Reading 09

 

Image found (here)

The weight of this week’s workload got a bit lighter now after finishing up with the Unity tutorials. We are also in our final stages of refining our writing for our Game Design & Development book. I can say with relief that the point of tension for this module has been crossed for this module. Using the shared google document to paste our writing in the appropriate shows the amount of work we’ve put in. Similar to the previous week,  we were put in triads again to comment feedback on the shared class document this time.  I thought was more effective just because of how the highlighting and commenting feature of google doc can help you be more specific and straightforward in your feedback in a shorter amount of time. However, there is also the preference of some students who may be more comfortable with receiving feedback privately rather than being displayed in the class document - which is understandable. However I personally had no issue with this- I just thought it was worth noting. But it’s also important to reflect on the fact that academic writing is a new skill for all of us and although the feedback can be a scary thing, it’s important to just take it as feedback and nothing more. During the Easter break I hope to review my writing and make further corrections and changes where needed.

Reading 08

 

Image from lowgif.com

This week we had to write our introduction and conclusion to our chapter topics. Reflecting on the writing process up until now, I think this part has been an easier task to complete.  For the introduction, I introduced the topic of serious games and explained the definition of serious game for readers as it I did not include it in my themes for the topic. To explain serious games, I needed to re- visit a few of the reading materials.  This then allowed me to carry on to explaining the challenges of serious  games and some ways to overcome the challenges.  The conclusion was a bit more tricky to write without feeling like I was repeating what was already mentioned in the conclusion. Looking over the main points and conclusions of the thematic paragraphs did help. The videos on the multidev website also helped with giving pointers on providing interesting stories, statistics and questions for the introduction as well conclusion phrases and starters. Reflecting on the process, the annotated bibliographies were the most arduous task due to not being used to reading academic papers. The papers varied in length and would take longer to gather notes. However, if I were to repeat the process I will somewhat more confident than I did starting the first time.

Link to writing document can be found HERE.

Tutorial 07

 

Screenshot of my Unity tutorial

This was our last week working on our Unity tutorials. It’s surprising to have come this far as it felt it was such a short amount of time. To finish up with our little game we needed to add audio to bring some life in Ruby’s world.  I was somewhat familiar with this as we worked with audio in our game from last semester’s 3D tutorial but this was a nice refresher. An empty game object was made for the background noise where an audio clip component was added so we can place the music clip in. I learned about the spatial blender feature in the properties which lets you adjust how the sound will be heard. Moving the slider to the left side will have the audio played in the same level regardless of the audio listener’s position – which for our background music is ideal for our 2D game.  Moving the slider to the right the audio level will be higher in the right or left speaker. We used the PlayOneShot function on Ruby to trigger sounds based on the player’s actions in the game. With it, there were sound effects when Ruby picked up a health fruit or when she threw a cog.

The last tutorial was interesting as it covered how to make an application from our game so others can play it without using Unity. The tutorial was very informative as it explained the properties in the project settings such as the setting the company’s or the products name as well as the resolution and the default option of how the game begins. I also enjoyed looking at the build settings. I was able to choose the scene and platform for the game to be run. Playing the game outside of the Unity editor was a different experience.

doing

 

Image source

I find giving or receiving constructive feedback a bit daunting. However,  Thursday’s session has been especially useful  by  watching how Shaun provided feedback it gave me a better idea of how I should approach my feedback for others.  Including highlighted notes on a copy of my peers document seemed effective in explaining where improvements could be made.

 After looking at how other people approached their writing it gave me a better understanding of how I can pick apart my own to improve on it. The feedback I have received by my peers has also been useful as two pair of eyes beats one. I was given pointers on how I needed to clarify and expand on my initial theme of Student’s attitudes towards serious games.  Initially, I had some information on student’s attitudes to learning in general so I have included more content from my annotated bibliographies to make it relevant to the original theme.  Another useful suggestion was to look for statistics that back up some of the points I have made in adolescent and educators views on serious games. However, there were none mentioned in the original articles. They are likely found in citations of those articles, so I will need to sift through them to look for backed statistics.

Link to the Paragraphs can be found HERE.

Unity Tutorial 06

Screenshot of my progress in Unity - RIP Jambi

  

For this week’s Unity tutorials we were introduced to adding a User Interface or UI in the game. It was our first time covering this part of game creation, so it was fun first part of the tutorial. To include a UI in our game we added a Canvas game component to our hierarchy. Another game object was automatically imported called EventSystem that focused on how the player would interact with the UI. However we didn’t work with this for this part of the tutorial.

 The Rect Transform component had various screen settings for how the UI should be displayed in the player’s screen.  For this tutorial, we left it at the default option – screen space overlay which essentially renders the UI above all the other game objects making it easier to see.

We were also introduced to static members to easily call our UI script without the need to reference which makes the process much simpler as we only need to include the keyword ‘static’ in the UI HealthBar instance and using that bit of code will let us access that property anywhere in our scripts.

The next tutorial was still linked to UI.  We included a friendly frog NPC, Jambi, where a dialog box would appear when the player presses the ‘X’ key to ‘ talk’ to Jambi. This works using a feature in Unity’s physics system known as raycasting. The code for the raycast was put on Ruby, once the  player presses the ‘X’ key,  a ray is cast from Ruby a certain distance. If that ray detects the collider of another game object, like Jambi, then the dialog box will appear.

 Unfortunately, Jambi ghosted me when working on my tutorial. He was invisible but the dialog box would still appear and I could see his bounding box when I click on it. I tried to fix the issue with the sorting layers but it didn’t seem to work. Hopefully he’ll make an appearance before the end of the tutorials. 😜

 

Doing

 

I missed the blog post on the reading task last week so I included the themes of my annotated bibliography  alongside this week’s reading tasks. When codifying themes for the annotated bibliography I took on a slightly different approach. I uploaded the document in Miro, where I could see and edit the pages next to each other. I used color codes to highlight the different concepts and ideas. The coloured post-its then held the theme names: 

• ·         Challenges of Serious Games
• ·         Benefits of Serious Games
• ·         Overcoming Challenges of Serious Games
• ·    Interdisciplinary Cooperation to Improve Quality  of Serious Games.

Including the definition of serious games may be a theme that I need to include in the future. Next to the themes I summarized the points and ideas from the annotated bibliography and grouped them in sub-themes.  This helped me have a better idea of what I was going to write about in the paragraphs. The lecture on Thursday has been really helpful to prepare use for the actual writing for the paper. The practice run on the 5 sentence structure was useful and gave me a clear idea of how to structure the paragraphs. Whether I was successful with that is a different story, but I’m quite satisfied for a first draft and I’m hoping that I’m going the right direction.

Link to Themes can be found HERE.

Link to the Paragraphs can be found HERE.

 

The themes for my annotated bibliography

Unity Tutorial 05

 

I remember mentioning a few weeks back wondering how we’d be managing the camera for this tutorial since  the map of my game was off-centred. This tutorial had the answer. Rather than having a static camera of the whole map, we set it up so it would follow Ruby on her journey.  Having the camera zoomed closer to Ruby made a big difference in the play experience which I felt made the game more immersive allowing for the player to explore the world rather than getting  full-picture view.  This tutorial showed us how to look for Unity Packages which are pre-made bundles of  code that can help remove a lot manual workload in scripting and behind-the-scene math work.  The camera package we used for this tutorial is Cinemachine which allows you to make interesting cuts and set-ups between multiple cameras similar how you’d see in movies. However, for this tutorial we set the camera in orthographic mode since we are working in 2D, having the objects appear the way they are rather than in perspective mode where objects would pear smaller the farther the distance.  We also learned to add  boundaries to our game by using the  existing water tile set-up from previous steps which Ruby already knows not to walk over. All that was needed was to add a confiner extension component and link it to 2D polygon collider to set the boundary.

Screenshot of my progress in Unity

Second part of this week’s tutorial I spent some more time messing with Unity’s  particle system settings. We briefly went over particle effects last semester but this semester were introduced to some of looong list of settings and options available to alter the sprites so they can look more realistic witch fading smoke effects and adding variety to shapes. I decided to experiment the second one on my own.  The idea was to add an explosive burst of star particle once the smoke is gone and the r obot is fixed. Creating the particle wasn’t hard, it does take a while to get the desired effect however. It was telling the script when to apply the effect that can be confusing. I tried write the opposite  line of code in the Fix function of the enemy controller script:

Stars.Play();

Unfortunately, the effect still plays as soon as the game starts. I may need to mess around with Unity more in order to figure out where I’m going wrong.  Overall, it was fun to figure out how the particles worked.

Embracing the chaos in Unity