Mac's Blog

Man Reading Pictures/ iStockPhotos  Greeting Friends, Thats how Gary Gramenz begins his video on how to code a document and create themes, for some reason, those two words had an impact on me. I felt a certain kinship with Gary and I was excited to hear what he had to say. So in awe was I by these words that I have decided to add it to my personal vocabulary.  The collection of data and processing into a readable article was something I had learned to do in my last college during my journalism course but the whole coding a document aspect was completely new to me. The creation of themes was something hat hadn't occurred to me to do, usually I just kinda write down whatever comes into my head and hope to god that what I have written makes sense. The themes I ended up coming up with are as follows: Fun throughout history, gaming's impact on society, gaming systems, how games are played and meaningful gamification.  I'll have to start writing this chapter pretty soon, which ho

  Screenshot taken from Ruby's Adventure This weeks Unity Tutorial is making me wish I had saved my game idea from last semester till this semester, the overhead 2D style of gaming is an excellent way to make a stealth game. Ah well, it also works well for RPG's, maybe this semester I'll make my own RPG? Anyway, the tutorials themselves weren't too confusing this week. I've been having issues getting Unity to actually run on my laptop so I had to borrow my mams work laptop, I'll have to see about getting a laptop from the laptop loan scheme the college does.  There are a lot of similarities between making a 2d game and a 3D game, its all mostly just adding assets and going to the right hand of the screen to determine how that asset interacts with the world.  You can probably tell by how i worded that that I'm not exactly a tech genius, but hey I made it so the fox lady doesn't phase through the metal boxes so I'm doing something right. Using prefabs

image of Scott Nicholson's YouTube channel profile picture This week I got a great tip from Irene to check out a guy called Scott Nicholson, who is an American Professor of Game Design & Development at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario. His writings, which were all mostly available for free on his website seemed to be a treasure trove of useful information where pre digital gaming was involved. His YouTube channel is pretty interesting, check it out here. The first of his writings that I read was an excerpt from his book "Reframing Gaming" where he talks about the history of libraries offering the public chances at gaming, only unlike today where you can enter a library and get your hands on a pre owned copy of FIFA 17, people in the 1800s would visit their libraries to play games like scrabble or chess. The text also reminded me of another vital aspect of pre digital gaming that I had completely overlooked. Card games. Other than the odd poker night I

Cover for "The Shamutanti Hills" by Steve Jackson “In ev’ry job that must be done  There is an element of fun  You find the fun, and snap!  The job’s a game!” (Travers 1934) I'm an active reader, it's a curse. Every time I read something it takes me forever because I get too critical with what I'm reading, for instance, when I read a historical novel,  I'm gonna have to have twenty Wikipedia articles open on my phone explaining the backstory of each and every character and place mentioned. So when it came to this weeks reading I made sure to take my active reading compulsions to the next level and really critically analyse what I have been reading. I learned some interesting stuff, like that the term "gamification" was coined in 2002. However the thought of gamification goes back a long way, it seems that throughout our history, the human race has striven to gamify the boring parts of our life, such as everyday work life and even religious ceremony.

 The Chapter I chose to focus my writing on for this semester is "A Predigital history of Games And Narrative". I chose this topic as I'm a bit of a nerd for stuff that came out before video games, I enjoying playing table top wargames and old roleplaying games and I can see what kind of an influence theses types of games have had on our modern gaming landscape. I will mostly be focusing on the similarity between classic RPG Dungeons & Dragons and modern day Role Playing Games as I feel it is a topic that is significant for the book but is also something that I can create an in-depth analysis on as it is a topic that I would be interested in even in my free time. A good starting place for my research would be a book that has been recommended to me a few times by friends about the man who invented D&D (Dungeons & Dragons), Gary Gygax  called "Rise of the Dungeon Master" Image taken from "Rise of the Dungeon Master" Graphic Novel by David Kus

  My experience with this tutorial was not off to a great start. After clicking on the link to bring me to the Unity website my Wi-Fi went down and I was greeted with awesome Dinosaur jumping game that plays every time chrome cant connect to the Wi-Fi. "what the heck" I thought to myself, "I may as well try to beat my high score!" so I started playing and slowly but surely I got closer and closer to my high score of  5000, go tobainn, just as I reached 4900 points, the screen goes black and I'm introduced to the Unity tutorial website. Ah well, may as well get to work. The tutorial was easy enough to follow but I do really miss the videos that came with last semesters tutorials, it was easier to navigate the Unity programme after watching a video instead of just reading instructions. Creating the game was easy enough, having the player sprite move around was an easy thing to implement and I liked how the tutorial explained what each section of code was doing som