IF Statements

In this coding task it was a recap over the IF statement and how its used when creating your code this was actually something that I understand but never really had the full context on what it actually means so this task was a great help in doing that so now I know.

Image from tengel403.medium.com

Conventions and Syntax

Image from hotcore.info

For this coding task I learnt all about Conventions and syntax which was a useful task to go over because some of it I knew but some I needed a recap over and helped a lot so I found this very useful and is one of the main reasons that I do these coding tasks as they help a lot in general.

Tutorial 05

For this week's unity tutorials, the first one was all about setting up the Cinemachine Camera, installing it into unity and making it follow the player while they move around the map, and also setting up the map with more tiles and making it look better overall, so you couldn’t see the outside of the map when playing the game. I enjoyed learning about cinemachine as I have never used it before and always have fun learning new things in unity, so that was good. Moving onto the second tutorial, it was all about visual styling particles, adding particles into the game and adjusting them to look how you want them to look and adding them to characters in the game and making them act a certain way during the game by adjusting code in visual studio. This tutorial was okay because I already learned about particles in a unity tutorial challenge that I did last semester, but it was nice to recap over it and some of the settings that were involved I had never seen before, so I still learned something, which is always a plus. Overall, the Unity tutorials this week were a success, and my tutorial game is coming along well.

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Doing : Reading 06

After getting my annotated bibliographies all ready and finished I had my themes ready to go, so this week during the reading task it was about putting my themes together and linking my annotated bibliographies with them which was fairly easy to do because I had all the research there and it was about putting it all together and linking up my themes with my information from the annotated bibliographies. It all went great I got 4-5 paragraphs done and I can say that my research topic is becoming an overall success because the research was planned out well and each reading task has kept my work and research very organised up until this point. So far it’s taught me more about how to carry out research and that keeping organised and having a structure or plan for your research can honestly make doing research so much easier than going in with no plan or method, so I will definitely take that away for sure, and this will improve my research in the future. Now I have my annotated bibliographies fully completed and my themes from last week been used to put 4-6 paragraphs together while linking my annotated bibliographies to them.

Here are some of my Annotated bibliographies:

Image from my work

Here is one of my paragraphs I put together:

Image from my work

Beginner Scripting : Variables and Functions

My other extra credit task this week was on another beginner script tutorial that went over variables and functions I feel like these tutorials would have been a great thing to do when I first started using unity for the first time but regardless they will prove to be a great help especially when working on my tutorials and projects I will understand it a lot more because of these tutorials just takes time to understand everything.

Image from learn.unity.com

Beginner Scripting : Scripts as Behaviour Components

Image from learn.unity.com

For this extra credit task I learnt about scripts as behaviour components this was a useful tutorial I enjoy these because I get to expand my coding language and have more of an understanding of it which is great. I look forward to doing more of these tutorials because I know I’m going to benefit from doing them.

Tutorial 04

Image from smart-ehub.com

If I’m being brutally honest, I was happy to be done with this week's unity tutorials as this was probably the least fun I have had using unity so far, mostly because I really didn’t like sprite animations.There was a lot involved and it was hard to remember everything. I feel like the tutorial should have been split in half and a better tutorial should have been made because you were just bombarded with different types of information and menus in unity In my opinion, it should have been explained better and thoroughly talked about first, rather than just throwing you into it without any information at all. The projectile tutorial wasn’t as bad because it was explained properly and most of it was just script editing, so that was okay. Doing the animation tutorial was fun in terms of the things that it was teaching us, but as I said, the way it was executed could have been better. I feel that I definitely learned some things, but I will need to do my own research on animations so I can get the hang of it and understand how everything works. I hope to learn more about animations in Unity in the future because it’s generally a cool topic and important to add into games because it adds more life to the character models and the game in general.

Overall, this week could have been better, but I still learned quite a bit regardless.

Doing : Reading 05

For this week's reading task, I really had a good look at my overall research so far and I am happy with what I have done, but I would like to do some more and acquire more annotated bibliographies first, which is one of the things I did this week. I just want to make sure that I optimised my research and did everything as I planned to during the planning stages of this because I see that there are a few gaps here and there in my research that I want to fill in and that’s what I have done. I have acquired enough research and have started to break my annotated bibliographies down and create themes for them.What I did was create lists for my annotated bibliographies underneath each subtopic and decided where I wanted to put my main focus on my research and pick out the best annotated bibliographies that I ended up making and researching. So this week for me was all about finalising my core research and now coming up with my own themes to then bring that research to life for my research topic ahead in the coming weeks. These research methods and tasks each week so far have helped me out a lot in terms of keeping my work organised and planning every step of the way, and it’s coming along great.

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Einstein Tech Tip

 I used hetemeel.com to generate this Einstein chalkboard image of my own.

Fake Social media Tech Tip

The generator I used to create this is simitator.com.

Tutorial 03

Image from connect-prd-cdn.unity.com

I learned a lot during this week's unity tutorials for Ruby's 2D adventure, which was fun but also complicated to wrap my head around as the new things that I learned are quite confusing and hard to get down, but overtime I will remember the code.

I learnt how to add health collectibles for the character to pick up and regenerate health. I also learned how to add in damage zones, so if the player walks into one they will take damage and the player's health will be reduced. I also added enemies to the game and made them have vertical and horizontal movement while also being able to collide with the player and damage them. Some of these things I knew already and some I didn't. I remember doing some of the damage coding for my game project last semester and also the enemy movement, but it’s cool to learn about it again because there are multiple ways to code, not just one way. Some are harder or easier than others, it all depends, but it’s great that there are multiple ways because then you can choose the best possible way for you and what you find most convenient to remember.

Overall, this week I learned a lot more on the coding side of things and some more ways to use the unity menu and settings, so it was a useful week for me and I enjoyed it.

Analysis

During this week's reading task, I expanded on my research topic and continued using the 3 pass method to do so. I also decided to start researching not just websites but other artefacts that have information on my topic, so I first watched a documentary all about esports. It specified a variety of information and was a great watch. I enjoy watching documentaries and I think they are a great way of finding information, especially when talking about videos in general. There are a lot on YouTube that you can find even just normal videos and not documentaries. YouTube is a great research platform, especially if you have verified creators or companies that specify the information that you take from them because they are more trustworthy and actually provide solid information for you to have a look at.

The last two pieces of research that I did were on two websites. I hope for more of my research that I can hopefully come across a couple of esport books. I like to research multiple artefacts rather than just websites all the time.

I now have 6 annotated bibliographies and my research is going great. My matrix method is helping me a lot in terms of the info I have left to research in the coming weeks, so I am on great track and I have everything organised and know all I need to research.

Esports Documentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=box4SFtGvA0&t=306s&ab_channel=CBSNews

Main Esports Gameplay Types

https://discoveresports.com/what-are-the-game-types/

Most Valuable Esports Companies/Teams

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinasettimi/2020/12/05/the-most-valuable-esports-companies-2020/?sh=75701e373d0c

Image from g2.com

Tutorial 02

This week's unity tutorials were all about decorating the world map and learning how to block movement. They were both interesting tutorials. I always have fun customizing the game to my liking adding in different objects or changing the environment in some way blocking movement was all about collision that the player has when running into objects around the map or coming across water so it went over rigid bodies and box colliders a lot of which I already know about but was beneficial to recap over and get it down more so I understand what all the things do as unity has a lot of things to remember and consider when creating a game.

Since starting this 2D game I have gone over things that I done before that I forgot but I feel after seeing them again when creating this game that I am going to remember them a lot more now which is one of the reason I chose to make a 2D game was to better my coding and become more experienced at unity so this weeks tutorials overall were great and I learned a lot and look forward to progressing with this game and hope to learn more new things next week.

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Tech Task Sidebar Box

I recently added a html box to the sidebar on my blog its one of the quick and unique features in the blog layout settings.

Meme Generator Tech Tip

I used ImgFlip.com to generate this meme.

Doing

Image from fuelcycle.com

During this week's reading task, I decided to have a more in-depth look at my research/matrix method because I wasn’t happy with my current one and I decided that I am going with a research method fairly similar to the matrix method. I have different folders that I created and they have research of my topic, resources, and bibliography etc. It’s basically like the matrix method but my own version broken down in my own way, so I understand it well and it’s laid out how I want it. For my research topic, I have broken it down and planned out what I am going to research in an organised and effective way.

For this week, I researched three resources that were taken from three of my sub topics, and I applied the three-pass method to them while doing my research. It helped out a lot, and I used my own matrix/research method that keeps everything organised and I have everything in there that shows me what I need to research, which I then tick off after I get the research that I need. So far my research is going well while using proper research methods and having my own matrix methods. It’s keeping everything organised and each week I’m able to focus on what I need to research and I’m not just searching off the top of my head. It’s useful to me that I am already good at staying organised and researching what I need, so this is helping me learn more ways to research, considering there are loads of ways you can research, so it’s nice to find out more and see if I find any easier than my current research methods.

Here are links of what I done research on this week:

What is Esports?

https://www.pocket-lint.com/games/news/145890-what-is-esports-professional-gaming-explained

How did Esports start?

https://www.musicgateway.com/blog/gaming-industry/esports/what-is-esports

Top 5 biggest esport events

https://clutchpoints.com/5-biggest-esports-tournaments/

Tutorial 01

Image from learn.unity.com

For my weekly tutorials in the coming weeks, I decided to stick to Unity and learn more about coding, so I went with making the 2D game Ruby's Adventure. I want to expand my knowledge of unity and just learn more about coding in general. I generally enjoy it, but I will admit that it can be difficult to remember things at times as it can tend to get confusing, but overtime I end up remembering, but that’s only for certain things. 

This week's tutorials were enjoyable, but the one thing that I found difficult and took me a while to get was the world design tile maps exercise. It involved a lot of things that I have never even seen in unity, but regardless, it ended up being an enjoyable exercise and 2D is a bonus in terms of the fact that you can basically paint your own game world, which is awesome. It’s also interesting to compare 2D unity work to 3D. There are quite a few differences in both areas, mainly involving unity itself and not the coding. At least not yet, anyway. But overall, this week was enjoyable and I look forward to progressing more with this tutorial in creating a 2D game.

Tech Tip: Blog Profile

For this task I added a translation tool to my sidebar which enables the viewer to view my blog in a different language I feel tools like this are very helpful and that some viewers will appreciate it.

Online identity is important to think about and I've always been sophisticated when it comes to it as I dont use many social media platforms but yes online identity is important and should be thought about from time to time. 

My online identity will become more professional especially when I get my degree and get the job that I want. 

Tech Tip: Blogger Template

I chose a new theme layout for my blog I used the theme settings to make it look how I wanted which was very easy to navigate through so now my blog looks much better.

Planning

Image from questionpro.com

To start off this post the library tour by Lindsey was very helpful as I feel like I haven't utilized the library properly and would like to start doing that I like how she talked about refworks and that thought me more about it the library is a great space for getting work done in general and finding information from books to help you out with particular modules, this site for TUD library is very useful and helped me learn about how the library works back in my first year of this course.

I had a look and thought about it and the topic that I decided to cover for my book is going to be 

Professional Players

What is e-sports? 

What is its history?

Achievements and Competitive components involved with gaming

This could change around somewhat if I think of other things but I like this topic as esports has always been an interest of mine.

My favorite sort of research strategy is a step by step checklist where I break down my topic and sub topics and research on them individually and make a list of everything that I am interested in including during my research and then ticking the steps and stages off I enjoy this as its always been something I like when it comes to researching its what works best for me anyway and keeps my research organised and insuring I find everything that I need.

The matrix method seems interesting I like how organised it is and really plans a whole structure for your research which is very important in my opinion especially for keeping track of everything.

Ref-works is a great tool for citation management and is something that I have been using since I started this course and I will continue using it because its important to have good citation in your work and giving credit where credit is due.

As per similar to the matrix method I have organised folders on my PC in a multimedia folder with named folders so I know where everything is and I have also downloaded the arts review matrix spreadsheet so I am ready to start my research.

These are some links to things that I found useful and interesting while looking up research strategies and citation management.

https://library.leeds.ac.uk/info/1404/literature_searching/14/literature_searching_explained/4

https://guides.library.ucsc.edu/writing/cite_sources#:~:text=A%20citation%20identifies%20for%20the,References%20or%20Works%20Cited%20list.