Wednesday 18 June 2014

OutLast Walk Through Part 1





Part one of my OutLast walk through! tell me what you think? what can I improve on?

Friday 13 June 2014

ESO Dark Elf Tanky DPS Build





My First YouTube video Check out my Tanky(ish) sorc

My Digital Portfolio Assignment in Conclusion (results and more)!!


So here I am at the end of my assignment, I didn’t quite get the response I wanted but for now that’s ok.
First of all I would like to thank everyone that was involved. I came shy of my goal of 50 survey participants, only achieving a total of 16, And not many people posted on my blog (probably my fault mainly because I forgot to open it to the public at the start, silly me!)

When I was given the chance to make a “digital portfolio” I was very excited. Something I’ve always wanted to do is gaming journalism, start my own YouTube channel or start a blog for gaming reviews, stuff like that. I never knew where to start or how to get involved. I decided for my major ICT assignment that I would break through some of the things that were stopping me from starting my own blog. The set up was the easy part, I told my lecturer that I wanted to do a survey and she advised me that Google Drive was a really simple tool and it was free!
After setting up my Google account I realized just how many thing I was already using were run by Google. So I dove right in!  My online presence isn’t just my Facebook page anymore, now I have a YouTube account/channel ((https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNgcTOwIU_OegSsmMVDX6Yw)only just started) I have a G+ account, (https://plus.goog le.com/u/0/) I have a blog on blogger (as you know), I’m using Gmail exclusively (www.gmail.com) and Google drive as my cloud (www.drive.google.com). After I set all this up my first blog post was to run the survey (at the time that was all I was going to use my blog for) so I set the survey up and linked it to my blog.  Next all I needed was traffic!

As I said the easy part was setting it up, the hard part was what do I do now? I had no idea how to promote a blog so the first thing I did was hit Facebook. I realized that I didn’t have the target audience I needed in my friends list so I started looking for gaming Facebook pages and slapping my blog link on the ones that would let me. I got about 50 people come to the blog and about 8 people did the survey, no one commented, this just wasn’t good enough!! So then I hit the oracle of online knowledge and “how to” videos… (www.youtube.com)!
I watched a few videos on “How to promote your blog” and got a few ideas. I then decided that I need to find some people that already had my target audience and promote my blog with them. This proved useful and is a tactic I will probably continue to use, by making sure I never over spammed and showing an interest in the other Vlogger/Bloggers content I invited the author and there audience to take part in my survey/blog. All was going well but I started to realize that this wasn’t going to be an easy thing to accomplish. 
During this process I played around with Google+ and added my Twitter and Facebook feeds to it, from then on everything I commented on (e.g. YouTube videos and other blogs) I had the opportunity to share it on my Google+ page which then shared it to my friends and circles and hopefully to their friends and circles. I didn’t want to overdo it, I didn’t want to over spam it with my close friends so I needed to find another way. 
I then made an RSS feed and used Wise Stamp (http://www.wisestamp.com/) to stamp all my emails with my blog, for those of you that don’t know what I’m talking about basically at the bottom of all my emails there’s a link to my blog and a preview of my last Blog post. This has come in handy mainly with meeting people and making contacts in the gaming world rather than getting traffic on my blog. Over all I have a long way to go with getting sustainable traffic and long term readers but hope to get there one day.

The last thing I am adding to my digital portfolio is a YouTube video (http://youtu.be/93d5Rt15YHk). As I said earlier for a long time now I have wanted to start my own blog and YouTube channel so I thought this would be a great thing to take onto the end of my assignment. The video is about 7mins long and is a clip of me playing Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) talking about my character build. It’s very informal, I basically just did it so I could get the hang of uploading to my channel. I used a program called “Fraps Screen Recorder” (http://www.fraps.com/) which I found out about through one of my favorite YouTube gaming channels. It’s very easy to use and you can set frame rate and audio in put everything perfect for YouTube uploads. I plan to use my YouTube channel to promote my blog and vice versa buy using then in conjunction with each other I should be able to start a pretty solid community.

In conclusion this assignment consists of a number of programs and services that I wasn't fully familiar with or had never used before:
3.       Google drive: https://drive.google.com
5.       YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/DrdlokdSp4rtn
      -This is the video voice over I did as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93d5Rt15YHk 
6.       Fraps: http://www.fraps.com/
7.       Wise Stamp: http://www.wisestamp.com
8.       Over all internet research in general
9.    Windows Movie Maker

And Now the Moment We've All Been Waiting For!

The results:
This is a link to my hard data:

This is a link to my averaged and graphed data:

·         Most people surveyed were born between 1980 and 2000.
·         -73% were male, 13% female and 2% Transgender
·        - All were stated they were Gamers with only 13% saying kind of
·        -Most started gaming before the age of ten
·         -47% game over 20 hours a week
·         -20% Xbox, 7%PlayStation, 27% PC, 27% other

And as you can see by the comments in the blog and on the survey there is a very mixed reaction to the steam console and how it will affect the industry as we know it. (All of the following comments have been copied and pasted straight from the survey results in the link listed above, and have not been edited or changed in any way).

It's probably too late and too alternative. Certainly not mainstream enough to pick up in any real capacity. Expect a sad, Zune style death. 
Holy Shit I need one.. Also would be an serious game changer in the console/PC industry, Good on steam for developing it. 
A possible future game changer (once it is advertised more) Would certainly be competition for the PC gaming industry 
i don't think it will sway many PC users but i can see it peaking interest from console gamer's. . Making PC gaming more accessible and customisation easier for the gamer is a great idea and with the brand power of Steam behind it I'm intrigued. 
I'm excited to see the steam box. I think the steam box will have a hard time trying to sell to true pc gamers, but I hope it will bridge the gap Its a product without a market. PC gamers are not looking for a simplified platform and console gamers already have these simplified platforms. 
It was only a matter of time. 
Steam is a horrible form of energy production and transportation. Gas is the future. #Gasbox4life420bro 
It's a bridge to gap console players to PC, and make PCs more accessible away from a desk. It's not a replacement of either, it's a midway point 
Yes I believe that the steam console is going the change the future for consoles it just seems better in every way 
It is the missing link in gaming evolution! It would be a huge competition within both the PC and the console realms. I want one! 
I think its a good idea. No complants. 
Its good 

the Pc will

Over all I am very happy with the response and hope to build on this more and more throughout my gaming/university career. Once again I like to thank everyone who got involved and encourage people to subscribe and like, I will changing a few things about my blog after my assignment has been marked so stick around. please comment/share if you like my content so far and wish to see more also I don't mind if you drop a link to promote your (related) work here.

DrdlokdSp4rtn 

Tuesday 3 June 2014

So far so good. Whats next?

So my course is almost over, which means my assignment is a week away from handing up!
Iv got a lot of traffic and a lot of people have done the survey, I really want to thank you all so much for that.
I have decided that I'm going to continue this blog but change its angle a little. After I hand up my assignment I'm going to change a few things and concentrate more on blogging about my experience in the gaming world. Next year I will be studying a Bachelor of Computer Science, the aim of which is to get into the programming industry. As far as this Blog goes I'm also going to continue with the gaming survey theme where if i find good online surveys and good debating questions I'll post them up here. Basically I want this blog to be a bit of fun with some heated discussions.

I am very anxious to see how my first blog turns out.. If anyone has any advise for me on how to improve and promote I would love too hear it in the comment section below.