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.