Multimedia Development

The reading this week focuses on game stories and why narrative is important, as so far we have only read and researched about rules. ' A Practical Guide to A Hero's Journey ' is the first of our readings for this week and looks at how a hero's journey can shape the narrative of a game.  In this article we look at the value of myths, as within society they teach us about ourselves, morals and how we should behave. Throughout history myths and stories have been used to encourage tribes and communities to be brave while hunting and fighting, and to believe that their deaths during war are good for the survival of their comrades. The same can be seen today with suicide bombers believing what they are doing is for the greater good and that they will go to their heaven and be with Allah. Narratives like these can be used to encourage entire countries to blindly follow the same ideologies. Germany after WW1 had severe problems with hyperinflation . Adolf Hitler took ...

For this week's reading I am looking at my previous Reading and Project posts on my blog and giving my thoughts on them. Looking Back: Looking back on my previous posts I have to say that my writing abilities have improved indefinitely. The level of detail I am able to go into and my ability to analyse articles in great depth has also improved. This is beneficial across all modules as analysing articles and other peoples work is an important skill and plays a big part in our course. My favourite readings so far has to be between the ' Games MDA ' and ' Game Fun '. They are relevant to one another as they both look at the psychology behind why people play games, what they find fun and what keeps them coming back for more. I find this type of research fascinating as I always ask myself "why?". Why do I like some FPS games over others? Why do I like playing multiplayer on some games and only want to play by myself on others? Why do I like team-based ...

The purpose of this blog post is to create a vision statement for my game, so I can lay out my vision in sufficient detail to implement it. Skeleton Quest  is a first person adventure game made with the Unity 3D engine. You play as the hero Stephen, exploring the vast open world and fighting skeletons and spiders as you collect gems in your quest to clear the world of the undead. It is the second idea in this previous blog post . Genre:  First-Person Adventure Platform: Windows, Mac and Linux. The game will be playable with a keyboard and mouse, with possible adaptation for an Xbox One controller in the future. Gameplay: The game will handle similarly to other first person games like Skyrim, Fallout or Call of Duty. The player will have an open world in which to explore and collect a number of gems to complete the game. The game and controls will be thought to the player through pop up messages. To challenge the player they will need to explore the open w...

Having completed this weeks reading task on the 'Different Kinds of Fun' I have learned more about why we play games, and what makes some games addictive. The first of this weeks readings about fun in games I read was Natural Funitivity by Noah Falstein. This article focuses primarily around how we developed a want to play games from our ancestors. At the most basic level it looks at hunter-gatherers and their need to hunt and how that has traversed to us through thousands of years of evolution. Hunting has given us a desire to be physically active, but in recent years we have begun to simulate it through entertainment - like movies and video games for example. It has also given us a yearning for things that could technically help us with hunting, such as motorcycles and cars that can give us more speed. Sure we don't need to hunt nowadays but our ancestors utilised tools to complete tasks and vehicles have become tools to us for many reasons - getting us too and from w...