The Art Of Gaming

Hi everyone! This week I started on making my level and I have to say I'm very satisfied with the layout that I've created. I was brainstorming on how I was going to go about it and I wrote some things down on a piece of paper as well as drawing out my path. I decided to give up on my search of working jump and speed pads even though I spent a long time trying different codes. I'm pretty sure I watched every single youtube video there is as well as searching it up on google. Every single page is outlined in purple when I search up "Jump pad Unity".  I tried my best with the camera movements. I wanted to implement rotation with the arrow / WASD keys because when I was doing the previous unity challenge with the footballs the camera mechanics were exactly what I wanted. I put in the scripts on my player and on the camera but nothing really worked. The camera was inside my sphere half the time and I didn't know how to fix it, I think it's something to do with...

 Lesson 4.4 This tutorial was pretty simple and quick to finish. The instructions basically made it so enemies were spawning in waves: so for example the first wave 1 enemy spawns, the second wave 2 enemies spawn etc. At the end of the tutorial, We had to make the power-up that we created at the very start to spawn after each wave as well. The code was a little difficult to understand but I don't think i'll really need it when it comes to my own game! I liked these set of tutorials because it gave me ideas for what I wanted to do for future projects when it comes to the second semester! Lesson 4.4 - spawning new waves Challenge 4 The challenge was pretty confusing, I tried looking up a tutorial on it but I couldn't find an english version. I liked the camera movements in it so I tried putting into my own project but it didn't work the way I wanted it to. I managed to do the two first challenges which was hitting an enemy away from you and I managed to spawn new waves by...

 Over the weeks I have read welcoming comments on my blog and it made this year just a little bit less stressful. I love looking at my blog every other day and seeing new comments appear especially from the people who I haven't talked to at all last year. If we do end up going back to college next semester I have a feeling the atmosphere will be warmer than before.  I think the comments on my project are the most useful because then I write notes on the important things people have mentioned. Things such as storylines for my game, the camera angles, the levels etc. I like the introduction blog comments as well because people know a little bit more about me and I remember a lot of things about people when I read their introduction posts which is handy! The feedback comments that I'm writing on other students blogs are truthful and curious. I love seeing other peoples work because it makes me more motivated to perfect my own. Seeing the games being made last week kind of made me...

When I first started on the reading tasks I didn't really know much about academic writing or reading. I kept doing them first because if I left them till the last minute I would freak out. I kept going back and forth through synonyms when writing my blog to make my writing appear more professional because I thought academic writing was all about professionalism. I was wrong entirely when we started doing the reading tasks together as a class. I feel like the progress is getting much better since we figured it out as a group and our lecturer was extremely helpful. He understood that it was our first time doing the academic writing so I took a lot from the Monday lectures.  My favourite reading so far was probably the first one: The components of game design . You can tell that my academic writing was a bit too much but I had fun trying to figure out how to go about the assignment. During the blog comments I was looking at students academic writing and I had a feeling we were all st...

This week was rather difficult for me because I had to figure out how to implement the scoring system and moving obstacles. My level is still not finished as I want to get everything working first before I start working on the level itself.  I looked through some youtube videos that had scoring systems but a lot of them weren't working for my game so I decided to go back to this tutorial  which was 23 minutes long and I managed to get it to work! I added in some gems instead of coins and made them small. I also looked through the assets store and found a nature pack   which looked perfect for my game. I tried adding a grass texture onto my platform but it looked too fake and I like the smoothness of my platform so I left it as is.  I fixed my issue with infinite jumping by going through this tutorial   and I also added moving obstacles. I tried going through different youtube videos but none of them made my obstacles move so I ended up searching it on...

 Lesson 4.1 This lesson is going to be really handy when it comes to my game project as I'm making a sphere game. The instructor made it so the camera rotated around the island itself as well as moving the player. This tutorial basically described what different things we can do with the camera.  enemy pushing the player off the map! Lesson 4.2 In this tutorial we made it so enemies can spawn at random locations and they also follow the player around. I think I will use this mechanic within my game as I want my obstacles to push the player off the map so the "Bounce" physics material will work great. In this game the spheres were able to bounce off each other using this mechanic.  Lesson 4.3 We learned all about powerups in this tutorial. I can't wait to try this out on my own prototype, I'm really happy that he covered this as I wasn't sure if I could find anything on youtube. So when the player hits the powerup (gem), whenever the sphere hits the enemy ball,...

Hi all! I just wanted to briefly talk about the twitter lists I have made. Here is the link to my CDM list and here is a link to my Multimedia / Game Develop list if anyone wants to join! I added all of the people who I follow and who are in my course. This is much better for me than the newsfeed as it gives me an opportunity to see CDM related stuff in general. Sometimes my newsfeed is covered with retweets and likes that I don't really want to see so the twitter list is very useful.  here is the multimedia / game development list that I created on twitter! -Anna Zurawska

 I've created my first prototype and so far I'm very happy with the outcome. It took me a while to look through the assets store and get used to it. I didn't really know how to put in a skybox so I spend a couple of minutes trying to get it to work. Youtube was my friend so whenever I got stuck on something I  needed a video to show me what I was doing wrong. I also wanted to put mountains behind the player and I only found 2D options which didn't really work for 3D. I remembered there being a mountainous background in the first unity tutorial so I just stole it from there.  I followed a couple of Youtube tutorials on "making a 3D Platformer in Unity" . I was kind of stressed out before I found these tutorials as I didn't know what to do but with the help of James I made my own platform with obstacles and I also made my Sphere! I thought I had to go through the assets store to find spheres so I spent a long time on that and afterwards my unity was filled w...

“In order for the player to be optimally engaged, challenges should be presented at a level equivalent or slightly higher than their current skill. Not too easy, not too hard”( Gigity McD ) The word 'flow state' was coined by Csikszentmihalyi (1975) also known as being “in the zone” This is when the player is fully engaged in the game experience. Csikszentmihalyi put a lot of work into observing and analysing various groups of people. This theory is focused on the idea of how people should balance their skills and the demands of particular tasks. An example of Flow would be a challenge in a game that interests the player such as a puzzle or a boss battle meant to keep the player interested and not get bored. Csikszentmihalyi also states that flow is related to an ideal psychological condition when a person engages in a challenge-skill activity, often resulting in concentration and a focused emphasis on a task. A practical technique for improving Flow is to look at what players...

 Lesson 3.4 During this tutorial we learned all about sound effects and particles. We incorporated sound effects when the player jumped and when the player collided with the fence. We also put in music to make the game more of a fun experience for the player. I can't wait to play around with particles and sounds when it comes to my own game, I have a feeling I will spend a long time getting this perfect as it's easy. I really like the variety of different things that they give us in the game. The different characters, the sound effects, I kind of play around with the same ones but I have looked at other blogs and found that they dabbled in different objects and characters.  look at that balloon go! Challenge 3 I'm finding these challenges difficult to understand. I just feel overwhelmed when having something in front of me that I don't quite understand. I was able to move the background by looking back on the previous code. I was also able to move the balloon at spawn i...

 I created my first ever Game Design Document, I felt like the reading task this week helped me a lot on my journey. Dundoc has some extremely useful game design document templates that are nicely organised into different titles such as technical, sounds, game introduction etc. I looked at other students game design documents whenever I was stuck on specific things and I found it 100 times easier. The template looks daunting at first but I promise it's not as bad as it looks! Here is the link to my Game Design Document Here is a picture of my game design document (might have the chance the name to my game title) I will make several changes throughout the semester so I can fill out as much information as possible. Right now I haven't made the game so when my vision comes alive I will include screenshots and information architecture.

 Lesson 3.1 During this lesson, I learned about player movement and how you can create a continuous pathway by moving the background to the left instead of the player, we used this by creating a script called MoveLeft. The instructor also made obstacles spawn on intervals so instead of placing obstacles manually down a never ending pathway, they just spawn in the same places which isn't time consuming at all! Lesson 3.2 During this lesson we fixed any imperfections within the game. In the first lesson the player went through obstacles which didn't make any sense so the instructor made it so when the player collides with the obstacle, everything stops (the background, the obstacles stop spawning and the player itself). This is important as it creates sort of a "game over" within the game.  animation controllers within unity  Lesson 3.3 I found this lesson frustrating as some things didn't work for me but other than that it was the most helpful and interesting tutor...