Mac's Blog

  Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - Wikipedia This weeks readings focused on a concept called "flow theory". It seems to focus a lot on the player using game dynamics to achieve goals within a game and keeping the player engaged. It is a state that I have found myself in quite a few times, and it is interesting to me that this is something that game developers take into consideration when creating a game. It seems that keeping a player engaged is very important. However I feel that most modern games focus on introducing a player to game flow  at the beginning of their games, slowly teaching the player how to engage with it, which is great when the player is playing the game for the first time, but I feel that having to reintroduce players to game flow on another playthrough can be a hindrance, that's why I think that games should give players all the gameplay opportunities possible at the start of the game to keep them engaged longer.

"Design Considerations" by Greg Aleknevicus was a cool thing to read. As a Warhammer fan, I found his insight to creating board games pretty cool, I appreciate how he mentioned Space Hulks cool box art as an important part of the game, which I feel is an oftentimes overlooked aspect to games nowadays. I feel that nowadays more people care about gameplay trailers and researching a game rather than just seeing something cool and buying it. The blog focuses mainly on board games though so it's not the most helpful thing I've read. The video on Game Design Documents was a good help to me while I created my own Game Design Document.

MDA framework for IT system design | 4Agile  What does MDA stand for then? Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics Mechanics is essentially how the game plays, whether it be jumping,r unning or even how long it takes to look down the sight of your gun in a game. Dynamics is what comes from combining multiple mechanics creating a smooth gameplay experience, for instance, in order to play Mario, the player runs and jumps. Aesthetics is essentially what the game aims to make the player feel, for instance, harder gameplay and scary game settings create a horror aesthetic. This is what I was able to piece together from my reading anyway. 

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fsabotencon%2Fstatus%2F906211826823815170&psig=AOvVaw1d_ap4ym4gTAVD8kCA4XY5&ust=1641866276866000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAwQjhxqFwoTCPiz5NOKpvUCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD   The reading this week was real fun. The video  had alot of fun ideas as to how to come up with ways to conceptualise your games in real life, it reminds me of how Hideo Kojima used Lego to create and plan out the maps for the Metal Gear games, an interesting video that kind of connects to this can be found here . "Formal Abstract Design Tools" by Doug Church was an easy, quick read. I enjoyed how on page 2 he discusses how games have a language without borders, detailing how gamers have their own lingo that stretches worldwide which I found amusing. I found Paper Prototyping and Iterative Design by Chris Barney to be the best of the three. It has the same sort of concept found in the video but his blog aesthetic and his writing

 This weeks tutorial went by pretty quickly. The important thing I find with creating games in Unity is to clean up your code. I find its really handy to keep the code easy to read and not too spaced out. This game was actually pretty fun to play even after completing the tutorial as I am actually a pretty big fan of the dinosaur game that plays on google when I have no WIFI, I also found it similar to jetpack joyride. Introducing a Game Over state was something I had already done in my project so that wasn't too hard. The main thing I took from this game was the moving background, though I had no need for it in my game, it made me realise the ingenious ways that developers can convince the players that they are moving ecen if they aren't, it reminds me of the genius techniques used by early filmmakers to convey fast motion, like sword fights on the top of trains. The code this week was hard to understand and I found myself googling a few terms after I had forgotten what a pref

I was glad that this weeks tutorial started with fixing something I found counter intuitive to the gameplay from last week. Having to press the "s" key every time I wanted to span a new animal got in the way of gameplay I felt, so having the animals spawn on a timer was pretty handy I must say. Inputting the code for the spawn manager would have seemed an impossible task if not for the tutorial. The narrator explains what we're inputting and why very clearly which I found really helpful. Challenge 2 did exactly what it said on the tin, it challenged me, however, I finally got it to the point where the ball would fall from the top of the screen at random intervals and the player could send the dog out to catch the ball, leaving me feeling pretty accomplished. (Though I admit I checked YouTube tutorials for a bit of help) Unit 3 was one that I found pretty easy, mostly because I had already implemented sound into my project game. The player movement tutorial was very helpfu

  This weeks Unity Tutorial was pretty difficult I must say. I'm steadily starting to realise that my laptop may not be able to keep up with the Unity engine, every time I use it something goes wrong, whether it be the programme doesn't remember I have a licence or the programme just randomly crashing whenever it feels the need to.  Once I had gotten the programme to work however, the tutorials were easy enough to follow. I started with opening a new project and importing all the assets much like how I did with project 1, except this time i named the project "Project 2" I then dragged and dropped the humans pets and food into the landscape. Lesson 2.1 was mostly just inputting the suitable code into the player character. Lesson 2.2 is one I wished i had completed before finishing my game as I feel the projectile throwing mechanics that learnt in this part would have worked well for a shooting mechanic in my game. I was pretty excited when the projectile worked after I

Learning how to control the player character was much easier than I had expected. The way in which these Unity Tutorials provide information is so easy to understand that it makes the task of making a video game almost relaxing, inputting the code provided by the tutorial was a lot easier than having to guess what kind of code I should enter and worrying about spelling errors within the code that came with making my official game. The inclusion of a transcript of the videos are really helpful as they help me to locate and go back to parts of the videos I need to hear again. these usually happened whenever the video would show the host clicking a certain thing on screen and then I would attempt to find the same thing on my own screen. Not only that, but the vehicle ended up controlling really well which made me feel pretty accomplished. Overall, the way Unity has made these tutorials works perfectly for people like me who have never really worked on video games till now. I look forward