Reading 05: Doing a lot or rereading

Image by Russ Ward on Unsplash.com

This week's task was an extremely nice breather from the heavier reading and writing tasks that we have been doing the past couple weeks though it still did take careful attention to complete. I was not exactly sure about the process of coding writing and linking themes as I began but after following the resources provided on the Multimedia Development Website, especially the resource at https://libguides.jcu.edu.au/py2106/lit-review which presented the process in a far more understandable and simplified way, it became a lot clearer and did not seem very daunting, just intricate. I was unsure how intricate or expansive the task was going to be so I decided to just begin and adapt my approach to any developments. I read through the first bibliography and just began assigning the base highlighter colours to similar topics I found in the first text alone to establish a base colour set for the Key that I would adapt later. As I continued through my bibliographies more and more linked works and topics arose and the colour Key was becoming hard to keep track of mentally thus I decided to write the Key in a note beside my text for reference as I continued through the texts and added additional colours as they came (This Key is included in the document). As I progressed further and further, the Key became slightly more fluid as words and topics covered began to overlap. I then read through the text a second time to cover any connection that I may have missed in the first pass. I then looked at the highlighted texts as a whole to begin filtering themes from the coded content. As I did so I found that I could group similar or adjacent themes to create a more succinct list but still cover most of the coded content and would allow me to write more on the refined themes.

The working document of my Annotated Bibliographies can be found below

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kIdExr3wTsuJPG7_vqhq16mfJYXuLErrlTTSxPtdLF8/edit?usp=sharing

Unity Tutorial 4: Animation and projectiles

Screenshot of my Unity workspace

In this week's tutorial we began adding character animation which was something that we briefly encountered in the previous Unity 3D tutorials however its 2D counterpart requires quite a bit more effort as instead of manipulating a model for animation, each frame is a different sprite to load. This tutorial introduced the Unity animation windows for 2D animation which were all quite intuitive once you got used to the interface. The animation controller and blend tree introduced in this tutorial looked fairly similar to the ones used in the 3D tutorials. We also added the code for the in-game sprites to trigger the appropriate animations. This week's tutorial also had us implement a projectile for Ruby to shoot. This feature expanded slightly on the Unity physics system which is still quite a confusing aspect for me in terms of the 2D game environment. This tutorial reintroduced the instantiate function for spawning objects in the world. It also introduced layers to the 2D space and introduced the concept of certain layers, and thus game objects, not interacting with other certain layers. We also gave the projectile the in-game function of pacifying the robot when hit. I have encountered a strange error with the robots collider which I have not been able to mitigate yet but plan to try and fix soon.

Reading 04: Annotated Bibliography further analysis

Image by Dan Dimmock on Unsplash.com

After this week's session I think I can definitively say that I have found this process extremely difficult and that I struggled greatly in completing these tasks. Similar to last week I was not able to complete the intended amount of work in a reasonable amount of time and thus I was quite disappointed in myself in that regard. I was able to get a bit more done than last week but I still found the process very difficult and confusing and felt very unsure while doing it. It didn't feel as cumbersome and slow as last week as I think I had gotten used to the feeling of sitting down and writing for a certain amount of time again but this week still came with it's own problems and left me uncertain and confused like last time. I was still unsure about what information I should be actually extracting from the papers but unlike last week, where much of my writing was more summary in style, I aimed to focus on the papers' contents relevancy to my own writing project topic over trying to collate as much of the understandable information as I could. On a slightly more positive note I am glad that I spent the time that I did in Week 2 sourcing my papers before writing these bibliographies as it's quite  weight off my back not having to go and look for a new source every time I have to do a bibliography entry. My process of setting a block of time to sit down and complete as much of the work as I can helps me on a personal level as it stops me from overworking and sacrificing other aspects of my life like I'm prone to doing but I have to admit that it's kind of disheartening on an academic level that I haven't been able to complete the intended amount of work yet with this process. It feels like it does help however with my writing as it puts me into the 'academic writing' state of mind for the duration of my writing sessions which makes my writing more cohesive and lets me recall my previous writing better for comparison. There's no doubt that this process as a whole has been a struggle for me personally but this is the compromise that I landed on.

The working document of my Annotated Bibliographies can be found below

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kIdExr3wTsuJPG7_vqhq16mfJYXuLErrlTTSxPtdLF8/edit?usp=sharing

Unity Tutorial 03

Screenshot of my Unity workspace

In this weeks tutorial we learned how to add and alter health to the character which is a new game feature that I had not encountered previously in the 3D project. This feature made this project feel a lot more like an actual Role Playing Game rather than just a porotype project. I also reintroduced triggers but employs them to create health items instead of powerups like the previous Unity projects although the code for the health item pickup was quite similar to that of the powerups. This process however introduced new concepts that I didn't recognise such as properties and the maths functions for calculating the health of the player. The second part of the tutorial was far more complicated and introduced many new concepts for the 2D Unity workflow. This tutorial introduces damage zones which alter the value of the players health when collided with, this feature also introduced new concepts for triggers such as sleep modes and OnTriggerStay. It also introduced the concept of tiling sprites proportionally. We also added an enemy to our scene and gave it automated motion, this was vastly different to the motion that I used for my 3D project which involved animating game objects, the motion for a 2D project had to be executed in the code. We also added collision to the enemy which damages the player and in turn lowers their health. These features were quite complicated and difficult but made the game feel a lot more legitimate.

Reading 03: Starting the Annotated Bibliography

 

Image from Rod Long on Unsplash.com

https://unsplash.com/photos/VHS_CmxFBGI

For this week's Writing Project task we began the process of creating Annotated Bibliographies for our Academic Sources. Truthfully, I was already dreading this process but was hoping that it would not be as difficult as I initially thought. I began the task by sorting through the sources that I had collected the previous week and choosing the ones which I felt were the most appropriate and best related to my chosen topic. I then began the process of creating the bibliographies which proved far more difficult than I had initially thought and was unfortunately not able to fully complete the assigned task. I followed the recommended process for initially parsing information from the sources but found the process of extracting relevant information from the remainder of the text to be extremely difficult. I found myself getting bogged down by the large bodies of text and often getting lost or confused in the content of the paragraphs. I tried to understand as much of the content and data as possible so that I could 'translate' it into more manageable information for my bibliography but found that to be a very difficult process that I wasn't able to do for much of the content because I just did not understand it and couldn't meaningfully translate it. I attempted slightly different strategies for each of the sources with the aim of getting the appropriate information from the source while also not spending too much time on them but was unsure about the validity of my strategies. I found that the sources the resources provided for writing annotated bibliographies did help but because of my own inexperience and I wasn't completely sure how to critically apply all of it to my own work.

The working document of my Annotated Bibliographies can be found below

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kIdExr3wTsuJPG7_vqhq16mfJYXuLErrlTTSxPtdLF8/edit?usp=sharing

Unity Tutorial 2

In this week's Unity tutorial we continued with fleshing out the game world for the project. In the first tutorial we added additional assets to the scene and adjusted the project settings to render them dynamically by basing their tier in the scene on the asset and player's Y-axis. We also learned to adjust pivot points on assets both automatically and manually which affected the origin point of the asset and how it is rendered. This in turn made interactions between assets feel more natural and dynamic. This tutorial also acted as the introduction to the creation and editing of Prefabs in a 2D project which I am familiar with from the previous 3D Unity project.

In the second tutorial we began the process of learning, interacting with and modifying the default Unity physics system for 2D projects. This entailed assigning the 2D version of the familiar rigidbodys and box colliders from the previous project to the assets in the current project, this proved itself to be far simpler than it's 3D counterpart and was not nearly as daunting of a process as in the previous project. The omission of the 3^rd dimension in this project has helped streamline the process greatly so far. This tutorial also re-introduced editing asset scripts to interact with the physics system which was something I found extremely difficult to comprehend in the previous project and is seemingly similarly as difficult in the current project. An interesting detail I learned regarding 2D projects is that the size and shape of colliders for 2D assets is far more intricate and subjective than those used in the 3D project, one must take into account asset specific interactions when deciding colliders on 2D assets for fluidity and dynamic interaction. Colliders also had to be applied to certain scene tiles like water which was a new concept that was obsolete in the 3D project. The tutorial also introduced composite colliders which composites adjacent colliders into a singular body for precautionary and optimisation purposes.

Tech Task: Twitter Lists

 This week I decided to complete the Twitter Lists Tech Tip as it proved to be the perfect solution for a problem that was slowly arising due to the other tasks in this module. I had noticed that I was beginning to follow a substantial enough amount of people that my Twitter Feed could eventually become congested so making Twitter Lists was the perfect tip to resolve my concerns. I used the lists to create a private and public list, the former containing CDM personnel such as students and lecturers and the latter containing the interesting Twitter accounts I felt were helpful or relevant for this module.

Writing Project planning

 This week we began the planning phase of the Writing Project for the semester. This process is honestly quite daunting as Academic Reading and Writing has never been my strong suit and the process for this project seems a lot more comprehensive than any reading and writing I have done in the past. Hopefully I can keep on top of the workload as it comes throughout the semester. I chose the topic of "Managing Difficulty" in games as it is an intricate topic that I find extremely interesting and have consumed media on in the past. My choice was also greatly inspired by many of the games that I have played recently that all handle difficulty in vastly different ways but were all still enjoyable.

During the lecture this week we were given a very informative and helpful 'tour' of the College library online services by Lindsey Dowling. She taught us how to navigate the online services while also giving helpful advice on how to find reliable research materials both through the library and elsewhere online. She also pointed us toward several helpful tools such as RefWorks which I plan to work with closely throughout the project.

I began my planning process by formulating keywords that would assist me in my search for relevant academic sources for my chosen topic of Managing Difficulty with some inspiration from the following videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4_auMe1HsY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxp4G-oJATM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs

I found the folder system for the Matrix Method to be quite tedious and complicated and thus I intend to utilise the folder system available in RefWorks to store and organise the research I find which in turns helps keep my resources in a central place and streamlines the process of creating citations as it can all be done through RefWorks when needed.

In terms of a Review Matrix, I found the suggested example to be slightly too 'formal' and complicated for my own personal use so I plan to create my own Review Matrix in a similar style with the example as a guide but with my own criteria to better streamline the process and as to not overcomplicate or confuse myself.

Unity Tutorial 01: Ruby's Adventure: 2D Beginner

 

Screenshot of my Unity Workspace

Returning back to Unity for the first time in a while was daunting but as I expected, at least for the time being, the 2D engine and 2D game creation is proving simpler than it's 3D counterpart but still held it's own problems and challenges. It felt a bit frustrating, starting the entire game design process again with a different system but also felt good to be free of the previous stress of the 3D process. In this tutorial we began with the basics of game/scene creation with adding characters and environments; we also coded a basic character controller which was quite similar to the previous process. In the 2D game we utilise sprites instead of models for both characters and environments which has seemed to be a lot more intuitive and a lot less stress so far. I did however encounter a problem in which Unity did not have the required packages installed to create a 2D game but I was able to rectify that eventually. Creating levels and environments with tilemaps is a relatively new process but was a lot simpler to understand and manage than familiarising myself with the placement of objects in 3D space. It was actually quite enjoyable to create an environment with tilemaps and I look forward to working with them going forward.