Mac's Blog

 The readings this week match up pretty well with my week in general, I was listed as a close contact so I've essentially  just been spending my isolation play testing my upcoming game, I've also sent it around to some of my friends and got their hot takes and opinions on it. Therefore I'm pretty excited to see what the readings have in store for me and maybe I can compare how I did my playtesting to how they tell me I should do it. The first reading,"7 Different Types of Game Testing Techniques" essentially lists what it says on the tin, listing 7 different ways to test your game, the 4th one, functionality testing is one that stands out to me as I have no clue how the game will run on itch.o, I think I had better test it and see. After that I read, "Computer Games Are Serious Business and so is their Quality: Particularities of Software Testing in Game Development from the Perspective of Practitioners" was a long read, but an interesting one, essential...

  https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-are-in-the-endgame-now First things first I just wanna say, screw you Unity Hub, I had been trying to actually get to my game for the past week but as you guys may have seen in my last post, Unity Hub didn't want to admit that I had a licence to use it. So I uninstalled it and installed a newer version onto my laptop and boom, I'm back in business. First things first I spruced up the player character model by creating textures in unity and aplying them to a free Solid Snake asset I got off that website a few weeks back, heres the final result.   I know it's no Kratos in God of War 4 in terms of graphical quality but I was trying to go for a classic ps1 pixely aesthetic which I think translates pretty well into the final product. I also made a few textures for buildings and signs in illustrator and imported them into the game to make it a bit less Alpha and a lot more Beta. I also implemented a few voice lines that play at the start and en...

 This week I decided to focus on Game stories. So I started here... 1.Interactive storytelling This article basically focuses on the difference between storytelling in Video Games and other forms of media, the article mentions one man in particular... 2. Chris Crawford (game designer) I feel like I know a good few game designers, but personally I've never heard of Chris Crawford. Turns out he's an O.G, he made games for the Atari, including the game... 3. Wizard (2005 video game) http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-wizard_11885.html Despite the title of the article, this game was made by Chris Crawford back in 1980, according to the article, the gameplay went like this "The player is a wizard from Irata (Atari spelled backwards) and battles imps in a maze. It's not a symmetric battle: the player is faster than the enemy, but the enemy can go through walls and fire faster than the player can. There is no need to aim, as the angle of the player's fire is au...

image-photo/smiling-baby-girl-lying-on-bed-420756877 I love sleeping. It's too bad I'm terrible at it. It seems like most nights I'm up with a bit of sleep paralysis seeing demons crawling up my chest and stuff. So how can I stop this? How can I, Matthew McConnell get a good nights sleep, well I read some articles to see if I could find an answer to that question, here are my findings. The first article, "An Underappreciated Key to College Success: Sleep" by The New York Times kinda just comfirmed what I already knew, sleeping well helps people stay on top of college work. The next article held something new that I actually never knew about. REM is actually a form of sleeping and not just a band that loses its religion. Turns out REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement and that "During REM sleep the brain purges the unnecessary details to make room for new learning the following day" pretty neat huh? This article made me pretty excited to try and fix my sleepi...

image-photo/western-cowboy-portrait-1048362142  This week I decided to make an acronym out of myself. M.A.C MOVE ALONG COMPETENLY This acronym is for all you cowpokes out there who may feel like they have no idea what the hell they're doing, all you guys have to rmember is, you are competent, now move along that trail partner. (I've been replaying Red Dead 2 this week, hence the cowboy speak.)

Check out this sweet gif I made using a few photos I took last year.  

image-photo/fabulous-shadow-little-prince-on-horse-578902873  I can't believe watching video essays about video games is what I get to do for homework every week, it's awesome. I was halfway through watching the video "Telling Stories with Systems" when I realised, hold on... I've watched this before, in fact, it's the video that got me to try out Crusader Kings 2! It's nice to know all those hours watching YouTube videos as a teenager have finally started to pay off! This weeks topic on stories in games is one that interests me greatly as most of the time the main thing I look for when deciding to play a new game is the story, or more importantly the stories I can inside the game. One of the main reasons why I love RPGs like The Witcher 3 is that although I can complete quests and goals set for me by the developers, I can also choose how to go about them, will I be a barbarian and cut down every enemy I see? Or will I choose to talk it out with the villai...