Unity Free Tutorials

For this week Unity tutorials, I finished all lessons by Jimmy Vegas. The first video was about post processing and how it changes the way the game looks. That lesson was very interesting because of the possibilities post processing script gives us. First of all, its free to download from the Asset Store, secondary its really easy to use because you don't need to code anything. There are settings like the Bloom, Anti-aliasing, Motion Blur, Color Grading and few others. They are very powerful options as they completely change the look and the feel of the game, so I would recommend to everyone who is reading my blog to watch the video. Because game is not only the mechanics but also the graphics, and post processing can change any scene into an genre you are looking for, like horror, fantasy, etc. Also, it gives you possibility to change the settings during the game view, so you can full control in game of how it looks. 
The last video was a review of the previous episodes, but in a different way with more details. Also in that video, he showed us how to create a script for opening and closing doors, based on a previously written gem script, only slightly changed. Overall, those two videos are related to my project and I will try use them in my game. 

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Games Stories

 Articles for this week talk about stories and how they are used in games as a very important aspect. The article mentions three writings that are often used by game designers when they are creating story for their game - The Poetics by Aristotle,  The hero with thousand faces by Joseph Campbell and Story: Substance, Structure, Style and Principles of screen-writing by Robert McKee.

The Poetics talks about writing a tragedy - a serious, lifelike story. It has nothing to do with poetry.

The Hero with Thousand Faces goes through a journey of a hero. The author studied a lot of myths and histories, and found out that they all follow a certain action pattern, which he writes about in his book. 

And finally, the last one is more useful for screen-writing, but can also be applied to games. McKee basically rewrote Poetics in simpler language.

All three provide information that are quite useful, even if not directly related to stories or games themselves. The two extra articles just further expanded on the two ideas in the first writing, so one was about the journey of a hero and the other was about the stories in general and how to add them in so they make sense and are understandable to the players. 

Overall, I enjoyed reading the articles. 

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Week 8 Progress

The last reflection post is about progress. In general, I can't say that I'm happy with the progress I did in Unity tutorials, even though I did them and learn something small from each, but I feel its not enough for my game project, so I am looking forward to going through more Unity tutorials which will help me further develop the game into something playable. I have huge overload of work from different modules, so my weekly routine is changing from week to week so I can get all the projects done. There are no class assignment in this module, as everything we do is through blog, but my favourite post type are the Unity tutorials, because I feel like they are useful and related to the game developing, unlike the whole blog writing, but if there were any class assignments in this module, I hope it will be something based on unity tutorials from different perspectives.
Looking forward, i would like to make some changes to the second half of this semester - like less blogging throughout the week, so we can focus more on unity and our game prototype. And instead of blogging and giving feedback through writing, we could do it during lectures where we could discuss each other's opinions, and lecturer could give us proper feedback too, so we would teach something and learn something. For the second semester, I hope we won't have any groups for assignments. Also for the second semester, I hope we will have a clear picture of our end project at the start of the semester, so we can plan our actions ahead of time, because I know second semester will be harder and we need to know what we are doing and where we are heading.

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Week 8 Comments and Feedback

Overall, I think the idea of getting feedback and giving feedback is bad idea, because none of us is professional or even close to professional, so what kind of feedback can i get from someone who knows very little about game design and otherwise, what kind of feedback I can give to someone when I know very little about games myself. 

When it comes to the blog comments, I don't feel that I am connecting with people through blog or comments, because right now, we have so many social medias that we use, and blogs are old-fashioned way to communicate. And secondary, I am not a fan of writing to people through blogs or social media, I am old style and prefer to meet with people rather than write to them, so I think the feedback comments should be moved to the lecture where we can talk and discuss it, as thats impossible on blog because people don't answer the comments. I don't think blog is a space where we get to know each other, because we had been forced to make it, and everyone has twitter, instagram, facebook and so on where you can learn far more about them. 

Looking forward, all my thoughts are focused on the projects, so I can't even thinking about the future. All my aim is to finish all the projects and survive till new year. 

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Week 8 Reading and Writing

Overall, my thoughts about reading and writings are that I prefer to read rather than write. it was a lot of reading this semester that i liked and didn't like, I liked the themes of the articles, but not the fact that they were really old information and written in difficult language. Some of the articles were more aimed at professionals rather than the students, so sometimes I caught the idea of article, but not the full meaning.  My favourite article was about MDA game structure, because it was very informative and showed basic plan of a game designing. So that article gave me a basic structure for my game and that was the first step to creating my game. When it comes to the reading notes, I usually try to highlight the most important informations in my blog posts so I can refer to it later on, so I think that is the only positive thing about writing the blog, you have all  important information in one place.

Some articles I found difficult to read, so I decided to google the overall topic and find articles that are newer and easier to read, usually written by young game developers who try to make the topic understandable to everyone. I also included all the extra  resources I found, in my blog posts. When it comes to my game project, since the beginning it was going bad for me, because I didn't know the final aim or what my project should look like, but after speaking one on one to my lecturer,  I started to understand it better.  Now I have a clear picture of what my project should look like, so my biggest accomplishment will be to make the game I imagined and pass this semester.  

This is an image I used for my MDA post, I like this picture because its simple and the concept shown represents the game mechanics. It is also easy to remember because it is all showed on one picture that is colorful and easy to remember . 

Looking forward, to continue watching the unity tutorials and making my game. 

Unity free tutorials

For my unity free tutorials, I decided to stick to Jimmy Vegas and continue with his series of tutorials because I find them easy to follow and its only 15 of them so I decided to finish them all, because it still has content that will be relevant and useful for my project.Today, I went through two tutorials. In first tutorial I learned more about colliders and how to animate action through the animation bar and how to script that action further. The example in this video was animating and scripting door movement. It was a similar script to the gem collecting, but this time we used a lot more colliders and animation. The second video talked about the particle system and how to manipulate it, and also how to add in more trees and nature into our world. I really liked the particle system and will use it for my project as it is easy to use and can give many different effects to the scene. The two videos were very useful, as they relate to my idea for the project. In the video, I also learned that the particle system is not only useful to create fog, but also fire, smoke, explosion effect, water, rain and so on.

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Game Fun

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After going through this week's readings, I learned more about different types of fun and different types of players. The article goes into a lot more of details about "fun" than the MDA Framework which we read for one of the previous weeks.

Starting off, this piece goes through the standard 8 "funs". The Sensation, Fantasy, Narrative, Challenge, Fellowship, Discovery, Expression and Submission are the main ones, but, as the author said, the list isn't completed and there is so much more going into it. The other four types found in games are: 

Collection. This is the “gathering” part of hunting-and-gathering, so you would expect it to be fun. In many board games you collect resources or tokens. Trading Card Game players collect cards. 

Spatial Reasoning. Primitive humans needed to figure out spatial relationships in order to build useful tools (for example, if you want to find a big stick to make a crude ladder or bridge, you need to be able to estimate length; if you want to stick two pieces of wood together, you need to be able to figure out how to make them fit). Many games make use of spatial relationships, from Tetris to Pente.

Advancement. The skill of learning new skills, which is obviously useful to a primitive human that needs to learn a lot of skills. We see this formalized in games all the time, from the overt Experience Points and Levels to finding new items or buying new weapons that give us better stats or new capabilities.

Finding Shortcuts. Finding novel, undiscovered ways to work around problems in ways that take less effort than normal helped primitive humans to conserve their energy; in that sense, laziness can be a virtue. Ironically, in games, this often takes the form of deliberate rule-breaking and cheating.

Griefing. Like other forms of competition, putting other people down is a way to show dominance and superiority over your peers. 

Sadly, you can't just create a game which contains all the types of funs and hope it will work, because they all work in a combination with each other, so its something that a game developer needs to be mindful of. 

Another thing that the article mentions is the types of players. Achievers, Explorers, Socializers and Killers.

Game Brainstorm

For this post, I would like to discuss the four game ideas which I was thinking about for this module. 

1. Racing game - I was thinking to create as simple as possible racing game with gokarts, something similar to Mario gokarts. I could make a racing track in an oval shape with two competitive cars.

2. City-Building - My second idea was to create something similar to Age of Empires(1996), a simple building, economical game.  

3. First-person shooter - The third idea was to create a first-person shooter, because I been playing a lot of shooting games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor and my first shooter game, back to 1994 is Contra where two persons go through different screens and shooting enemies.  

4. Sport game - I play Fifa and NHL, NBA and other types of sport games. so I'm interested in this type of games. So I was thinking of creating something similar, but I have no previous knowledge in advanced programming. 

In conclusion, as an experienced player who had been playing many games for many years, I have lots of ideas about what I would like to create, but for the start I would like to create something simple like a 2D game which I used to play. 

Game Design

For week 2, I had to read through two articles. One of the articles was about Euro games, also known as german style games.
This is what makes a Euro game:

1. Rarely take more than an hour to play - they are quick to play. 
2. Simple rules - so that everyone can understand and play. 
3. Only a few plausible or reasonable choices each turn - so people dont take long time to make a decision. 
4. Uncertainty of information - you can't calculate your decisions.
5. No player elimination - nobody loses. 
6. Very pacific - instead of destroying other players, you stop them from improving. 
7. Player interaction without overt conflict.
8. Short intervals between playing ("down time") - again, so it doesnt take too long to play. 
9. There are not many pieces—cards, counters, etc.—for a player to manipulate in a given turn.
10. Great visual interest.
11. Abstract to the point that the "theme" appears to be tacked on.
12. A dislike of dice.
13. Positive scoring mechanisms.

The second articles I read was "So You're Going To Make A Game For The Very First Time?". This article is more about making the game for the first time. 

•  make a tabletop game, or use a simple level editor to modify an existing videogame
• make something based on a game you know
• reign in your ambition--try to complete a small project, not a large one
• focus on gameplay not prettiness or story
• play the game yourself before anybody else plays, even if it isn’t intended to be a one person game
• teratively and incrementally playtest and improve the game
• your never really finish

Unity Tutorial 05

Hi , in this blog I will continue to tell and describe what we have learned new and how it will contribute to the creation of our game. So let's start with what we learned from Unity Tutorials 9 - 11. In first video, we reviewed and learned new game elements such as:         Skybox,Lighting and Wind zone. Very interesting video about the creation of the sky in the game and how you can use the light settings to choose the desired shade or to balance the light or change it to another. We also learned how with the help of Wind Zone settings you can change the strength of the wind, its direction and intensity.  In the second video, we learned how to pick up any object in the game, example weapon. And using the example of the script from the last lesson(gem picking) we went through step by step  how to do this in different way. Also we learn from this tutorial how to Fade in the scene trough Animation and script. In the last video, we learned how to fix bugs in game trough
script, also we go over and repeat whole process of adding a new texture(grass,bushes and House) and also we finish Fade out screen same way as we did in previous video, trough scripting. 
   

My practice field

Games Decisions

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   This week's articles are about in-game decision-making, flow-theory and cozy games. The first of two goes through types of decisions in game, and splits them into two categories: the good and the bad types of decisions.
Good types of decisions are the ones where player can make a decision with the knowledge that they have and feel in control of the consequences. The article mentions things like dilemmas, short-time vs long-time and risk vs reward as good types.
The bad type is when a player has no knowledge to make a decision or when the decision makes no difference in the gameplay, so meaningless decisions, blind and obvious decisions are considered a bad type.

The second article was about cozy games which I didn't understand too well, because I don't think the word fits very well.
Cozy games are the ones that give the player feeling of safety, softness and abundance, while keeping the game in bright and vibrant color palette with relaxing ambient sounds and music. The examples given are Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley.