Reading Task 10: Finishing touches

 

Image by Markus Winkler on Unsplash.com

For this week's reading task we, as a class, collectively worked on our individual sections in the final document to further polish and refine our sections in the document for the final output. The first task for the class was rectifying any outstanding comments from peers on our work from before Easter Break. Fortunately enough I had already reviewed my work and rectified the comments on it before the class but I reviewed it again during the class to take on the new feedback that was given during the class. We were then tasked to add the bibliography to the end of our work which may have been a far more difficult task if I had not kept track of the sources I used for my writing in RefWorks which allowed me to simply export all the sources in the desired referencing format and in alphabetical order and paste it into the document. The last writing task that was set for during the class was for us to write our own personal Author Biographies. This was actually a very interesting piece of writing to do and I decided to use my biography to give personal context for my writing in terms of personal interest and knowledge on the topics in my paragraphs. We were also introduced to and asked to vote on the two book covers which had been designed by fellow student Flosie Sazon over the Easter Break.

Reading Task 09: Peer reviews

 

Image by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash.com

This week's tasks involved creating and receiving peer feedback on our writing pieces. This week's task differed from the previous task as we have completed our introductions and conclusions and thus these reviews encompassed our almost completed products. I find this task very difficult as I feel that it is most helpful for my peers to receive in depth feedback on their work and thus I try to be as in depth with my comments through the entirety of their work. I may be doing a lot more work than is necessary but I do so in hopes that I can help them both personally and help the book as a whole. I also received feedback from my peers and lecturer and have taken it into account and reviewed my own work. I have adjusted my work slightly as a result of the reviews but have also used my own discretion on how I apply the feedback. I also that saw there was general feedback from the lecturer and reviewed my own work to check if I also needed to take it into account. I have found this overall project quite enjoyable/fulfilling actually despite how difficult it has been at times.

Tech Task: Quote Maker

 

I took on this task because I've recently been watching a lot of different shows and comedians, and just a lot of varied media in general recently and I've come across a lot of quotes and sayings that I liked a lot and wanted to visualise one, both for myself and others while experimenting with the new sites. After messing around with a bunch of the different site I ended up using the one from Quozio.com.

Reading 08: Intro, Conclusion and questions

Image by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash.com

For this week's reading task we were tasked with writing the introduction and conclusion paragraphs for our sections in the book. I went into this week's task expecting it to not be as difficult as the previous writing we have done because it would feel more routine but once I started trying to create the introduction alone, I started to see how difficult this week's task was actually going to be. Unlike the introductions for each the content paragraphs, this introduction served to introduce all five of the previous paragraphs and the overall idea of my section. I found it really difficult to find suitable phrases that were applicable to everything I had already written without directly referencing it, in other words, it was really weird writing a conclusion after I had already written my body content, it was a very unfamiliar process. The same went for the conclusion, as it had already been quite some time since I had read my body paragraphs and was a little hazy on the details. It was also really difficult to succinctly conclude such complex paragraphs in a cohesive and satisfying way. I had to turn to the recommended video on the website for help and it served as a pretty good refresher of what a conclusion paragraph should be. The questions were by far the easiest part of this week's task but they were still quite difficult in their own right. Formulating questions that weren't too easy or hard but still tested a good amount of knowledge from each paragraph was hard and required me to get a full understanding of my paragraphs again that I could then break down to a single, or two, question. I have drafted them out for now and plan to make them interactive for next week's task, hopefully I'll get some inspiration from everyone else.

Reading 07: Peer feedback

 

Image by Adolfo Félix from Unsplash.com

This week's reading task involved us critically reading two of our peers' work and providing constructive feedback for improvement. It was also an exercise of reflecting on our own work as we would receive feedback back from our peers too. I was lucky enough to have my document labelled as exemplary for the last assignment and thus felt that I would be able to provide helpful feedback to my peers, or at least that was my hope. I began the task by reading through both documents and noting any major critiques that jumped out initially, then I used them as comparison pieces to see if there were any similarities or different critiques I could spot. I noted all of this down as quick notes and then left it for a day. I then came back to the documents to see if there was anything I may have missed in the first read through. I then began to structure my feedback in a more digestible way as I felt that my notes were not clear enough. In the lecture we were advised to be clearer and more exact with feedback for it to be more helpful so I created copies of the documents so that I could highlight the feedback that I was given to be more precise. I then sent them off and waited for my feedback back. Luckily enough the feedback I received wasn't too major and I was able to incorporate it well into my writing.

Reading 06: Paragraph Framework

 

Image by Glenn Carstens-Peters from Unsplash.com

This week's task had us writing the paragraph's for the five codified themes that we selected last week. This week's reading tasks proved to be slightly more challenging than I had initially expected but not nearly as difficult as I had found the previous tasks. This week's task was our first 'actual' academic writing task, it that, we actually began writing content for the final paper as opposed to the prep work that we had been doing over the past few weeks, however, all the work that we had completed up to this point really helped in making this task a lot lighter and streamlined the actual content writing process by not needing to go and look for and read absurdly long sources for each paragraph. It also helped a lot that Shaun provided us with a clear framework structure for the paragraph's that was easy to follow and apply, though I found myself needed to adapt it differently at times. It was satisfying to be able to collate the all the work that I had previously completed into more cohesive paragraphs but I did encounter difficulty when it came to topic overlap. Due to all of my sources being selected for one overall topic, with some even referencing others, I found it difficult to separate some of the content into the specific themes without blatant overlap but I think I got around it alright. Overall I found this week's task find and I'm interested in seeing my peer's work next week.

The working document of my Annotated Bibliographies can be found below

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

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. 

Beta

 

Image of my Unity Workspace

For this week's project work I finished the majority of my game. I finalised the different levels of the game and implemented some final touches and streamlined the gameplay. Some of the things I added include a Death Plane which resets the player and I also added some more moving parts to make the gameplay more dynamic. I adjusted parts of the game to suit the more speedrunner/fast-paced linear gameplay that I landed upon during development. I fixed some minor issues throughout the levels such as areas where the player was clipping, etc. I am still having a lot of difficulty with some of the coding issues I am encountering but I have found some work-arounds to some of the problems. During this session I also applied textures throughout the levels to give them a cleaner more finished look and to provide more consistency throughout the levels for both aesthetic purposes and also for gameplay purposes for the player's sake. It had already become evidently clear that the targets I had set for myself earlier in the module were far further out of my skillset than I had ever imagined but I am not completely disappointed with the outcome of the work that I was able to put into the project despite the setbacks and I was still able to output what some, I included, would consider a game. 

Unity Tutorial 10

 

Image of my Unity workspace

For this week's Unity tutorial I found myself searching for online Unity tutorials that would be helpful in progressing my game further as I had really hit a figurative dead-end in my game. I began the tutorial session by following this Unity tutorial I found on YouTube which gave step by step instructions on how to implement a more arcade style driving script into a Unity project. It was initially difficult to get follow the tutorial as my assets did not match but after some tweaking it was fairly smooth sailing following the tutorial. It was far more comprehensive than I had initially thought when clicking into it and it really helped make my game feel far more like an actual car game. I then decided to search for a possible alternative for my Camera Follow script and stumbled upon this YouTube tutorial for a slightly more dynamic Follow Camera. The coding in the video itself was far more advanced than my current capabilities but it was fairly easy to follow. Once I had completed the tutorial I tested the camera and found that it was jittery when in motion and due to it being too advanced I was not able to mitigate the problem. This led to me reverting back to my former script with some minor edits.

Unity Tutorial 08

Image of my Unity Workspace

I found this week's Unity tutorial to be very interesting as well as, similar to last week, it really felt like we were adding polish/the final touches to an actual playable game rather than just following instructions purely for a lab project task. In this Unity tutorial we added enemy waves to the game so, which increased gradually by a factor of one upon defeating all the enemies of the previous wave. To achieve this we learned and integrated For-loops into our code. We also used For-loops to spawn a power up with each consecutive wave of enemies. This enemy wave system really made this feel like a legitimate game with challenge and replay value. 

Unity Challenge 4 workspace

I found this week's Unity challenge to be actually quite difficult, probably because many of the concepts we had learned through the process of following Unity Tutorial 4 were slightly more advanced than in passed challenges so spotting and changes even minor discrepancies proved to be quite a difficult task. Even the first problem proved difficult as it looked like a minor problem but involved such a long string of code that I did not feel confident in manipulating. Problem 3 an 5 were also difficult as I was not confident with the writing code unlike in the other problems that merely asked you to alter the code.

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.

Tech Task: Fake Social Media Generator

 

Made using Fake Twitter on Simitator

In this week's Tech Task I created a Fake Social Media Post using the Fake Twitter option on Simitator. I had not previously thought about using a premade generator for things like this before.