Skip to main content

Week 8 Reading and Writing

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 objective game types on Battlefield 1 over more solo-based game types?

Games MDA focuses on the Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics of games. First and foremost I loved this reading because it helped me to understand the differences between them. This article lead me to look at 'Eight Kinds of Fun' and understand the basics of how people play and what they find fun.
Game Fun looks at the reasoning behind creating and finding games fun because of our ancestors. It looks at links between what our ancestors would do in their spare time between hunting and to pass the time.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I feel the reading tasks have helped with my analysing and writing skills and that I am gaining more from my research now. I find when I read articles or watch videos relevant to games in my own time I take a lot more from them by just being able to analyse them myself, and finding similarities and links between them and the readings done as part of this course.

I am happy with my project so far and feel that I will have a playable game that has good game elements and is fun, thanks to the readings and notes I have done over the past couple of weeks.
I feel the biggest accomplishment I have achieved from this module overall is being better able to analyse and utilise information in my own projects.

Image:
Source
I picked this image from my reading from week 2. I picked this image as it shows the cover of an old book on 'The Art of Computer Game Design' from 1984. The thing I love about it is that you can see the book is a bit tattered and has more than likely been well used. Books and studies like these are the reason that gaming progressed as fast as it did, and only three decades later we have very realistic open world games, and thousands of other games from various genres to choose from. It is books like these that have led to where we are now and they should be appreciated for the bibles to early video games they are. 

Looking Forward: Looking forward I hope to have a smooth running, albeit basic video game by the end of the semester. I do hope that we can work together in small groups or as a class next semester to create a much larger and detailed game, bringing together the things we've learned over the first semester as everyone will have different experiences, viewpoints, skills, and knowledge from their own journey through the readings and their projects.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction to a Future Game Developer & Film Producer

Introduction A photo of me taken by James Reynolds My name is Christopher Carney, and I'm an aspiring Creative Digital Media student hailing from IT Blanchardstown (soon to be one of three campuses as part of the Technological University of Dublin). I have interests in everything digital media from graphic design to filmography and everything in between. I'm a 'jack of all trades, master of none' who is constantly looking to challenge and better themselves, yearning to learn and gain experience in anything I can try my hand at. Education After I completed my leaving certificate in 2015 I went on to study in Dunboyne College of Further Education for two years. In my first year I studied Sound Engineering & Music Production at FETAC Level 5 in 2015. This was a fun and active year long course in which I expanded on my previous knowledge of music production, and learned a lot about sound engineering. We organised a gig that year as part of our course in whi...
13 comments
Read more

Game Brainstorm

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 ...
6 comments
Read more

Game Vision Statement

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...
5 comments
Read more