Multimedia Development

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...