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.