Unity Tutorial 05

For this week's Unity tutorials, I finished up last week's prototype and completed a challenge where I play fetch with a dog by spawning random balls and making the dog catch them.

(Image of my Unity)

The first tutorial this week was just the last tutorial for Lesson 2. In this, I learned how to spawn random objects with a timer rather than having to press a button all the time, I learned a little more about colliders, how go destroy objects when they collide and how to trigger a "game over" message for myself. As always, the tutorial was straightforward and I had very little to no problems with Unity.

(Image of my Unity)

For the second part of this week's Unity, it was a challenge and instead of following along to tutorials, I had to figure out how to make things work myself. There were some hints to help but I still got a little confused. The past tutorials did help because I had a better idea of where to look and what to do. I struggled and not everything works like it should but I got most of it to work I think.

Unity Tutorial 04

(Image of my Unity)

In this week's Unity tutorials, I learned basic gameplay by making a "Feed the Animals" prototype. It was really easy to follow along as the tutorials go through everything clearly and step-by-step. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun making the prototype.

I learned a lot of new things in this tutorial using code. I learned how to move the character side-to-side, set boundaries for the character's movements, how to clone and spawn objects/projectiles by pressing keys, how to make objects disappear instead of going off into the distance forever, how to change the location of where objects are spawned and a few other things. They were all fun to learn how to do and to play around with.

Overall, it was really fun messing around in the game and the tutorial was easy to do. I didn't have as many difficulties with this one as I did with Unity Tutorial 02, I'd make small mistakes here and there but they were easy to spot and change so that was fine.

Reading 3

(Image of Researching)

This week I focused on researching the topics I've chosen. For this I also had to complete a Matrix which I think is basically like a summary of the sources you plan to use. It was very confusing on how you fill it out but hopefully I did it right.

While researching, I found many articles that seemed useful for my topics. Some of the things I found and learnt about my topics:

5 Domains of play:
As mentioned before, this topic focuses on the relation between "The Big 5", which are the main 5 personality traits players can have, and how those personalities determine what type of games/game domains they might enjoy. "The Big 5" relates more to psychology but it was translated and used for research for game development to find "The 5 Domains of Play". The traits are;Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (O.C.E.A.N). The 5 domains consist of; Novelty, Challenge, Stimulation, Harmony and Threat.
For this topic, some of the sources I found that seemed like they would be helpful for my research are:

https://www.darklorde.com/the-five-domains-of-play/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uX6ye66NK0

Demographics of Players(Types of Players):
This topic focuses more on statistics and the different types of players found in games. Demographics can relate to a number of things such as age,gender,occupation,education level,etc. of a person but for games I think it mainly focuses on age and gender. This is about how those factors affect the players enjoyment of games, their motivations to play, preferences and how the overall gaming experience is for them. Along with this, this topic also will talk about the different types of players found in games. There are 4 main types: Achievers, Explorers, Socialisers and Killers.
For this topic, some of the sources I found that seemed like they would be helpful for my research are:

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130552/unmasking_the_avatar_the_.php
https://www.gamesparks.com/blog/the-average-gamer-how-the-demographics-have-shifted/
http://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

Unity Tutorial 02

(Image of Unity)

This semester we were given the option of picking between developing projects with code and trying VR in unity. I decided to go with the 1st option of creating with code. Instead of watching and following along with Jimmy Vegas, I was following Unity's official tutorials.

These tutorials were very simple and went over things step by step in very short videos making it really easy to follow along. There was also a short summary written under the video which explained what to do incase you didn't want to watch the full thing.
Jimmy Vegas also did a good job at explaining but I felt like his tutorials were very long and slow compared to these Unity ones.

I learnt some cool new basic tricks that I didn't know before and just overall felt like I learnt a lot more from these tutorials than the Jimmy Vegas ones. I made a vehicle
collide into obstacles using code which was really cool. While doing these tutorials, I did struggle sometimes but eventually got everything to work.

Reading 2

(Image of planning)

For the book we are writing, I chose to write Chapter 4: Understanding the Player; 5 domains of play and demographics of players(types of players). The 5 domains of play focuses on the connection between "The Big 5" personality groups and the different types of games they most enjoy based off their personalities. Demographics of players(types of players) focuses on all the types of different players.

When planning my approach, I took my 2 topics and broke them down into some questions that I could focus my research on. These are just some of the questions:

• "What are the 5 domains of play"
• "How "The Big 5" personality groups correlate to game type and enjoyment"
• "What are the different types of players/characteristics of the different types of players"
• "How do the different types of players interact with one another"

I also highlighted some keywords that would help with my research. Some of them are "domains" and "play" for the 1st topic and "demographics", "player" and "types" for the 2nd. I tried to find other keywords associated with the ones I already had to further help me.

From what I have looked up so far, a good few articles have come up for both topics so the next step is to properly research and go through all those articles to complete my Matrix to see what is relevant and what isn't. This will then help me when I am in the writing process of the book.

Game Testing

This week's reading was about giving criticism and how it can actually be useful. The useful and good type of criticism is called "constructive criticism". It gives feedback to a person on things that can be improved or issues that can be avoided in a way that doesn't make it sound like you're insulting the person.

When giving constructive criticism, you have to make sure your opinions stay valid and unbiased. This means that the feedback has to be reliable/from a good source,to make sure you know what you're talking about, and free from personal preferences. As we've learnt before, everyone has different preferences in things, so when giving feedback, we need to make sure we avoid what we would personally like to be done and instead give overall feedback that will help the person improve on their ideas.

Along with that, make sure your criticism is clear, easy to understand and relevant to the topic. Be specific in what needs improvement rather than the typical, vague responses "I like it"/"I don't like it". These responses won't help the person so just point out clearly what works well and what doesn't

Giving criticism correctly can avoid people getting their feelings hurt and giving them low self-esteem. So as long as your feedback is specific,understandable,unbiased and reliable, it should be very helpful to the person you're giving it to.

Review Week: Comments and Feedback

The majority of comments I've been getting from other students have been positive and very helpful. I found the comments on my game process most beneficiall. I thought there would be more criticism on my game but it was the complete opposite. Getting comments off others gave me a chance to see my game ideas from someone else's perspective and not just my own. They gave me points on how to improve or ideas on things I could add that I may have not thought of myself.

I didn't really write many feedback comments on other people's blogs,  I wouldn't know what to write or how to give people points on improvement for their game process. Everyone seemed to have a good idea of what they wanted to do with their games so I wouldn't know how to add or improve on them.

I know the main point of the blog comments was to connect with others and get to know them but  I still felt a little awkward writing comments. However, on the few blogs that I have left comments, it was interesting getting to know people through their blogs and to see how others were getting along with their games. I did struggle thinking of what to say and  not ending up repeating myself on some of the blogs but it was still an interesting experience.

For my introduction blog, I never really know what to say about myself so I don't think it was that interesting and I probably could've thought of a better way to write it. I felt like it was really basic compared to other people's introductions. However, having an introduction blog was nice and really helped getting to know people. I didn't think I would, but I enjoyed blogging and seeing people's comments.

In the future, I would definitely try to comment more on other people's blogs and work on giving better feedback on their ideas. I would also put more effort into the appearance of my blog.