The Art Of Gaming

I remember when I had to make gifs using photoshop and it was the most frustrating thing in the world. This was a couple of years ago when I was 15 years old and I was a tumblr addict.  Now there are countless websites which help you make a gif easily which save you the hassle! This is the website I used to make my animated gif. Credit to Megan Kelly for helping me find this website! Frodo in his natural habitat. -Anna Zurawska

Reading through my annotated bibliographies I noticed common themes among all of them. The only downside to my them is that I don't have a ton of information written for each so I will have to go back and read the academic articles once again. For my main project I have a few things I want to write about that I feel is important in terms of game modifications.  1) What is a mod and the history and background of game modifications. (I need to get more information on this) 2) The active modding community that revolves around the gaming industry. Examples of this include Simtropolis, Nexus Mods, CurseForge and how they benefit fan programmers.  3) What motivates the modding community and how much fan programmers benefit the gaming industry as well as the different skills fan programmers learn along the way in addition to complications.  4) The different developmental tools that make it easier for fan programmers to mod their games. I will be talking about Half-life 2 and how...

"Of Mods and Modders: Chasing Down The Value of Fan-Based Digital Game Modifications"  Postigo, H. (2007)  Of Mods and Modders: Chasing Down the Value of Fan-Based Digital Game Modifications , SAGE: United States. The modding community play an active role in relation to the success of a game in addition to the gaming industry as their work is constantly being recognised because it improves the sales of a game. There are various add-ons that fan programmers design which include modding, changing the layout of a map, weaponry, skins and making changes to the game-play. Modders have the ability to make changes to anything in relation to the game. Some of these examples involve making changes to the game-play and the story mode of a game and physically manipulating the world around them. Mappers on the other hand design the map layout of the game. Skinners change the "skin" of the character and weapon makers who create or improve weapons within the game. The article out...

Hi Everyone! This is my tech tip for this week. I know this might not technically be a good tech tip but I think it's incredibly relaxing when you want to get some work done or if you want to explore different places without going on google maps. This website is called Drive & Listen  which lets you drive to different cities around the world while you listen to their local radios. There's also an option to go to Dublin which is cool. I feel like if you want to study or get some work done having the radio on in the background can be a good idea!  Gowan buy him a coffee be grand sure  -Anna Zurawska

Hi everyone! Today I went through the tutorials based of animations and the physics system. These were extremely long tutorials and I'm happy to be done with them.   Sprite Animation This tutorial was pretty long but I enjoyed making animations for the characters. The 2D animator looks much easier than the 3D animator and I'm proud of myself for understanding it. The animation clips were already provided but I had to put them together and save them for later use. The robot is a little broken because it only goes one direction but that was probably due to the previous tutorial. I like the fact that the finished scripts are at the end of the tutorial because I sometimes find it hard to know where the functions go.  World Interactions - Projectile  This tutorial was all about the physics system.  I remember doing this in the 3D tutorials but I found it easier going through the videos on this part. The tutorial didn't really describe the process very well and I found mys...

Hi everyone! This is the third week of the 2d Unity tutorials and i'm finding it very easy so far. I was a bit scared at first when I realised I had to read the set of instructions myself but now I prefer it over watching videos! In this set of tutorials it mainly focuses on collectibles and damage zones as well as enemies.    World Interactions - Collectibles Coding was the main thing about these tutorials because it required for collectibles to be set to triggers. As soon as the character goes over to the strawberry collectible, it disappears and a message pops up at the bottom left corner making it clear that Ruby received a life. After Ruby has collected the life and the bar is full, when Ruby goes over to the strawberry again it doesn't get picked up. World Interactions - Damage Zones and Enemies In this tutorial, we made a damageable as well as an enemy that moves in one direction. They both harm Ruby which results in health loss. There's nothing much to say other tha...

 Hi everyone! For this tech tip I made a twitter list with all of the different modding websites that are on twitter. I made a list because I'm doing my literature piece on game modding (player community) and I felt like it was necessary. I'm going to be adding more platforms in the future when I find relevant articles.  -Anna Zurawska

Game Modifications (Player Communities) "To Mod or Not to Mod - An Empirical Study on Game Modding as Customer Value Co-Creation" Katarzyna Bilińska-Reformat, Anna Dewalska-Opitek and Magdalena Hofman-Kohlmeyer (2020) 'To Mod Or Not to Mod—An Empirical Study on Game Modding as Customer Value Co-Creation'.  Sustainability,  Vol. 12 (9014) 9014. In this article the authors focus on the customer value co-creation in relation to game modifications as well as the motives of mod users and creators. Qualitative research has been carried out which includes separate interviews and focus groups with mod creators and mod users. This research centres on the participation in the development of game mods and how it motivates the user and the creator based on the engagement of the individual. This article gives an in-depth definition of what game modifications are and the different type of game mods and their characteristics alongside some background historical information on the fi...

Hi! This is my blog post describing what I did in the second unity tutorial. I feel like my laptop isn't under any pressure when i'm dabbling around with the 2d world. I feel like this semester is going to fly by with these tutorials because in the first semester we got straight into creating a 3D game rather than a 2D game. In the second tutorial " Decorating the world" I added prefabs onto my character and metal boxes. I changed the colour of the boxes to red and I also changed pivots within the sprite editor. I feel like the prefabs in the 2D tutorials were easier to understand than the 3D tutorials. I like how the character goes behind the box to add a more realistic effect. I coloured in the prefab to be red and all the boxes changed that colour! The physics system in the 2D world is more crazier because you can't just fall through a 3d platform. We added many components to the character and the metal boxes to make it so the character would be able to go behi...

This week's task I was assigned to prepare for the literature review by looking up keywords that would help me find articles and information about my topic. The topic I decided to go for is "Game Modifications (Player Communities). I chose this topic because I'm very familiar with the modding community in a lot of games such as Minecraft, The Sims, Garry's Mod, Fallout 4, GTA etc. I think modding games is a big part of the gaming industry because fans get to engage and show their creativity by making the game more crazy and fun. It allows for numerous opportunities to make the game not sit out after you have finished playing with it.  The keywords I'm going to be using One of the librarians came and talked to us about the online library. Her name was Linsday and she was lovely and helpful anytime anyone asked a question. She provided us with numerous resources and certain webpages that would be of use to us during the making of our literature reviews.  Our lecturer...

 Hi Everyone! Today I've started on a 2D tutorial since I'm mainly going to be focusing on 2D for the rest of the semester. First of all I love how we get to freely paint the scene which we didn't have when we were doing 3D tutorials. I really like how we get to read the instructions instead of having someone to explain it to us. I love figuring it out for myself and the instructions are very clear and simple which I like. I feel like the instructions also have a guide to them so if you don't know what a specific thing is there's no need to worry because it explains everything anyway.  The scene I created on Unity  So this is the scene that I have painted. It's nothing too complicated because we were limited with the amount of tiles but I'm sure if I was more of an expert I'd make an incredible map with the tiles provided. We had the choice between 2d and VR even though VR sounds really exciting I don't want my laptop to combust because I have a feel...

 Hi and welcome back to my blog! It's been a while but semester 2 is finally here and I'm excited but also anxious for what's to come. I decided to do a typing test for this weeks blog because I seen simsgurumeg.blogspot.com  post and I wanted to try it out for myself.  Here are my results! I'm a pretty fast typer and this was extremely stressful because anytime I got a letter wrong I panicked. Nevertheless it's good to know that I can type 95 words per minute because that's insane!  -Anna Zurawska