Robbie Cahill Multimedia Development

 A topic that captured my interest this week was positive feedback. I decided to research on these topics through wikipedia Source:  Flickr Feedback Positive Feedback Negative Feedback Varieties of Criticism

 This week I decided to do an extra task in order to get more credit. For this I decided to focus on growth mindset. Teaching Growth Mindset Poster Source:  Pinterest For this I decided to examine the "Make a Motto" segment.  I tried to make a graphic but unfortunately I couldn't download it so I took a screenshot instead.

 Hello There(Extra Credit to the first person that comments "General Kenobi") Welcome to my long overdue Tech Task blog post.  I have now decided to change the layout of my blog to be much more stylish.  Hope you all like it, please leave your feedback in the comments  🙂

 This week from working on my project I have decided to restructure various details of my personal game. I originally wanted there to be an end destination which the player character would reach. This would likely be a house or another type of structure. I will now have my game be an endless runner, similar to many mobile games such as Temple Run for example. I already wanted to do it before it is now vital that I make my obstacles spawn continuously and randomly. I will also need to make my road and ground repeat continuously       I also planned to have my car move and rotate like a regular car would but I will now experiment with having the car "sway" very quickly from side to side. I am also still considering whether my game should still have a projectile option. As it doesn't quite fit with my new vision of the game I wish to create. Although my game will require many small details to be changed the broad idea still remains the same and I am confident that ...

  I can thankfully say that I have continuously received excellent feedback comments from my peers. The comments they have left on my blog posts have not only been friendly and supportive but they have also offered fantastic advice. When I was still brainstorming on potential ideas for a final video game one of my peers made an excellent comment about what I could add to one of my game ideas. I didn't follow through with this idea however if I had more time and more experience in creating a game I would definitely try to incorporate his comment into a game. I find comments which offer ideas on potential ideas I could work on in my game to be the best comments as they really help me with the potential future of my games and really get the creative side of my brain whirring. Although I can't understate the importance of comments which offer general support and friendly well wishes. I am proud to say that I can rate the comments I have received on my blog a ten out of ten. In turn...

Looking back on my previous readings I have a variety of tasks on this blog which I have completed over the semester, my thoughts and feelings on the tasks from reading have always fluctuated between thoroughly enjoying the tasks, to disliking them, to becoming more disinterested. This would always vary on whether the topic at hand was one which I found interesting or not. Although I won't let disinterest or dislike of the topic get the better of me in the following weeks and will be sure to try and complete as many tasks as possible. Although I had a variety of tasks by far my favourite reading assignment was the work I did on growth mindset. Growth mindset is a very interesting idea with a great deal of merit behind it. I especially related to this idea as when I was making my through secondary & primary school I never achieved outstanding results and I felt as though I could never change that. Reading about growth mindset finally made me feel as though I had a few kindred sp...

This week was week 9. For this week I also had a Unity tutorial to complete. This tutorial was Unit 4 Lesson 4,  a continuation from the tutorial I had completed last week. When I had first opened my Unity tutorial I had to fix a small error but this was relatively easy to take care of and I was able to move on to the rest of the  tutorial. For this tutorial my first task was to write a loop in C# to spawn 3 enemies at once at the beginning of the tutorial. I found this task to be relatively easy compared to the tasks from last week. I also added in some code so that the enemy balls would be destroyed if they fall off the platform. I proceeded to increase enemy count with waves and also spawn power-ups with new waves. Source:  Flickr As I have now reached week 9 I feel very good about my Unity Tutorials, I found Unit 4 as a whole to be a bit more difficult than the other tutorials and I can't help but shake the feeling that the next Unity tutorials will be much more diffi...

 After my reading on the types of fun in gaming I found Marc LeBlanc's 8 kinds of fun to be a particularly interesting idea. The listed ideas. Sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery, expression, submission. All of these ideas are ones I firmly believe touched on different aspects of gaming and I could see how each of them fit into different types of games, even ones I don't personally play or enjoy. Source:  Flickr Here are some items which I found interesting and I believe are relevant to the current topic. When Video Games Feel Haunted: Inside the Low-Res Horror Boom The Many Different Types of Video Games & Their Subgenres Video games are fun. Here's why, and how they hook us.

  For this week I worked on Unity tutorials from Unit 4. Specifically, tutorials 4.1, 4.2 & 4.3. These tutorials provided me with new challenges which I had to work my way through. I started with 4.1, this tutorial had a completely different setting than the tutorials I completed last week. The setting was a large tower-like structure stretching up into the night sky. I then added my player character as a sphere and a texture to make it look better aesthetically In lesson 4.2 I added an enemy sphere and added a texture to that sphere. Afterwards I created a C# Script in order to make it follow the player around the map. I then proceeded to make the spawn location randomised. Source:  Flickr During lesson 4.3 I added a power-up to my game. This allowed me to be able to knock the enemy sphere away. After this I changed my C# Script so that I would only have this power-up for a few seconds. Unlike some of the Unity tutorials I had completed in previous weeks I experienced a d...

This week I had to design my very own "Game Design Document." I can't deny that at first I found the idea of creating a "Game Design Document" to be extremely intimidating. It seemed like a gargantuan task. However the more I looked into I quickly realised that At first I tried to use the website DunDoc. Unfortunately it didn't work. I am still unsure what went wrong but my email just didn't work. As a result I moved onto using a google document instead. Once I got my head down and kept in the swing of it I started flying through. I already knew what I wanted to place in my game so I just ordered it into specific categories and added them all in. I'm also relieved that you can edit your "Game Design Document" at a later date as recently I have had thoughts about changing my game to an endless runner and also adding a form of ammunition to my game. Source:  Flickr Here is a link to my GDD  I hope you find it interesting and can give me some ...

  The Unity tutorials for this week continued on from the tutorial I did last week. My first task was ‘Lesson 3.3 - Don't Just Stand There.’ This tutorial was about editing the players animations.   I also set up a specific animation for jumping and proceeded to tweak it. In addition to a jumping animation I also added a falling animation to the player character. The next section of the tutorial (Lesson 3.4 - Particles and Sound Effects) was about particles effects and sound effects. The first task I did was creating. The first step   was to add a custom explosion particle. I found this part very interesting. Immediately after this I had to ensure that this particle played upon collision. In order to make this effect look better I had to add a dirt splatter particle.   Source:  Flickr The next part I found incredibly interesting. It is an important addition to any video game, the music. In order to do this I added music to the main camera from the source library...

For this Unity tutorial I followed on from the previous tutorial which was learning about how to make the player character jump. This tutorial is lesson 3.2 and is titled "Make The World whiz By." A very fitting title as for this task I had to work on making it seem as though the world of the game carried on forever. One of my first tasks in this tutorial was about making the background repeat. This was so that when the character is running that the background repeats itself so that to the player it seems as though the background (in this case a nature setting) goes on potentially forever. I also edited the game over screen. Now once the player bumps into an obstacle the game stops altogether. The player & the background simultaneously stop moving with a small "Game Over" screen in the corner. Source: Flickr For the final task in this tutorial I made sure that objects were destroyed when they are moved off-screen. I had already done this in a previous task so th...

 This is my fourth Unity Tutorial. This tutorial carried on directly from the previous tutorial. I continued working on making the animals move. My first task was to make a brand new method in order to spawn animals. I achieved this by creating a new void in " SpawnManager.cs." I proceeded to spawn animals at timed intervals. I then added collider and trigger components and made sure to destroy objects on impact. I found this part very interesting as I edited the size of a small box around the three animals and the food projectile item. Finally I added the most essential part of a video game to this tutorial. A "Game Over" message. Source:  Flickr For my Final Unity Tutorial I had to make the player character jump up into the air. I learnt all sorts of interesting things to do in this tutorial. I learnt how to ensure gravity worked on my player. At first I had some issues with the character falling through the map but I realised I made an error with the box around t...

Welcome to my third post for my game Idea. For my game idea I believe that creating a racing style game would suit me. It may be easier as Unity seems to have My game would fall neatly into the genre of a racing game. My concept for a game would be to have a pizza delivery driver racing through traffic and dodging various obstacles in order to deliver the pizza to a set location before it gets cold. Game genre I believe one of the pitfalls of racing games is that many of them don't have a story. Grand Theft Auto may be one of the most popular racing games but I highly doubt it would be so renowned if not for its story and characters. Although my game definitely wouldn't have a large story like games with a larger budget I do believe the addition of a small scale narrative would assist in enhancing my game. I feel as though players would tend to lose interest fast if there was no goal outside of merely beating a timer. Having a light narrative would help keep the player involved...

In a funny twist I had to refer to older instructions in order to remember how to download the new assets into this new Unity project, thankfully the website provided a link to those exact instructions so I was able to follow those and get my new assets into Unity in no time. I believe this is a great feature that Unity has added to their websites. When it came to my C# Script I had an issue with the horizontal input, however one of the comments I came across on the tutorial website helped me get it right.  Source:  Flickr Overall I found this task very fun. I am thrilled to say that I greatly enjoyed this task. I heard from my peers that it was fun and I can more than confirm. Shooting out mini-sandwiches from my character brought a joy to my spirits that I didn't think it could. Completing this Tutorial brought me immense enjoyment and a sense of price and accomplishment. I feel as though I have learnt some vital information in order to make a game. Any issues I had were all...

Previously I considered a variety of ideas which I could translate into a full video game. However most of the game ideas were far too big for me to do. I believe that there was a single idea that could work very well. Creating a racing game where you drive about on a long stretch and try to avoid traffic. I firmly believe this would be better for my current skill level. A game with more scale would require more time and likely more members. I also believe this link could explain why my peers could enjoy a racing game One mechanic that I believe would work very well is actually jumping. In the game I used to play you could jump over traffic. This was vital as the longer you played the faster you went. It was a very fun mechanic, seeing a large taxi leap over other cars in a cartoonish manner always brought me endless amusement as a child. New obstacles would also benefit this game, such as overtaking buses and other fast vehicles. Although there could be other types of obstacles added ...

  Feedback is a very important part of improving. Not just in work situations, but in order to grow as a human being. One of the articles I found very interesting was Five Reasons to Stop Saying “Good Job!”  .  This article questions what most people would believe. Pointing out that explaining to children why a quiet classroom would function better makes the children kinder and more thoughtful. Lilian Katz, an authority on early childhood education. Make a great point about the negative side-effect of children constantly hearing "Good Job". She stated that "Once attention is withdrawn, many kids won’t touch the activity again." There is also research to back up her claim. Showing that if people are rewarded more for doing something then they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do. Feedback Source:  Flickr I believe the article  What Kinds of Messages Help Kids Grow?  offers great advice on helping small children with feedback. This article points ...