Multimedia Development

I have just completed the reading task for this week on initial design. The reading this week focused on initial design and creating mock-ups for games from board games to video games and everything in between. The main article  we read called Design Considerations by Greg Aleknevicus (the creator of Black Vienna Online ) goes in depth about what to consider when creating a board game, which is easily transferable to other mediums for games also. From the beginning I agree with Greg straight away on something that I loved as a child - physical presentation. Getting a new video game as a child I always loved looking at the front and back covers for the art and information, opening the box to see what art is on the disc, flicking through the manual and getting that new book smell  as well as looking at other things like physical copies of the in-game world map. Physical presentation was such a great selling point to me as a consumer as a child with video games that it i...

In this Unity tutorial we learned how to utilise the programming language C# in our games to rotate the arms on a clock that we've made in the Unity Editor. The tutorial was on this page  and it was relatively easy to read through and follow. I started from the start in building the clock face out of a 3D Object in game. In this case I used a cylinder. I flattened the cylinder to create a face and moved on to making the hour indicators . For this I had to use a cube 3D Object, and make it long and narrow. I then learned how to use the hierarchy system in the Unity editor to make multiples of the hour indicator.  Each time I duplicated one I had to increase it's y  rotation by 30 degrees to move it along the clock face's axis. These indicators were then taken from their 'parents' in the hierarchy system and placed as 'children' under the clock object. Moving on I created the arms next, making each of them a parent of their own for the hour, minute and s...

Having completed near an hour of reading I have decided to document my findings on Games MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics & Aesthetics). I started with watching the slide show video which summarised a lot of what LeBlanc, Hunicke and Zabek explored in their publishing of ' MDA Framework '. Mechanics, Dynamics & Aesthetics are defined as the following: 1. Mechanics - describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms. 2. Dynamics - describes the run-time behaviour of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each others outputs over time. 3. Aesthetics - describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system. The slideshow and article continue to go into detail on each. My understanding of each has improved greatly thanks to it. I understand Mechanics now as being ammunition or spawn points in games, Dynamics as being how a situation develops because of your in-game choi...

Little update: I've added my Twitter feed to my side bar! Click on the burger bar/navigation bar in the top right hand corner of my blog to view it!

Little update: I've added my Twitter feed to my side bar! Click on the burger bar/navigation bar in the top right hand corner of my blog to view it!

A link to my first list . I created the CDM list as it is most relevant to me and what I am doing. I added the CDM Twitter and the ITBSU Twitter as they tie in to my college work. I had no previous experience with lists on Twitter but it is quite handy to get all the tweets from a relevant industry and relevant accounts in one place. And I agree with what Shaun said in his blog post about being time-efficient online: "so much to keep up with, and so little time!"

I only follow a few accounts on my new Twitter  as I have only recently set it up. I did have an account that was several years old where I was following hundreds of people and I felt I needed a fresh start which is why I started anew! On my new account I mostly follow my fellow classmates, but I also follow accounts like UDHEIT because we learned a lot to do with Universal Design in first year, Lovin Dublin as they regularly tweet about restaraunts and events in Dublin and our very own CDM Twitter account to keep up to date with current news relative to us and our field of study!

A link to my first tweet on the MultiDev hashtag. A link to my first retweet  on the MultiDev hashtag. A link to my first tweet on a different hashtag . The FridayFeeling hashtag got my attention because it is currently trending and it currently relates to me as I do have that Friday feeling as it's the first full weekend I have had off work in a couple of months! To anyone reading this blog post feel free to follow the links and give me a follow on Twitter!

Here's a link to my first tweet

Game Brainstorms Four types of games that I would like to possibly develop in the future. 1. First-Person Shooter Inspired by the likes of classic shooter games from Doom (1993) to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) I would like to create a simple First-Person Shooter (FPS) game. Having started our Unity tutorials in Week 2 and creating a simple environment to run around in I think it would be an interesting challenge. There are scripts and tutorials  (from none other than Jimmy Vegas himself) available online on how to make a FPS game. He goes in depth on how to make a basic shooter and I feel that if I was to watch his videos it would be possible to bring that knowledge into my own environment. The video series even goes as far as to create spider enemies  that you can shoot in game. My overall idea would be to create a presentable and fully working level where you have to shoot all of the spiders to complete the level. I would also be thinking that I could have ...

Having read " Formal Abstract Design Tools " by Doug Church, published in  July of 1999, I have opened my eyes a little more to the fast progression of games in the past two decades. It is amazing to see how the same design principles that we use today were only being termed around the time of games like Mario 64   (1996),  which is used as an example in the article. Some of the tools  that Church talks about in the article are "Cooperation, Conflict and Confusion". Church talks about how the player of a game like Mario 64  or others, will experience intention or consequence. When performing tasks in the game there are only so many ways a task or action can be performed (which are created by the game designers) so it is up to the designers to create tasks that are challenging enough that the consequence is not completing the task to advance in the game, but that the player can work out the intentional action to perform the task and progress. This is all abou...

by Friedrich Eduard Bilz dated 1894 - Source Today I followed a Wikipedia trail starting with a topic that we covered in college. I decided to start at Christopher Nolan 's Wikipedia page as we had watched scenes from Memento (2000), as part of our Digital Video Techniques. I am really fond of Christopher Nolan's work, and Memento  is a great movie but I particularly love The Dark Knight Trilogy  (2005-12) and Inception  (2010). His most recent film Dunkirk  (2017) is a cinematic masterpiece, and won Nolan the Academy Award for Best Director. In the article it mentioned how "Nolan's films are typically rooted in epistemological and metaphysical themes", and I decided to follow the link on the word " metaphysical ". Metaphysics is "the branch of philosophy that studies the essence of a thing" meaning it questions "being, becoming, existence and reality". The word Metaphysics comes from the Greek word meaning 'beyond nature...

Unity Logo - Source Having started with the three Unity tutorials I can say I am excited to delve further into game development over the next few weeks. The first tutorial is a bit slow and of course I sat there frustrated because I wanted to dive straight into making games but towards the end of the video it picks up a bit and we get into making basic hills on a blank terrain. In the second tutorial we get into using assets and adding texture on to the terrain. I found this simple enough and was happy to play around with the brush tools and the opacity and height to create different hills, and to smooth them out or make them jagged. I am already getting ideas for how I can use this in future projects/game worlds and I can see how they utilised it in mountainous areas in games such as Skyrim. It was nice to use the dirt and grass textures to add colour to the world, even though they were quite basic looking to what would be in a finished game. The third tutorial shows us how to w...

Cover of ' The Art of Computer Game Design ' by Chris Crawford, 1984 After finishing reading through the Reading Material for Week 2 I have learned some things I didn't know previously. For instance I did not know that the card game 'Magic: The Gathering' helped to " triple the size of the hobby games industry ". I also did not realise there was such thing as a cross between a LARP (Live Action Role-playing Game) and traditional theater, such as the play ' Tony & Tina's Wedding '. Reading through the articles made me realise that game design goes much further past the traditional board and card games and usual video games. I had heard about LARP and "Choose Your Own Ending" books, but they do not come to mind when you think about game design. I know that when it comes to creating my own game I will have to take different game types into consideration, and they could in turn become influences and inspirations for my own game...

This week for extra credit I decided to try my hand at one of the Growth Mindset tasks. Quote 1 THE DECISION TO TRY "I often fall into the trap of saying good job, awesome when reviewing people's work. It used to be a game in high school to see who could critique "you put the wrong date" so that we could have our one correction out of the way. I definitely will work on being more specific with feedback, as I know how much I dislike non-specific feedback." I picked this quote from the list as I love most feedback I get, positive and negative. The kind of feedback I do not like though is the "good job" and "awesome" or what I hear a lot is "oh yeah, that looks grand". I love to hear constructive criticism, giving me ideas of how I can improve my work. Quote 2 WHY NOT? "The way I would like to use "Why Not?" is in the sense of saying yes. Why not make time to see your friends? Why not make a random ...