxation. I have a one week residential training course at the beginning of august and am hoping to go away for a few days with my girlfriend to paris which should be nice. Though I'm slightly worried that after that holiday I'll be broke and with all of the time doing nothing that I have I'll end up spending more money on things that are totally unnecessary, especially with the +Steam Summer Sale coming up. 

Last week's post about +Factorio was probably my best received post so far, so I was thinking of maybe trying to do a few more game reviews and maybe some other things around that, maybe a +YouTube Let's Play series on a  few things if people were interested at all? My flatmates were thinking of starting a +YouTube  channel at some point, at the moment getting the hardware together is proving a little time consuming, especially considering we have all had exams for the past month and haven't had much time to do anything other than revise. 

Anyway this is just a post to let people know about the coming few months and there will hopefully be a new post every week  at least for the foreseeable future depending on page views, time and whether I have anything to write about.

Factorio

Factorio is a game where the player has landed on an alien planet and is tasked with preparing the planet for a colony ship to arrive from earth. This is done by mining ores and then using them to produce materials and machines. All of this can be automated using conveyor belts, automated assembly machines and many other things. The game is in late alpha at the moment and costs €10 (roughly $13US or £8.20) which is a very reasonable price for a game as well put together as this one seems to be on first impressions. 

Official screenshot (not one of mine)

The game is a bit like Minecraft in some respects, however this game is a top down view of the world rather than a first person view and there is much less physical mining to be done and more automation, engineering and even research needed in order to progress through the game. Obviously as the game isn't finished there are a few things that will change, but nothing seems broken. Everything works as it should, there don't seem to be any bugs or glitches and it is surprisingly fun. I have only just got the game so this is a bit of a first impressions post at the moment and I can't say that more of the late game stuff involving logic and complex wiring works perfectly. But the early game, mechanical system of automation works very well. 

The amount of planning that is needed to ensure that the conveyor belt lines all stay separate and that the right goods go to the right place and then they get made into the right thing that then gets taken somewhere else is substantial. I have played a game where I ended up not giving myself enough room to work and messed up my production of science packs a little bit and spent a good while trying to fix this issue. I was surprised at how not-boring this was, I guess I just enjoy problem solving and things like that and I guess that's one reason I really like this game and would recommend it to anyone who liked Minecraft or who is interested in this sort of thing. 

Yes, trains!

Although it can look really complex and quite daunting, so far I've found that it really isn't that hard so long as you take it slowly and think about what you are trying to do and think about what each part of the "machine" needs to do and how it will do that. There are so many different things that you can do and I can see myself spending hours on this game.

There are enemies and there is a working combat system with regenerating health and auto-aim with the pistol and the SMG. There is an abundance of technologies to research, unlocking more and more things that you can craft that will enable you to build more complex machines that are able to do more so that you can automate more and your base grows exponentially in complexity and in size as you progress. However as everything can be done slowly it isn't too difficult a task for even a novice like me to set up some reasonably complex (I think) systems without much trouble.

To conclude, I would recommend this game to most of my friends as it is really fun, but I can see that some people might not enjoy it quite so much due to the complexity of bits of it but when you finish building a machine that works it just feels good and it looks incredibly cool. There is a free demo, which includes the first three levels of the tutorial campaign over on the Factorio website so if you're interested do go check it out.

Mid Exams Update

I am now about halfway through my exams with three of the five exams completed. I'm happy to say that the exams have all been a little easier than I had been expecting which could go either way in terms of results to be honest. I have also had two of my assessed essays back and got mid 2-2's on both of them which isn't so bad considering I hand't done an essay subject since year eleven up until this year.  So overall everything seems to be going ok.

On receiving my essay back and getting a solid 2-2 of 56 marks, a girl I know on my course who got 57 remarked that it "wasn't good enough". Now I understand that other people have different levels of expectation to me but I always assumed it would be general common courtesy to keep thoughts like that to yourself or at least only divulge those views to people who have either done as well as you have or better. It was a bit of a demoralising comment to be honest. I had just got a mark that I was happy with and was quite willing to sit on but the comment caused me to get a bit self-conscious, which I know I probably shouldn't have, I mean why should I compare myself to others?

However at GCSE level I was getting A's and A*'s and I would only utter my displeasure at getting a B or lower to friends who had got higher or to those that had specifically asked me that question. However at A-level I started getting terrible results. I remember getting a Facebook  message that really annoyed me from a guy in my physics class asking how I did. When I replied UDCC he said that I must be "more than disappointed" which to be fair was true and then when I asked him what he got he told me "ABBC" and said that he was also disappointed and probably would have done better had he started revising earlier than two days before. I however had been doing work (not enough work however) for a good few weeks and that made me feel a bit crap again. 

Anyway, now that I'm halfway through my exams I feel like I've been doing enough work on the whole and that the rest of the exams should go alright so long as the questions aren't too awkward...