Prototype.

Since my 'Game Vision Statement', I have elaborated on my idea by developing some prototypes, such as drawing out a basic map of the game and some start and end points. 

A photo of my map.

➪ Considering the game is meant to raise awareness on global warming and our doom because of plastic, I wanted to go for a more greener feel, with plenty of trees, grass and scenery. I'm also considering creating a barn to promote organic products, and a home made from more sustainable materials. I'd also like to surround the land with trees rather than the player being able to jump into the water, but still be able to see water in the horizon. I won't be creating a player for the game, therefore it will be in first person perspective.

A screenshot of my starting point.

➪ To start the player off, I'm going to add very harsh lighting and vignetting so when the player starts off, they would be particularly slow and can only see the spot they are on, with a message saying "Find 10 pieces of plastic" so that the player's environment could improve. 

A screenshot of my ending point.

➪ Once the player has collected 10 pieces of plastic, they see a beautiful "nostalgic" sky with a lively environment. They will also receive a message to let them know they won and can continue to explore the area, and will get a pop up message on different ways to be more sustainable and help our world.

➪ What I am struggling with, is reducing the vignetting effect and altering the light by bringing brightness in for every piece of plastic collected as this involves scripting. I'm also struggling with coming up with objects to include in my map, I am however open to suggestions if you'd like to comment them down below!

Unity Tutorial 06

This week I've decided to continue on watching Jimmy Vegas' tutorials on creating a game using Unity (I've watched episodes 9, 10 and 11 which can be found here). I've found the next few episodes much more useful and easy to use, and I'll be incorporating some of his techniques into my own game. First of all, the lighting techniques he showed, when messing around with the sky, adding different hues to match the scene with the background lighting, and creating a dark atmosphere. For my own game, I wanted to have the player start off with a more gloomy and dark feel (everything is pitch black apart from a light that follows the player around) and then eventually when the player collects pieces of plastic, the area gets brighter and more lively (robbing his "nostalgic setting" feel). I also really like creating a black fade-in screen for when the player joins in, but I'm not too sure if it'll suit my game considering the game starts off completely dark other than where the player is (his only source of light until he finds some plastic). I did enjoy learning about collecting an item as well, but do find the C# sharp aspect of it confusing. Watching these tutorials make me even more motivated to continue on in creating my game. 

clouds.

Games Decisions.

A little while back, I've come across some articles talking about decision making and the flow theory (https://learn.canvas.net/courses/3/pages/level-6-introduction-and-readings), that I find quite interesting. Lots of difficulties associated with making a huge multi player online game, comes in several parts. An ‘MMO’ (Massive Multi player Online game) is particularly delicate to create due to technical reasons involving ‘server scaling’, as well as designing issues involving scaling economics, politics, level design, pacing, persistence, and progression. (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2247/e6a3f394bf389c7ffe1c8dbbcf05eff86265.pdf). Many early ‘MUD’s (Multi-User Dungeons) involve populations of dozens-to-thousands of people and still have vibrant communities thus far. Minecraft, for instance, is wildly successful, despite its reliance on relatively small, instanced server, and other games, such as Fortnite, that successfully limit their focus to matches of 100 or less. There are plenty other game genres, in particular action and strategy games, that haven’t been successfully scaled to the massively multi player realm thus far. The main reason is that these games meet different requirements in terms of scalability than an already scalable role-playing genre: in particular, it’s player densities. When researching to make human-scale systems, there are several key concepts based on social psychology, each providing a set of restrictions on social design (https://lostgarden.home.blog), and it’s quite obvious it all comes down to friendships and social circles.

Friendship.