Free Unity Tutorials

Screenshots of youtube

For this week unity tutorials, i was mostly focusing on looking for videos that contained free assets that I can use for my game, especially the landscape elements like stones, trees, bushes, caves, surfaces, textures and so on. I went through a lot of videos because each of them contained something new and different and was used in a different way. Even though there are a lot of free assets in the Unity Asset store, you can sometimes find unique textures and assets in description of videos. Also, when you get to see the assets in action, you get to see which ones are worth downloading and using for my project.  

Since I'm working on my game now, i am more concentration on actually making my game rather than looking for tutorials because when I will have my level one, I will then be able to see what I'm missing and then i will look for the tutorials on missing components. 

I went through this really short tutorial on how to add in a minimap to my game, so that the player can know their location within the map. Also it adds a bit more to the Head Up Display to make it look like a real game. 

Games Testing

This week's reading is Level 11 "Testing" and it discusses the general idea of playtesting. There are a few different types of testing and they are all very important tasks at a certain stages of development. It's important to critically test your own game to see the obvious errors and bugs, then fix them on your own. Next step is to try and give your game to other game designers for testing. You should set up certain conditions for the playtest to get the precious information that you need. Then, you give the game to the gamers. This type of testing is very different from the game designers, as you will see how your game is experienced first hand by the real audience, but you as a game designer need to realize that gamers' feedback might not be as accurate and detailed. There are few different types of testing, like the bug testing, focus, usability, balance and fun testing. 

Bug Testing - used to find any bugs and errors. 

Focus Testing- used to determine the specific target audience. 

Usability Testing- used to see if the players can control the game. The testers are usually given tasks to complete.

Balance Testing - used to spot the unbalance in the game - like overpowered classes or tools, as well as to test whether someone can overcome or cheat through barriers. 

Fun - used to see whether the game is fun and enjoyable. 

Testing can be done by you being present so that you can take notes and observe the testers, or without you, where you have very little control and the feedback can be very various. 

The other article for this week talked about constructive criticism and how to give it to other people. 

Also i include a link to a short video that explains a playtesting. Just click on image source. 

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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.