Multimedia Development 2018

I guess I will talk about the unity tutorials I went through to make my first playable game. The minimap tutorial was in the previous post, so I will skip on that - it was the first and probably last tutorial I found that didn't require any scripting for something interactive. And it took me 20 minutes to get it done... That was nice... very nice. And it looks impressive too! Anyway, onto inventory... Why, WHY did I decide to make an inventory? Why did I even think it will be quick and easy thing to do... I mean, a lot of games have inventories! Big, complex, inventories... You would think Unity has somehow, magically, included a pre-built version... But no. And such simple, well-known thing requires lines and lines of code. And errors. Lots of errors. I think some of my scripts decided to just die after the 100th editing session. "End-of-Life" fatal error doesn't sound too good... I was also going to add in the whole aspect of equipment but... no. Just n...

Created with trianglify.io Stoooories! Gosh, am I really excited for a reading? I guess so... I kinda am. The first article I read today is Level 9: Games and Stories . It starts off with the standard question, all of them articles always start the same way - What's makes for good stories? Well, apparently, game developers look at three certain works, and those are: Poetics, by Aristotle The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee Poetics by Aristotle... Used in games? That's quite interesting. Let's look into it a bit more.  Aristotle used a very different language compared to the one we know now, so poetics isn't actually about poetry, but more about writing tragedies, but it's not the way we know it, as a story with a sad ending, no, for Aristotle it was basically serious and lifelike writing - there was no superpowers or mythical animals. Tragedy is li...

"Tick tock, tick tock... Running out of time!" So, today I am presenting the somehow first playable... Though, I don't see why anyone would like to play it at this point, since there is very little to be done in the game. If I had extra 10 hours in a day, I would love to put it into the game, because I quite like it, even though it's stressful when codes don't want to work or drop a thousand of errors that make no sense. At this point, I thought I would have HUD done, and maybe some simple quest or two... But sadly, I'm not that far yet - stuck on the HUD and lines and lines AND LINES of code. I guess I got a working inventory in place, and a mini map, so that is a good start... I would still love to do a button to exit the game, access settings and inventory... whether I do that or not, depends on the time and complexity of the code involved. The next step, is to add NPCs, dialogues, quests and some new things to pick up... And of course give them an ico...

And the last post about reflecting - this time about progress. Looking back:  I am pretty happy with the progress so far, but there are a lot of tasks from which I didn't learn anything or very little, which is frustrating because I could have spent that time on something else.  When it comes to weekly routine... I used to have a good routine, but with all the posts and other assignments, I had to completely change it and add in more hours to do the work that is required. So instead of spending 5-6 hours on this module, I sometimes end up spending 8 or even 9 hours.  I have used the extra credit tasks twice, as image collage is an easy and quick way to get some extra points.  Looking forward:  Well, I would actually like to have time to make the game, without all the unnecessary writings and readings, even just a week or two without them would make me enjoy the module a bit more... The pitfalls... As long as I stay on top of the work, it will be a...

Reflecting on the feedback! Feedback in:  I must admit, I am surprised by the quality of the feedback and comments that I got on my blog. I think most people won't really try, but I was wrong. I got a lot of very positive feedback and they are nice to read. Feedback out:  When I comment, especially on game ideas, I try to give somehow constructive criticism and give the students some ideas that they can implement or maybe expand on. I try not to sugarcoat anything, because I know it won't be too helpful. There are times though, when I have hard time trying to find someone to comment on, as the randomizer gives me people who aren't doing their blog or those who have 10+ comments already.  Blog Comments:  I don't feel that blog is a space where I connect with people, but I did learn some things about others from their introduction posts. Looking Forward:  In a lot of cases, the feedback is forced, which isn't a good thing, so I would probably change it...

And so, the time to reflect and look back is here... And honestly, I don't remember most of the things I read throughout the last 7 weeks. All I know is that some articles were old, some mentioned Mario 64 and others talked about board games. Looking at it, week by week: Week 1: "Sometimes, you read an article, you follow the sentences with your eyes, letting the words sink into your brain... and then you realize that someone is just so terrible at writing that reading is impossible. Greg Costikyan is one of those people. In the article "Don't be a Vidiot", which is also his speech from 1998 game conference, he talks about games so old that most students won't even recognize them." So this was the first reading homework we had to do, and I can still say that the first article did an amazing job at making me hate the reading Tuesdays. I still have nightmares. The other articles... they were alright, but nothing really sparked my attention. I read t...

Well... I don't have much to write for this post, as Unity is being a complete rebel since I tried to download 3D Game Kit to use some of the assets included in there. So I am currently at the moment where Unity doesn't want to open up or it takes about an hour to open up... So can't screenshot the bit of pretty landscape that I have done. I will probably redo it tomorrow... Instead, I spent a lot of time looking at possible assets for my game and I have found a lot of very useful things - starting with textures, to materials, to rocks, trees, flowers, crystals, through potions, tomes, books finishing on houses, interiors and exterior. Some of the assets I also found a lot of amazing, paid assets which I would love to use... but I know there is no point paying 50$ for something I will use only once, so I will work from whatever is free. I am also including a screenshot of a landscape I have created for my tutorials - I have created something very similar for my ...

For this week. I got a chance to pick my own tutorials which was kinda fun. At least I got to look for something that will be useful for my game. At first I thought to follow the tutorial series by Jimmy Vegas because things mentioned there are pretty useful - like the particle system which is so versatile and vast, but instead, I decided to go with some of his other tutorials. I been thinking for a long, long time how can I include a minimap that would be displayed in the corner of my screen? It turned into a bit of my nightmare, because I wasn't able to find a lot of information on google and even if I did, it was confusing... so this tutorial helped me greatly. And, there is no coding which is even better for me, because it tends to confuse me. Source This video goes through npcs and textboxes which, again, will be something I will use a lot in my game... Once I somehow get the npc's in.  The tutorial starts off with downloading the NPC from the Asset Stor...

Another article about fun, this time you can view it here   Fun is apparently another word for learning... and as we currently know things hat are fun, this article focuses on why those aspects are fun. Source The part of the article lists and describes types of fun. Sensation. Games can engage the senses directly. Consider the audio and video “eye candy” of video games; the tactile feel of the wooden roads and houses in Settlers of Catan; or the physical movement involved in playing sports, Dance Dance Revolution, or any game on the NintendoWii. Sensation includes physical movement (good for building muscle) and looking at and hearing things that are interesting (good for detecting opportunities or dangers). Fantasy. Games can provide a make-believe world (some might cynically call it “escapism”) that is more interesting than the real world. Fantasy allows the kind of “what-if” scenario part of our brain to get stronger, allowing us to come up with novel ideas. ...

I used fotor.com  to create this little collage using images I included in my DunDoc. The website is really quick and easy to use. --------------- I decided that I don't really like using Fotor, as it gave me watermark going riiight in the middle of my collage... so instead, I used Adobe Spark which has so many more options, free images and so on. It's a little bit harder to use, but that's because of all the additional settings. --------------- Another quick Spark collage. I really like making them. They are quick, easy and get me extra 2 points. I picked those images because I was actually thinking how to implement crystals and gems into my game, so I was browsing through pinterest and those caught my attention. --------------- And another collage done in Spark. I love how easy to use it became now, after I experimented with it a little bit.  ---------------- And another collage. Fun.

Link to the DunDoc ...After completing my DunDoc , I feel more like a botanist than a creative digital media... I will never look at the plants the same way again. Anyway, I updated my document with a lot more information - including descriptions and image references for the characters, as well as the offers of the merchants, so hopefully they will feel a little more human-like now. I included a whole list of plants that will be available in the game, as well as gemstones and rare, buy-only drops from creatures. Now you can also imagine how the map will look like - with somehow detailed village layout, and the surrounding landscapes. System specs, sounds, game flow chart... all added in! So, enjoy?

Screenshot of my Unity The three tutorials for this week talked about the skybox, wind, the fade in and out screens, as well as a little bit about the general environment. The first video I watched a long time ago, and was very excited to find out more about this whole skybox thing, as it changes pretty much everything. I experimented a little bit with different skyboxes - some were gloomy and dark, other ones were a lot more brighter and vibrant, but as I didn't like the extremes, I downloaded another asset set with a sky that looked a lit more natural. I like how it looks. The next part was to add in the wind, and that part was super fun to experiment with and see the different results. At first, my trees were moving wildly all over the place, but as I increased all the stats, it all started to become more realistic. The next tutorial was focusing on the fade ins... While I think its pretty cool feature and might use it in my game, I struggled with the coding part of thi...

One of the reading's for this week was about making decisions-making and flow-theory. One of the first pages goes through what sort of decisions are bad and good, which I found really interesting. The bad types of decisions are: Meaningless decisions are perhaps the worst kind: there is a choice to be made, but it has no effect on gameplay. If you can play either of two cards but both cards are identical, that’s not really much of a choice. Obvious decisions at least have an effect on the game, but there is clearly one right answer, so it’s not really much of a choice. Most of the time, the number of dice to roll in the board game RISK falls into this category; if you are attacking with 3 or more armies, you have a “decision” of whether to roll 1, 2, or 3 dice… but your odds are better rolling all 3, so it’s not much of a decision except in very special cases.  Blind decisions have an effect on the game, and the answer is not obvious, but there is now an additional prob...