Multimedia Development

Some of the speakers from the first half of MAKE 2019 MAKE - Media, Art, Knowledge, Education. MAKE is a seminar that started in 2018. It is TUDublin Blanchardstown's own celebration of the digital media industry, giving our Creative Digital Media students a place to learn from industry professionals. The day started with speakers who were amateurs and pros across illustration, design, visual art and UX design. They talked about their experience in their sectors of the industry and reference each others work to show similarities in each others work. Some of the most important things we as students can take away from these talks is how anybody can start in the industry from what they know, as they will learn and grow along the way as they progress through their careers. The second part of the day had speakers who worked in areas such as sound design, music composition, filming and directing, with our lecturer Hugh Rodgers who is an award-winning composer and directo...

I got to play a quick run through of this game and I was very impressed. You can see that a lot of time and effort has gone into the illustrations as well as the functionality of the game. Each level works well and any time you got a question wrong it brought you to the relevant 'Try Again' screen. All the links between each level worked as they should. There were many nice features to the game such as sounds when you clicked on some of the animals and the farmer would sound out the questions if clicked on. I think this game would do well even as a basic learning game for children if it was available online for free. It has a lot of potential to become a popular children's learning game if the team was to continue to develop it.

This week I've been working on getting the FPS controller to work within the world that Daniel has made. There has been some trouble getting it to work and I am currently still troubleshooting it. For next Thursday I hope to have the FPS controller working and the boundaries for the map worked out, as well as how we will implement the boundaries to look to the player. I do not like invisible boundaries on roads that look like you can walk down them, I prefer to have rubble, cars etc. in the way of the players path to act as the boundary. Screenshot of the basic level we have currently

As of Week 10 all the members of the 19Sixteen group have been assigned specific roles and things to research in relation to their roles. All members also have tasks due for next Thursday so that we can start building on our game. I myself took charge of reorganising roles to fit our six week timeframe and along with James Reynolds we merged the Assets and Level Creator teams as they will need to work closely together to build our version of D1. I also took charge of drawing out a map of the area we are creating for the game so the level creators can build the game world based on a specific area. Sketch of Dublin 1, the area that we plan to make

Our GDD in a PowerPoint -  https://vimeo.com/325028075 Password is: 19Sixteen James Reynolds and I have spent the past few weeks creating the GDD and made it into a PowerPoint presentation that you can see a video of above.  My role as Project Manager is to: - Create reasonable and achievable goals for all team members.   - Keep in contact with each team-leader to maintain communication and make sure there is no confusion.   - I will also help with the programming. Dublin after The Rising - Source

Today we looked at researching peer reviewed papers related to, and that will help us with our projects. I followed the mind map from 'interactive storytelling' to 'theory' to 'visual storytelling'. 1.  Figuero Espadas (2019),  A review of scene and sequence concepts. ,  Communication & Society. 2019, Vol. 32 Issue 1, p267-277. 11p. 1. This research proposes a separation of the scene concept into two, for the better understanding of any audiovisual narrative: scene and narrative scene. A scene is a narrative unit with space-time continuity. The key to this unit is spatiotemporal continuity. The narrative scene is, according to McKee: “an action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that turns the value-charged condition of a character´s life on at least one value with a degree of perceptible significance. Ideally, every scene is a story event” (2003, p. 56). The key is its unity of action. 2. A narrative scene is a particularly...

19Sixteen This game is  a 3D open world game set during the events of the 1916 Rising, where you will play as a character that has to pass messages between key locations and people who were in the Rising. I have formed a group for the project and myself and James Reynolds have organised roles for each of the group members. Provisionally they are: Leaders Chris: Project Manager - Creates reasonable and achievable goals for all team members.  - Keeps in contact with each team-leader to maintain communication and make sure there is no confusion.  - Contributes with Conor for the GDA to make sure the game is not obscured or changed.  James: Designer - Keeps in contact with each team-leader.   - Contributes to final decisions from team-leaders with Chris.  - Collaborates with Chris and has the 2nd voice for all decisions made by Project Manager.  - Creates grading system and keeps up with the workload and Marks tea...

This blog post is a look at the comments I have received and general feedback. Feedback In: I think the quality of the comments and feedback I have gotten from the class has been great. The majority of the comments left under my posts have been constructive in criticism and in suggestions for my ideas and opinions of my game ideas too. I find these kinds of comments to be the best form as they can help get external points of view that I might not have thought of.  Feedback Out: I feel the comments I have left for others have been of high quality. I always aim to give some form of constructive criticism as it is the type of criticism I like to receive. Just telling someone "oh that looks good" or "I don't like it" is not going to help them progress their project or their skills. Saying "I like X, Y and Z but you could improve on Z in this way" is the most useful criticism. Blog Comments: I feel the blog comments are a good idea, and it is nice ...

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...

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!