Unity Tutorial 04

 

For the first tutorial this week, we worked with adding animations to our characters. We briefly covered animations last semester, however not in as much detail.The animations gave Ruby and the robot some personality, making the game less static and more life-like. In order to animate a GameObject we needed to add an ‘Animator’ component. We then made a controller stored in the animations folder. The controller allows us to manage states between different animations. The animations were made using sprites to show different character movements. The sprites are added to the timeline and can span over a chosen period of time depending how fast or slow you want the animation to play.

 

For the second part of the tutorial, we had Ruby shoot cog projectiles. A script was made for the cog. The cog was also added to the prefab and removed from the hierarchy window so it would only appear when the player presses the ‘C’ to shoot. In the script we learned how to create our own physics system for the projectile. Another animation was also added to the Robot when it collided with the cog, it turned into a dancing friendly character.

 

Here is a screenshot of the Unity progress so far

Analysis

 

Image source: QuestionPro

Thursday's lecture has given me a better insight on how to work on the annotated bibliography. They can be viewed as a collection of the notes  taken from the reading that summarizes the paper.

The main objective is that our annotated bibliographies will be the main source of content to write about in our topics. So we will not be looking at the paper's we have read by that point. From my experience, it’s not the 'writing part' of the annotated bibliography that is quite difficult but rather the ability to effectively dissect and pinpoint what you need from the paper.

So this week I decided to spend more time taking down what I need from the paper. If the paper seemed of interest, I made sure to highlight the questions that it aimed to answer, after which I followed the method Shaun showed us by reading through the abstract/ introduction and conclusion. Then I moved to the body of the text, and rather than trying to read the entire paper, I selectively looked for areas where paper answers the question set out in the introduction or abstract and tried to include some examples to back up the points mentioned.

It’s still a exhausting process, especially when you’re not used reading an academic article like you would with the morning newspaper or your favorite novel. It’s a skill that comes with time and persistence.

Click here to checkout working document.

Unity Tutorial 03

  

Unity tutorial for week 4 was quite script-heavy.  The information and explanations that came along with the instructions was a lot to digest. So far, I think this may have been a more challenging unity session for me.

The first part of the tutorial we were introduced to the ‘trigger’ element in games. This was something which we also briefly covered in last semester. They are similar to colliders except instead of blocking movement, Unity’s physics system will only tell us if a game object collided with it. For this part, we applied the trigger on the collectable strawberry, which restores health when Ruby picks it up.  In the game console, it will tell us how much health Ruby has restored. Looking back, if I was aware of this part the tutorial it would have been a neat mechanic to have for my game in semester 1.

For the second part of the tutorial, we had to write a script with the same trigger to restoring health but for the damage zone (spikes) in the map. The only difference is that if Ruby collides with spikes, they will not disappear but instead inflict damage. We also added an enemy robot to the scene which walks back and forth which runs on a timer before it changes direction. When it collides with Ruby, it inflicts damage. However, instead of using the trigger function, we used OnCollsionEnter2D that is linked with the enemy’s Rigidbody component – since the enemy is a solid object compared to the health buff it needs to interact with the player.

 Here is a screenshot of my progress so far. As mentioned in the previous Unity post I did end up changing the game objects and background a bit.  

Tutorial 02

 This week’s Unity tutorials were especially fun to mess around with. For the first part of the tutorial I had to decorate my own world for the game with additional assets of our choice. I was slightly confused by this since I recall last week needing to copy down a particular background when learning about tile maps.  I even checked  a few of the other blogs to see if I was on the right track, but it turns out we have full creative freedom for this part!

So, below you’ll find a progress of my game world so far. I say ‘progress’ because I’m quite fickle and will likely change things around quite a bit.  I wanted to include the steampunk factory mansion but due to the way I designed the tiles for the background, there’s no ‘space’ for it without the top of the mansion sticking out of the scene. I could have it floating on water but that would look pretty strange. I will definitely alter background before the next tutorial.

The first part of the tutorial showed how to change the drawing order of how Unity renders game objects using its y-axis. We were also introduced to adding and modifying Prefabs which I was familiar with from last semester. (You can tell I had fun with editing prefabs from the excessive red)

The second part of the tutorial was focused on Unity’s physics system and using the Ruby controller script from last week to have her collide with other game objects. Similar to what we’ve previously done, we added a 2D rigidbody component to our game objects. I noticed how detail orientated you need to be when designing for a 2D environment and how the interactions with different game objects occur to make sure the game-play feels smooth. 

Reading 03

 

For our reading tasks this week, we began to write our first annotated bibliography. I already had four sourced ready from last week but I decided to look for six more so I can have the required amount ready in case some of the reading material might not turn out to be useful further down the line.

I downloaded a pdf version for each of the readings I’ve done and brought them into Adobe Acrobat. Following what we learned from the lecture and the instructions on the website using the Three – Pass method:  I read the abstract, introduction and conclusion of the paper. I then highlighted and included notes and comments along the way. I repeat the process when reading the entire paper and wrote extra bits of information.  One  of  the reading material I including is a really interesting book by David Michael and  Sande Chen. However it’s nearly 300 pages long so it will take longer to collect information from. I may need to pick and choose areas that are the most relevant and interesting.

Screenshot of note-taking in Adobe Acrobat - Ger, P.M. (2014) eAdventure: Serious Games, Assessment and Interoperability. 

The entire process was quite long but the method helped me grasp a better understanding of the paper. Although I was able to write up the 4 annotated bibliographies with summaries I feel like I wasn’t able to round it off with critical evaluation of the source.   

Despite the detailed instructions on the website – which are very helpful, I also found this week’s lecture/session golden. Being able to watch and engage in the lecture gave me a kick start for what to expect and how to prepare. I hope these sessions will carry on where needed. Annotate bibliography can be found in the link below.

Click here to view working google document.

Planning

 As part of our module in Semester 2, our class group will be working on an open-source academic textbook on Game Design and Development. This is a continuation of our reading and writing tasks from last year and serves as good practice and preparation to dissect academic articles and write in a formal style. I do feel uncertain as to whether I will able to meet the the level of writing standard  required. On top of that, from last year's reading experience I did find areas of academic reading overwhelming. 😓 Despite that we're bound to start somewhere, right?

First order of business was choosing a topic. I had a little trouble with this part as most people were quick to snag the 'fun' topics (RIP Character Creation).😔 I ended up switching a few times to make sure my topic wouldn't overlap with anyone else's as well as checking to see if there was enough reading material available in our library's database. I ended up sticking with the topic on Serious Games. Using the concept of games in education and real-world scenarios seems interesting and I'm curious to see what direction it will take me. 

This week, a member of the library staff,  Lindsay, generously gave us a tour of the library tools and resources which will help us when doing our research. She gave us tips on how to limit our searches to gather more relevant material, such as using quotation marks (" ") for keywords and phrase and taking advantage of  Boolean operators ('AND', 'NOT', other). The biggest takeaway was using RefWorks to store all our research material and it also generates the citations for you.

Following the task instructions I went ahead and made a document outlining a few questions based on the 4 W's (Who, What, Where, Why?). This served as a little brainstorm to see what areas I could potentially discuss in my writing. https://drive.google.com/file/d/11hwyJx11h0ipVOWdRY2XzBGPu03HzmSe/view?usp=sharing

Next, I came up with roughly 13 search keywords that relate to topic (although I haven't tried them all out yet). 

Finally I decided to download the Matrix Review spreadsheet and included 4 sources I found from the library database. The spreadsheet does look a bit overwhelming but I figured I'd give it a try and alter some sections to suit me as I go along. Here is a link to the working document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yw4aq4BtQHtcPtB4P0qG-t_CojexoDZe/view?usp=sharing

Now getting into the actual planning...

1. I'd try to stick the following strategy when looking up material:

2. Anything that seems useful will be added to the RefWorks folder. 

3. When scanning through the material, I plan to use a word frequency website where it will find the most common used words in the article. Here's an example: http://www.writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp  I'm still looking for one that can sift through documents/pdf's. 

This will give me a general idea of the main theme/keywords of the article and I can re-use the keywords to look up other material.

4. Finally after reading/skimming through the material I'll start to fill in the Review Matrix. I plan to also use Diigo, to highlight annotate on the actual document copy. Diigo is a chrome extension which allows you organize bookmarked websites and also add your notes and comments. 

 

Unity Tutorial 01

 

Welcome back in 2021. Carrying on in semester 2, I feel more comfortable with Unity. When it came to choosing a route for the Unity tutorials, I decided to go with 2D game development. Looking back, although the video tutorials for the 3D game were nice and simple to follow; I did find the scripting part difficult especially when it came to making a game of my own.   Therefore, I felt that reinforcing what I've learned last year was the way to go. 

Setting up the Unity editor was a bit confusing. The tutorial didn't appear to be compatible with the 2018 version installed, so I went ahead and installed the 2020.1 which was recommended. The interface is somewhat different, so it took me a while to get used to it. The only downside to the 2020 version is that it currently does not provide long term support. Keeping my fingers crossed that nothing unfortunate happens down the road!😜🤞

As I worked through the  tutorials for this week, I noticed a contrast in their layout. The main difference being that there were no videos that accompanied the instructions similar to last semester. In their place, there were more detailed explanations of the Unity editor and what parts of the script meant which gave me a clearer understanding than I had last semester. Looking back, it seems quite silly but I only now understand the difference between Vector3 and Vector2. Vector is data type that stores numbers. Vector2 only stores two numbers and you can guess how many Vector3 holds. Since we're working on a 2D game we will only need the x and y axis positions which is why we will be using Vector2.

I was also introduced to working with tilemaps which are used to decorate the game world and various backgrounds. What I liked about using tilemaps is that you can create a set of tiles to use from a single tile sprite. For instance, the following 3x3 grid is split into 9 different cells of the same image. This is time efficient and saves a lot of effort when creating art for your game from scratch. Also, I found you can get pretty creative when combining various pieces.

Image source: Ruby's Adventure: 2D Beginner - Unity tutorial

The following is a screenshot of my final painted scene. It's not centered to the cameras position in the game view. Hopefully I'll be able to fix that later on!

Screenshot of my progress with Unity tutorials