Beta

Dillon Eagers Beta Stage

Beta

I feel That for someone who has been struggling with Unity throughout this course I have actually got a good bit done the last few weeks. I unfortunately do not have a playable character or a collectible/ pickup made however over the last two weeks I did manage to get the following things into my finished unity project.

• Adding a rigid body, the plain to prevent items such as houses from falling through the map.
• Adding terrain to the layout of the map
•           Kinematic to prevent players from pushing the invisible wall I made to prevent players from getting through it and falling off the map.
•           I added a skybox around my map in order to stop the players from accessing areas outside of the map when using the player/ or exploring the map.
•       Using and manipulating boxes in order to form the shape of a house.
•        Using the materials given in my assets folder to develop textures for the map such as brown for the mountain, green for the grass and cobblestone gray for the village roads.
•       Adding multiple houses to the map with the manipulated boxes texture to make buildings for village aesthetic.
•       Added a wall to separate the mountain side from the villages aesthetic/to make park section for the map.

(Note: I did wish to get a tree texture to add to the map for more aesthetic for the wilderness and was also hoping t add a lake and castle design to the park.)

What I am Finding Difficult

I was having an Issue with trying to build a lake in the park area of my map (I did try using the jimmy Vegas tutorials available however they were unfortunately a bit updated with the layout I was using for my game. I also had an issue with finding a reliable video for how to make a character for my game with animations and a video on how to make collectibles to pickup around the map (which were going to be the powerups for my game.

How I am meeting my targets Set in my plan

When making target plans I did the following things in order to meet them

1. The first thing that I did was mark out goals per week through my blogs in order to look back through them and work from them
2. The second thing I did was write the goals out for what I wanted to focus on in my game throughout the week (set weekly goals such as , acquiring textures and making a plain layout fr my map.
3. The third thing I did was I did out sketches to help visualize how I wanted things to be made in my Unity game such as the map layout that can be seen below , or general Items I wished to make for the map like hoses made out of generic shapes( although they were edited in my final one from a pyramid roof to a re positioned square for the houses roof.
4. The final piece to these methods were adding the following ideas int unity which proved pretty good overall.

I did however have an issue with time in the end and feel that I should have gotten a playable character for the player , as well as a pickup item for the characters power up in the game. I feel that when it came to planning out my game in my blogs there was issue, however when bringing it to screen through the Unity program that was were I began to struggle as I had to learn how to change certain aspects of my game in order to make the game from a technical standpoint. It did prove more challenging , as I could not download the unity program on my laptop as it was too big, so I had to stick with working with  it on the college macs which were a challenge in of itself to me as I only started using them for the first time last year.

I also would like to mention that by re watching the following Jimmy Vegas videos I :managed to get a lot done on my map in the end.

Video 1:  How to make a game for free 001- introduction- Unity Tutorial by Jimmy Vegas link here

Video 2: How to make a game for free 002-textures/materials- Unity Tutorial by Jimmy Vega link here

Video 3: How to make a game for free 003-C coding- Unity Tutorial by Jimmy Vegas link here

Video 4: How to make a game for free 004- Improved Graphics - Unity Tutorial by Jimmy Vegas link here

Images

Unity Free Tutorials

Week 11 Unity

Link to image here

For this weeks Unity write up I focused on two particular videos that I feel helped progress my unity game overall. I made some progress in actually making things in unity over the last week such as the terrain , the road for the village on the map, the mountain and adding textures to my project. That is why I felt it was important to focus on the following things.

• Creating a character to play in the game with animations
• Adding items to collect in the finished project.

ANIMATING CHARACTERS in Unity 2018 Beginners Guide By Sykoo

Video one Here: The first video I watched was on how to make a character in unity for the player to play as. I found it helpful as it was a beginners guide and shows how using code can manipulate your character to make certain movements.

Mini Unity Tutorial- How to make A Collectible And Scoring System In C 

Video two here: For the second video it focused on  how to make a collectible/scoring system in Unity. Surprisingly this video was made by Jimmy Vegas the persons tutorials I used when making my game and hopefully will work out well for the assignment overall.

Overall I found that both of these videos had a lot to take in and would be beneficial in showing me what to expect when applying them to my project hopefully it will work out tomorrow when I try to implement them.

Games testing

Games testing

Link to image here

This weeks reading is on Game Testing. In particular Play-testing, which is a method of quality control that takes place at many points during the video game design process. 

Link 1:

The first link I posted was to a site called spritecloud (link to site here)which focused on the question "why games testing is important" in this write up  which focused on how to test games as well as the following types of testing for games

• Installation testing:Verifying that the game will load, install and runn on different platforms ( examples are Xbox or phones)
• Feature testing: test matrix's for different features for different players statuses 
• User Interface (UI) Testing:  Focuses on graphical elements and types of content
• Performance testing : Also called "Extreme testing", this involves running the game for a continuous 24 hour period , while increasing/ adding more players for testing the multiplayer aspect.

I overall found this reading quite helpful as it have me more insight into some of the different types of games testing in this design industry,as well as marked out specific things that make each of these types of testing unique and original for producing a finished game.

Link 2:

The Second link that I read was by The Closet Entrepreneur which was titled " Giving Criticism- the good, the bad and the Ugly"(link to site here) . This reading focused on the showing the positives of readings such as for example it can lend much needed assistance towards an individual if it is Constructive Criticism. This is different to normal/ sometimes harsh criticism as it offers valid feedback both positive and negative . It is normally applied when the person giving the constructive criticism is being unbiased in your feedback as well as giving credible and well- founded..

What I liked about this post mostly was how the writer wrote out examples of both  poor ways to give constructive criticism and good ways also . What I gathered overall from this reading was that we should not take offence to all criticism as it can also be not only helpful but someone trying to give useful and helpful feedback. This piece has also given me more of an understanding of why I was encouraged to use the wow, wonder, what if strategy when starting these blogs and I feel I wiil continue to use in future blogs to come.

Link 3:

The third and final link I clicked on was titled "Game Design and Target Market" by Gamasutra ( link to site here) This reading focused mainly on the following headings for target audiences.

• The Game Industries Average Target market
• The Need for freelance game design directors and designers.
• The perspective of the intermediate player/ gamer

From reading these however i feel as though they only focused on three types of markets .

1. The Casual game market which brings in cash because of its large customer base.But unfortunately limits things like creativity and forward thinking. mainly placing profit over these principals an unfortunate ting that has became a lot more frequent in recent years.
2. The Hardcore market which focuses on both the creative and the forward thinking aspect of the market but unfortunately brings little money to meet the financial demands of the game industry due to the small customer base these types of games seem to mostly attract.
3.  The Intermediate market which focuses on targeting the main appeal of intermediate gamer's and maintaining a balance of creativity and profitability. This would make this the realistic way to look at the market as it pushed growth on the game industry.

I feel this final reading had a lot to take in but overall gave me more perspective on these three types of game markets and how to tell them apart. which was quite beneficial overall.