Games Stories

In this week's reading task, I actually learned quite a good few things about storytelling in video games and agree with a lot of points made about it, but again, everyone has their own opinion on it. You have dynamic storytelling games, which are games that progress the story as you go along, and you can decide what outcome to have as a player and what you want to do in the game, and then you have author storytelling games, which have a specifically designed and mostly fixed story and generally lead to the same ending by the time you finish the game no matter how many different choices you made. I sometimes prefer dynamic storytelling as they are fun and flow by themselves and give the player more freedom in the story. But then again, there are many amazing author storytelling games out there too, so it’s all preference at the end of the day, but overall, to sum up storytelling in video games, there are many ways you can go about it, but as long as the players enjoy it, then that’s all that matters in my opinion.

This article showed me a lot of different story structures and ways to go about story lines in video games and where some have gone wrong.

I always enjoy the weekly videos and this one was great as the person in the video explains things very well and also displays games and shows us examples of things that he explains, which was very helpful.

This article was very in-depth and went into detail about the narrative of Mass Effect 2.

Image from mentalhealthgaming.com

Alpha

My own screenshot from unity

So this week during my project, I actually ended up getting a lot of work done, and I can happily say that I somewhat have the alpha of my game completed, which is awesome. 

So far I have my player mechanic of being able to move around the whole map and I have an enemy movement mechanic that chases the player at all times. I then made an enemy attack mechanic and the player gets killed if the enemy touches him. I also have a shooting mechanic so the player can kill the enemies. And lastly, I have a player direction mechanic so the player can change the direction he is facing and shoot different ways. I had great help from the unity tutorials and found a lot of info online that was a great help to me as well.

I currently have the base of my game down but now I am debating on how to continue from here because I want to create a level that requires you to kill 50 zombies and if you survive, you beat the game, but I am having difficulty finding out how to make an enemy spawner for my game. I have tried searching online but it’s slightly confusing on how to go about it and I can’t find exactly what I’m looking for. If I can’t find that, then I might make a few zombie rounds as the objective. I also want to make the zombies tougher overtime or faster but finding out how to do that will prove to be a challenge.

Once I get the level down, then I more or less have my game finished, but I want to add loads of details into it, like character models and animations, then design my level. I also plan on adding a title screen and victory screen, game over, and a brain counter with a current score and high score.

But the next thing that I’m going to focus on is getting my level objective done, and then I can start focusing on polishing off my game, which I am excited about.

Unity Tutorial 08

Image from pixabay.com

The unity tasks this week were nice because it was finishing all the ball game and it’s always fun to see what the finishing game is going to look and play like at the end of a unit on unity, so that was cool. Learning about adding power ups and coding in different spawn times and how to make the enemies go towards the player was good to learn and things I will definitely be implementing into my own game as it’s a mechanic that I need for it.

The challenge this week was awesome, as always. It was the same as usual, we had to fix up a broken game and it included tasks that we did during the game tutorials, so I had to put my skills to the test and complete it. It’s always great doing the challenges. They can be quite annoying sometimes, but it’s nice when you correct them all because it shows the progress you are making and that makes it all worth while.

The challenges are good to do at the end of units in Unity because they cover all the tasks that you’ve done and give you a good idea of how well you understand the codes being used by completing them.

Review Week Comments and Feedback

Image from dreamstime.com

The comments and feedback part of this module is a good part of it in my opinion, because it can motivate you to try out new things or suggestions, and you can see how people are liking your views on things or how your project is looking, and then, with some comments, they can point out things that might need improvement or slight adjustments, so overall, they are a great help. It was also a great feeling when I saw my classmates were liking how my blogs are or how my project is coming along.

 

The most useful comments are the ones that actually give me a good opinion on something and the other person's honest opinion about my work, because then I can see what other people are thinking about my current work. It's great to get an honest view from another person's perspective, as it helps out a ton and you can take their opinions and build on them however you want.

 

In terms of the comments and feedback I'm leaving for other people, I try to leave an honest comment and add some suggestions or tips that the other person can think about. Over the weeks, using the different feedback strategies we were provided to learn and that I thought of, I tend to think a lot during my feedback and give honest and useful comments and feedback, so the other person can actually get something out of it. That's what I believe comments and feedback are for they should benefit you and the people you are giving comments and feedback to.

 

I actually feel like I have connected a little bit with people through their blogs and the comments back and forth, which is nice. I'm happy with my introduction post and my overall blog in general as I feel I have done great work on it and, by seeing some comments, other people like it too, which is great to see. I also think the intros helped a lot in terms of communicating and getting to know other people, especially considering we had the option to comment on loads of introductions during our comments and feedback tasks.

 

I wouldn't mind changing how my blog looks and making it look nice, but the standard layout isn't that bad and is easy to navigate because I notice on other blog layouts that I have looked at in the theme settings that they look a bit jumbled and are not the easiest to follow, and I, of course, want my blog to be easy to navigate around, but I may still have a look at the layouts and change it to something that I like the look of.

 

To conclude this blog post, I believe that the blogs were a great way to communicate and get to know each other while also receiving great and useful feedback that will benefit your overall work in the long run. Learning how to give constructive feedback is also a great skill to have for the future, so the blogs have been very useful for me, and I would assume others as well.

Week 9 Reading and Writing

At first I wasn’t sure if the reading and writing assignments were going to help me that much, but I was actually surprised as doing them weekly has actually made me remember quite a lot of topics that were covered, and writing my thoughts on blog posts each week helped me remember them. So overall, so far, I am happy with the reading and writing tasks.

Games MDA and Games Decisions are my favourite readings so far they thought me a fair amount about game design and different steps that designers take or keep in mind when they are creating a game and I like that because I always want to focus on learning more about game design as it’s a career I am very interested in working in the videos were very entertaining and me personally I much prefer audio learning then visual learning and a lot of the YouTube videos we have watched I actually went onto their channels and subscribed to  them so I can watch more in the future as anything game design interests me a lot so that’s why these two posts were my favourite so far.

My reading notes help me with my game creation because I remember key points and information that was made about game designing and try to put myself into the players' perspective, and a lot of things I learned about start coming back to me, which I’m glad they do because it’s making me think about all the things I want to include and create in my game.

So far working on my game project has been a blast and every week I keep thinking and adding more things into it and I can’t wait to polish off the finishing touches if I get a chance I want my game to look very nice for the Final submission but of course all my game has to function perfectly before that can happen but I am really enjoying creating my own game and it all being up to me how I want it to play and look which is awesome because I don’t need to work around anyone it’s my own creation and I look forward to keep working towards finishing it.

My biggest accomplishments for this class are how much I have gotten used to Unity and its interface. I am delighted with that, and also with all of the knowledge I have gained and expanded on with game designing, which so far has been my main aim in this module as I have been looking forward to this module since I joined this course.

This is my favourite image throughout my blogs so far because it reminds me of the start of this module and how much I have learned and it feels really nice and good to know that I have gotten a lot out of this module and I am not even finished it yet.

Image from uxplanet.org

I feel I have done what I need to during all of these reading and writing tasks but I think one of the most important things and especially if you are into this kind of stuff as a career take your time and take in the information in front of you because it will benefit you in the future.

First Playable

For this week working on my project, I dialed back on putting details into my project because I want to leave that until near the end of my game, so this week I focused on my game mechanics and how I’m going to implement them for the player and enemies in my game.

I put my players and zombies into my game area and positioned my camera where I wanted it to be for the players' view, which is top-down. I made materials for my player and zombies so I could rule them out and distinguish between them both.

After all that, I added in my player-controller script and started working on how my player moves through the game area, which has proven to be a bit of a tricky task, but I am getting a lot of inspiration from the unity unit that we did, which was Unit 2, because it has the player view I am looking for and I knew when I did that tutorial that I would take a lot of inspiration and help from it. But I'm getting there. The hardest part of my player's movement is allowing him to move around the whole map rather than only a bit of it.

So I have my project planned out and will work on key parts of it every week. Next week I’m going to work on my enemies and the spawn management for them and work on having them spawn in the way I want them to, which I don’t think will be that hard to accomplish, but so far it’s all going well and surprisingly enough, I’m having no difficulty with the script coding. So the unity tutorials were great practice for sure.

My own screenshot from unity

Twitter Lists

My CDM list:

https://twitter.com/i/lists/1462122689867440131?s=20

My Multimedia/Games Development list:

https://twitter.com/i/lists/1462124425495691265?s=20

I have actually never heard of twitter lists until I done this task but they actually prove to be a pretty useful tool and create a better browsing experience for the user, I was able to create the list very quickly with my own image, Name and description adding other users by finding them in the search bar and adding them into the lists was a fast process which is nice because if it proved to be a hassle I doubt many people would be bothered to create lists. I will definitely keep lists in mind from now on.

Unity Tutorial 07

For unity this week, there was a lot of coding involved, like using our scripts and adding loads of different floats and commands. That’s what I noticed anyway. I feel this one was one of the most script-based tutorials that has come up, but that’s a good thing because it allows me to get more used to all the different things that you can put into the scripts. If I’m being honest, it can become very confusing trying to remember all the different things, but that’s why with practice it will come to memory more often and before I know it, I will be able to use them more often and actually know what they do off the top of my head.

I didn’t find anything difficult this week, but learning about how to add power ups was great because it is something that I’m most likely going to add into my game, but instead of a power up, they might be weapons floating around the environment, so now having done these tutorials, I will probably be looking back over them and trying to see how I can incorporate some of the methods into my own game, which I look forward to doing.

Overall, I enjoyed the tutorials this week, especially because they showed me how to do things that I actually wanted to learn for my own needs.

Image from i.pinimg.com

Game Fun

This weeks reading task truly made me realize that fun is so much more of a broader term then we think especially while watching this video and that we all have our own meaning of the word fun especially in gaming terms, Gaming has a lot of different versions of fun and can be different for everyone someone could find a competitive game or environment fun or someone else could find a chill and laid back game fun where a lot of it may be based on scenery and taking in how the game looks or others rather play party games where they are co op and interact with people is what they find fun but my point from all this is that as these weeks go on I learn more and more about what a game needs and how much game designers look into the players perspective and how important it is to think about because a lot of things are just created depending on what the designer wants but in gaming it’s much more then that. 

This article explains a lot more about the meaning fun and how there are different versions and groups of it and about all the definitions on it as well. Who knew there could be so much to do with simply one word there is so much more involved and its so much deeper then many think which is awesome in my opinion.

This channel will be another one that I will be watching from time to time because as I have said in some of my previous posts I like keeping tabs on all of these channels about game design and watch over them because of how interested I am in the career.

Image from mobilefreetoplay.com

Prototype

At first, I was not sure how to go about starting my project but then I just went ahead and started it because it was only the first time starting my creation and things can be changed or altered at any time in the future.

To start off, I just created my whole project file in Unity and saved it where I wanted to on my computer.

 

There will be two levels in my game. The first will be a very short level in the main character's room, and the second will be where all the game-play takes place and the action begins.

I decided to start thinking of ideas for my second level considering that will be the main part. I first thought about what I wanted the ground to look like because my games player view will be top down so the ground is basically my scenery throughout the game so I made a ground in my hierarchy and sized it to my liking. Then I downloaded a free texture on Unity Asset Store I then added it to my project and chose the texture that I wanted on my ground for the game which I may change in the future.

After that I added weapons that I might allow the player to pick up during the game to use on the enemies so I downloaded a 2D weapon pack on the Unity Asset Store and just added a few in to see how it looked.

My project so far is just trial and error and is just to get a possible feel of how I want my level to look and to then make progress after that is achieved.

My own screenshot from unity

I am having difficulty finding out how to add two levels into my game, so I will need to do more research on this as it may be a difficult thing for me to do at my current skill level with unity.

 

Everything at the moment is just trial and error. Each week I will bump into many different challenges along the way.

 

Each week I will work on different parts of my game, so for example, next week I will learn how to implement two levels into my game and edit both of my levels to my liking. I want to focus on creating the area for my levels before I progress onto the actual game mechanics.

Unity Tutorial 06

Image from gamedevdrops.com

This week's unity tutorials were very fun to do as they were more or less adding the finishing touches to the game that we have been working on in the tutorials for the last few weeks.

Learning how to use and edit character animations was interesting as it was something new to grasp and get used to, but it was fun to add in animations for the character.

After the animations, the tutorials went through adding different effects like explosions or dirt effects, which was again a cool thing to see because these are some things that I might consider adding to my own game.

Adding in music was a nice touch because I was wondering when we would learn how to do that because music is very important in gaming because it sets the tone for a lot of most games anyway.

The challenge at the end was tough, but it's always good to test my overall skills on unity, and it's rewarding to get it done because I get a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction after I complete it, which is always a plus.

Every week that I do these tutorials, I am always looking out to see things that I might add to my game or what might look good in my game and if it would work.

Games Decisions

This week's reading task mainly covered the flow in game design and was a very interesting topic to me because I can relate to it quite a lot in all my years of gaming. I’ve experienced it all and can see flow theory throughout many of the games that I have played. This video was by far my favourite, as he explained the flow theory in game design and broke it down for me to understand. It showed that flow state should be going on throughout the whole game, starting at the players' skill level and gradually increasing, but sometimes creating an anxious flow state for the player or adding spikes here and there in the flow. In my opinion, flow state is very important because it will determine how much time or how long the player spends playing the game, so flow state should very much be considered when designing a video game.

The articles this week were cool to read as well the most interesting one though was this study carried out on Game flow experience among Thai university students as the methods used and results they ended up getting was very cool to read about. I like studies because they show proof of things and show results that help out a lot. 

In the future I am definitely going to check out more of these videos on this youtube channel because I very much enjoyed the video to watch this week.

Image from www.gamedeveloper.com

Game Design Document

Image from digitaltrends.com

I had a lot of fun creating my Game Design Document for my game creation that is officially going to be called Zombifi I feel there may be things that I need to touch up or improve on so please let me know by checking out my GDD below and leaving some thoughts or suggestions in the comments. Thank you.

Link to my GDD: 

https://www.dundoc.com/project/7875/wyomw8lwt1

Unity Tutorial 05

This week's unity tutorial was my favourite out of the many that we have completed so far, as it felt a lot like an actual game creation and something that you would actually play on mobile it feels like a mobile game.

I enjoyed learning how to create the illusion of a background and a player moving.

Some things that I found difficult were definitely the scripts, as I feel like sometimes I would have something 100% correct but it would be the smallest thing that I would have out of place or wrongly stated, like a capital letter for example, the scripts remind me of web dev and how annoying it can get sometimes, but I still enjoy it nonetheless.

I notice as the weeks go on, the scripts become bigger and have a lot more included in them, so the coding has to be very accurate and can sometimes require looking back or redoing a step or two, but it has taught me that I should be extra careful when it comes to the scripts and make sure I know where everything goes and understand the commands that I place into them.

I look forward to seeing how this tutorial plays out and how it gets completed.

Image from unity.com

Games GDD

Learning about Game Design Documents was a fun topic to learn about this week, I enjoyed watching this video about it the most as I am much more of a visual learner and the video was detailed well and the person went over everything step by step and even explained how I could implement things into my own Game Design Document and explained it so I understood each heading and how it all worked.

This article gave me a great insight and overall understanding about what to include in a Game Design Document and went very in depth on the detail of each heading and what you would include which I liked because it showed me how much would typically be included in a Game Design Document and gave me an overall better understanding of it.

On the other hand this article that we had to read went in depth about how to create a good Game Design Document and put things into perspective telling me what it would be like if I had a big team creating one and what you would include in the document because the bigger the team the bigger the game which means the document will also have to be more in depth and include more detail about the game.

My overall conclusion for this weeks reading task is that I learned a lot about Game Design Documents some which I already knew but learned more and some of which I never heard of but with me being so invested in working on gaming as being my future career all of this is very interesting to me and intrigues me every week as I learn more by reading these articles and watching these videos. My favourite format of learning is definitely visual learning like watching videos I wouldn't be as interested in articles but there not too bad as long as its something I am interested in.

Image from gamedesigning.org