Project Progress

Image taken from unity project

For the project task this week, it was all about having my first playable for my project put together, which I did, and my game is going well so far. I switched up a few things compared to last week, so at first I wanted to make my 2D game a top down view, but I then decided to go with a platformer like the likes of Super Mario Bros. because I liked the idea of it and wanted to try it, so I made my first playable I put my character into my game and gave it the ability to move left and right, as well as jump around and turnaround. I gave the player all of the movement options necessary for my game. I then created platforms for the player to jump on. As it’s the first playable created, I wanted to focus on player movement and a basic level design to start as my foundation. Then during the next few weeks, I will add in more level design and gameplay mechanics etc, but so far my game is going well and I am enjoying the creation of my 2D game and am excited to see how it turns out as I improve it over the coming weeks. Creating a 2D game so far I have noticed it is much easier than a 3D game in some aspects, which I like because that means I can focus a lot more on my ideas and how I want the game to function while also being able to polish my game and make it what I want and how I want it to look. It’s cool to see the differences in game creation on Unity comparing 2D to 3D and what differentiates them from one another in terms of how they are made and how different they look. I have always liked 2D in terms of the retro cartoon side, and 3D is, of course, more modern and has a better graphical look and a lot more perspective. My game so far is going well, and I am enjoying the process.

Unity Tutorial 09

For my project, I wanted to give my player basic movement options in the game and there were certain techniques I remembered but some that I didn't, which is understandable because it is hard to remember everything from Unity, especially being new to it, so I chose a YouTube tutorial on basic player movement for beginners. I didn't want to search for anything complex because I wanted to learn and revise what I have potentially already done through the unity tutorials. The person in the video explained it very well and went through it step by step, and I actually learned quite a lot from it rather than just copying and pasting things and not getting any learning experience at all. My goal for my project overall is to actually learn about my capabilities in unity and also learn new methods and techniques to further my skills in unity, because I am still new to unity and there’s so much that I have to learn and master, so this project has taught me a lot, and that’s why I’ve enjoyed it so much. Being able to add our own things into it and look up help videos when we are stuck is very helpful and a great learning experience overall. 

Image from Youtube.com

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