Multimedia Development 2018

The first video I watched isn't much of a tutorial, but rather an inspiration. I watched it and was in awe of what can actually be done in Unity... So far, all my terrains looks boring and forced, so watching those environment videos really help me realize the potential of Unity, as well as it gives me ideas of what I can do with my world... Second video goes through creating the start menu which is pretty okay to follow. It's something that I will probably have to add to my game sooner or later anyway, so might as well have a look at it now, since I decided not to go through with the crafting tutorial... That one was way too hard for a simple game and the time frame. 

This week's article talks about game testing - very important part in making a game. After you have designed your game, its time to test it. At first, you test it yourself, but you, as the designer, know exactly what to do and how to do, so instead, you send your game off to people. There are different types of testing: Bug Testing (or Quality Assurance) - The purpose of QA is to find errors in the game’s behavior relative to its design. Focus Testing - In a focus test, you bring together players that are part of the target audience’s demographic in order to determine how well a game serves their needs. This is normally done for marketing purposes. Usability Testing - In a usability test, players are given specific tasks to accomplish in an attempt to see whether they understand how to control the game. Balance Testing - The purpose of this kind of test is to identify imbalances in the game so that the designer can fix them. Fun Testing - A game can be usable, bal...

Personal images of my in-game. Personal images of my in-game. Personal images of my in-game. So here is my kinda-alpha... Still quite behind, seeing how much code I need to add into the game and instead I play with the terrain and water and bushes and flowers and all of those things. Its really hard to get everything needed just from the free assets and its quite frustrating when you imagine something one way, but then it's completely different due to restrictions... But it is what it is. I think it looks decent so far... Difficulties: Cursor - I tried like 10 different tutorials and I still can't get the cursor to work. I have seen tutorials where people just put in "Cursor.visible = true;", and it works perfectly... but sadly, not in my case. Dialogue - I tried using Fungus for dialogues, because it looked simple enough and doesn't require coding, buuuut... I don't know how to make it active when you click the NPC... Oh wait, I forgot I don...

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...