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Planning My Research

  This week I was tasked with choosing a specific area of a game to research and write about. I wanted something that nobody else would write about but that I also feel is an important aspect of any successful games life. The topic I selected was " replay value " in games. I believe this is absolutely crucial for games, both single and multiplayer games. Personally I enjoy multiplayer games much more and have seen big franchises capitalize on in game cosmetics that become unlockable through completeling weekly/monthly tasks , live events or purchasable content through ingame stores. This keeps the game fresh and intriuging, keeping players coming back and continuing to populate games.    I have also seen the complete opposite happen. A game which I love, borderline obsessed with "Gears 5" has done a poor job of executing decent replay value in their game. Due to a release of an unfinished game along with prioritizing other elements of the game, the population has fa

Games GDD

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What is the purpose of GDD? A Game Design Document (GDD) is a blueprint for the design and development of a game. The GDD is a way of being creative and documenting the approach to the development of the game. Gonzale (1999) states that “ the important thing is to have something that describes your game project (or any other project for that matter) before jumping into production.( Gamasutra ) It should help to plan out your game. Though it is recommended that the GDD should be short it needs to be detailed enough so as game developers and artists can coordinate the development of the game independently whilst still keeping to the design.  The GDD is a blueprint for how the game is going to be designed and built, similar to a mind map. In conclusion, the game design document is vital to making a game and it is important to have in order to describe your game project. How do we create one? There are a variety of tools that could be used to create a GDD. These include word processing too

Unity Tutorial 04

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  Unity Engine Logo This weeks tutorial we were introduced to objects colliding with one another. This was a very interesting lesson and has opened my eyes to endless possibilities. It was basic, once an item collides it was set to make both objects disappear. This was achieved by adding Collider components to our objects in the game, then writing a CSharp script in Visual Studio. With the completion of the tutorials however, the game felt like it didn't run as well as it could have. There's many speed values I would like to change along with the size of my game. I felt everything was quite crowded and it became difficult to progress in the game as the animals spawned frequently and the speed of the character was just not capable of catching them all.  Another mechanic that we were very briefly introduced to is gravity. By removing gravity from our pizza slice in the game, the slice would fly along the ground endlessly. That's really all the introduction we got, disabling g

Unity Tutorial 03

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  Here is a current image of my progress in Unity, following the tutorial I have been following. I've really been enjoying learning about Unity and progressing. It most definitely is getting more complex and the code is becoming a lot more difficult to follow, remember and has a lot more to it.  It's worrying me a little bit going from following a step by step video tutorial to creating something original and somewhat unique. I hope there will be further tutorials to prepare me for what is to come in the future when developing my game and am hopeful that Youtube will provide some video tutorials on how to design games, similar to the First Person Shooter that I will begin developing shortly. I've had a similar experience like this. Last year studying web development we began by following easy tutorials that would become more difficult but any problems we had the solutions would be clearly visible. When we were left to develop the sight on our own it quickly became frustrati

Game Idea Research

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Taken via Google Images (Click for link)  The game I am choosing to create for the remainder of this project is going to be a FPS style shooter. Now, right off the bat that seems complex and, in all honesty I am a little sceptical about the workload that may be involved but after doing quite a lot of research I definitely think it is manageable. I don't plan on creating anything too spectacular my main goal is to have the basic mechanics of the game to work properly along with some basic graphics. If in time I'm capable of creating more detailed graphics and find the time and resources to do so, I most definitely will but the priority is for my game to run as intended. I will begin with the sheer minimum. an open plane, untextured perhaps with some 3D objects to add some atmosphere and to create placeholders for future development. ideally I would like the game to run as a quick response, precision shooter which while having fun and exciting aspects to the game, can be used to

Unity Tutorial 02

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  Upon completion of this beginner tutorial I felt very achieved. Although most of the work was done and was following a step by step guide. It's very rewarding to start a project and have it operating properly by the time you finish. I thought I would run into a lot of problems along the way but the software was really quite straight forward.    Coding came easy enough, I did however get an error when attempting to go into G ameview as I forgot to add the ";" at the end of my code. Looking back over my lines of code I was able to locate the problem, mainly because of how many times I've made this same mistake in Brackets while developing websites so the problem was quite noticeable to me. It's great to see similarities like that between modules that I'm doing currently. Web development I'm sure will fit in nicely to future coding that I will need to do I'm sure.    I do feel I will forget a lot of the code in the future, I think that will be my main

Tech Tip: Twitter Task

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  Just learned how to add a twitter widget to my blog! This displays as a sidebar to my blog which is linked to my twitter, showing all my most recent twitter posts.  Pretty cool little feature definitely adds a little extra to the blog and people can keep up with me a little easier. Definitely something I would consider using in the future.