Unity Tutorial 04.

This week, I've continued researching and watching different unity tutorials to help improve my skills with Unity. I've found two articles, one on an interactive prototype whereas the player throws pizza at hungry animals in order to win (https://learn.unity.com/project/unit-2-basic-gameplay?courseId=5cf96c41edbc2a2ca6e8810f), and the other article is related to designing, developing and deploying VR gaming and prototyping (https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/unit-1-design-develop-and-deploy-for-vr?courseId=5d955b5dedbc2a319caab9a0#5d955a53edbc2a001f0ea3ff).

↷ For the first article, I began by creating a new project and getting basic player movements working. I first chose a character that I liked, some animals I wanted the character to interact with, and a food item to feed the animals, and gave the player some basic side-to-side movement on the screen based on the users left and right keys. I then continued on in creating a new script, to allow the player to be able to press the spacebar and launch the foodie item, which in turn destroys itself when it leaves the game screen, and have animals be removed once they leave the screen also. Finally, I've continued on in creating a spawn manager so that when the player presses the S key, a randomly selected animal will spawn at a random position at the top of the screen which will walk towards the player. I've never created an interactive game like this, so it taught me a lot more about scripting and creating spawn managers for various objects.

↷ As for the second article, I was able to better understand the consumer expectations for VR content, recognize traits that successful VR titles have in common and better understand how to create higher quality VR applications. I've also ended up learning the best practices for creating a game design document, a player profile report, and a press kit for the escape room vertical slice that I've built throughout the tutorial.

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Reading 4.

For this week's reading post, I've since continued on in researching and working on my matrix offline and will be uploading the finished product within the following week. As part of my research, I've been learning how to conduct and write my analysis through literature reviews in which I've found an online article that gave me a greater understanding of it (https://www.teachingcouncil.ie/en/_fileupload/Research/Literature-Review-Webinar.pdf). This pdf covers the basics, what exactly is a literature review and how to start one, how to source academic literature and some bonus tips. When researching and discussing my two chosen topics, I find it rather difficult to find gaming articles in relation to them, as managing complexities is more in relation to geographical terms and business methodology and dominant strategies don't have enough information on them online. However, I've found an article based on a series titled "Creative Chronicles" where one article talks about managing the complexities in game audio (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-02-14-creative-chronicles-managing-complexity-in-game-audio), and a youtube video on the iterative deletion of dominant strategy equilibrium (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErJNYh8ejSA). Overall I do feel like I'm struggling a little bit as both these topics are quite hard to research and discuss the information found, but a little help from looking at both primary and secondary research and comparing them will get me through it. 

This image was found on pexels.com.

Game elements

I've recently came across some articles talking about the atomic elements and the qualities of a game that I find rather interesting. Games do have a repetitive theme, and each game has its own set of rules, it's own conflict, various choices, and its own goals.

↬ https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3357/formal_abstract_design_tools.php  discusses the formal abstract design tools and whether a game is "fun" or not, which I quite agree with. Whether a game is fun or not comes from a thorough and unbiased outlook on a game, and simply stating if a game is "fun" does not actually tell designers why it actually is entertaining. In turn we should be able to a pick a specific game, choose a single cool aspect from it and apply it to our own game, or even take a game that we love "if it weren't for one annoying aspect" understand why it bothers us, and make sure we don't create a similar mistake in our very own games. I think this is a very interesting approach to game design and I'll definitely be sticking to it.

↬ http://www.thegamesjournal.com/articles/WhatMakesaGame.shtml covers some very interesting topics on what actually makes a game good. For instance, it would have to be an original concept and has to possess unique elements that have never been used before, otherwise gamers would be considering playing other games as they would have the same concept with a more advanced approach. The freshness and replayability of a game makes its players want to play it again and again, and it should feel exciting each time it's played as it was the first time.  Games lacking this quality will soon becoming boring. Games should also be enriched with surprised and repetition in sequence, progress and events should be strictly avoided.

↬ https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/64z7w8/what_are_the_qualities_that_make_up_a_bad_game/ features all the errors in a bad game and how to overcome them, from unclear and bad controls, to unnecessary features like ugly user interfaces. Some games also feature extremely long and unneeded tutorials, and if a player can't play the game fast enough, they'd lose interest, meaning your game is probably too complicated/complex and you'd need to tone down the specifics. 

Complex Terrain.