Week 9 Reading and Writing

Throughout the module I have tried to keep up with the reading tasks from week to week but always found them to be the least intuitive task. When it came to the informal readings (articles, videos, etc.), I thought they were relatively manageable, the language was easily comprehended and they were short enough to get through and take notes. The academic readings however, were a large task that I could never seem to complete in what I felt was a meaningful capacity. I was only ever able to get through a small portion of them in the time I had while taking notes and some of the language was too academically specific that I found myself having to interpolate my own understanding of the text into the notes to make them cohesive without complete confidence in if I was comprehending them properly or not.

My favourite reading so far has to be the reading task on Game Elements from Week 4. I found it to be the most interesting reading so far and was the only reading that's topic had me engaged and made me ponder the subject as I did the reading task. Formally reading the breakdown of a 'game' into it's fundamental elements was interesting to see, as unlike the other readings which I may have found interesting but had already learned about prior to this class, this was my first time reading this information comprehensively broken down.

Although the readings were interesting academic tasks to complete each week I felt that they were too related to the theory of games and game design that they became detached from the actual process of creating a game, especially in the short timeframe that we have in the module. The only reading I felt directly aided or impacted my process in this module was the reading on Game Design Documents which gave insight into what the goal and requirements of the Game Design Document task entailed.

I'm proudest of actually keeping up with most of the tasks in this module each week. That despite knowing that I could drop a task or two during the week that I was able to generally keep up pretty well with the class and complete most of the tasks that I could.

Image of my Unity 3D workspace

I chose this image for this blog post because it was one of the images from my first session creating the basic prototype for my game which was the first time that all the work and information that we had been accruing throughout the module finally came together. It's an image that concretely illustrates that I have been doing the work during the module, enough that I have at the very least this extremely basic product to show. It also reminds me of how difficult this whole process has been and how frustrating creating the final game actually is but also how fun and rewarding it can be, if it works.

Looking forward to the end of this module I'm honestly not entirely sur if the remaining reading tasks can/will aid in me completing my game but at the very least if they're interesting they could come in useful after this module is over.