Mac's Blog

  The game has really taken shape this week. I have added a Start Menu and a Game Over Screen. I have also included a background for the main game, I designed all of these assets myself in Adobe Illustrator. I also imported the public domain songs from the band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard into the game to play at different points, my proudest implementation of this is the Game Over screen which has a much scarier heavy metal type sound to the Menu and Main Game.

 Finally the game is complete. This week consisted of adding audio to the game, which I had already familiarised myself with how to do for my game from this year. The audio really ties the game together.

  Not gonna lie I feel a bit like Dr. Frankenstein right now, the game actually works! It's Alive! It's Alive! I added in a the sprite I made in Adobe Illustrator so now the player is the Lizard Wizard and the obstacles are toxic waste barrels. The Score Board now works as well. The big task this week was making the game feel right, for instance, I had to adjust the box colliders on both sprites so that the player doesn't feel like they lost despite the fact they never actually touched the obstacle. For now the game just freezes when the player loses, next week I plan on adding a death screen.

Woohoo! Finally the chapter is done! Looking back at what I have written with fresh eyes was a great way for me to realise I have a real tendency to ramble. After taking out numerous tangents that went nowhere I finally had a chapter that I feel flows nicely. I also added in my author bio and a bibliography which I feel pretty silly for not including in the first place. Overall, I had a great time working on this chapter and am happy with the end result, I hope you guys enjoy reading it as much as I did researching and writing it.

  Author Bio My name is Matthew McConnell, I am 22 years old and a student of Creative Digital Media in TUDublin Blanchardstown. I've been playing all sorts of games my entire life so it just made sense that I would try and focus my career goals around playing games and having fun. My favourite Video Games are usually single player RPGs but I feel that games are best played with other people so I love going to the arcade with friends. Chapter Topic My chapter topic is the history of gaming in the predigital era, which is something I had a lot of fun researching and writing about, I'm a big nerd so talking about Dungeons and Dragons and the history of the game chasing was just really fun topics for me to write about. My Thoughts I'm pretty happy with how my chapter turned out, I feel like its pretty well researched and written competently enough. The thought of having something I wrote published in a bonafide book is a really exciting concept to me. I look forward to informi

 This week the tutorial focused on visual styling. Which consisted of adding a health bar for the player character. This was done by adding a UI (user interface) canvas into the hierarchy. This worked in a very similar way to how I created Game Over text for my game last year. The visual elements were taken from the ready made assets that came with the tutorial, however they all needed to be resized. After inserting the portrait, I then went about the process of masking which helped make the blue bar look like it was at different levels of health. Next up I created a new frog dude character. I then added RayCasting the player script, I had heard of Ray Casting from advertisements for one of the many Skyrim special editions so finding out how it works gave a real peak behind the curtain to how games are actually made.

  With my prototype complete I can already tell that this will be a fun game to play. So far all I have is a basic game with no real assets to speak of except for a few squares symbolizing the player, obstacles and the ground. The scripts I made were simple enough, the most interesting thing I've made so far is a Spike Generator which shoots out obstacles, this is kept offscreen so when the obstacles it generates come out it looks like they are standing still and that the player is moving forward, unfortunately there's not much skill involved in avoiding them as they come out one at a time every 2 seconds or so. I'll have to work on randomising the obstacles being generated to make the game more challenging. The score board doesn't work as of yet, I hope to have that working by next week.

  Name Possibilities: Leading names highlighted Polygondawanaland: The VideoGame Lizard Wizard  The Lizard Wizard and the Crumbling Castle Crumbling Castle Premise: You play as The Lizard Wizard as he makes his way through a barren wasteland till he reaches the crumbling castle. Unfortunately, these wastelands go on endlessly as the Lizard Wizard has actually found himself in the mythical world of Polygondawanaland. So it is up to the player to keep the Lizard Wizard alive for as long as possible by avoiding deadly barrels of toxic waste. Obstacles: The obstacles in this game are barrels filled with radioactive waste. Environmentalism is a huge theme in King Gizzard's music and so it was decided to portray that in the game with the same type of radioactive barrels that can be seen on the album cover of their album “Flying Microtonal Banana”. Goal and Victory Conditions: The game is an endless runner and as such has no definitive ending besides when the player hits an obstacle and g

  https://www.wikihow-fun.com/Dress-Like-the-Nostalgia-Critic I was sad to see that no one had reviewed my chapter besides Irene, ah well, it was my own fault for missing class. This week I went through my colleagues chapters, unfortunately Nasim hadn't uploaded anything. Emma had cut down a few things in the middle of the chapter and it reads much better. I cut down a lot of places where I tend to go on a tangent that has nothing to do with my topic.