Unity Tutorial 06

Unity Tutorial 06

Lesson 3.1 - Jump Force

This tutorial was relatively easy to follow, however I encountered some coding problems here. For some reason, when coding the collision in order to identify when the player is on the ground, the player only registers as being on the ground at the start of the jump and when the player lands it doesn't register as being on the ground anymore. I tried to fix this and put in my code exactly as the tutorial and I can't exactly figure out what's wrong so the player is stuck that way for now. I also had an issue where the obstacles would fall through the map and into the void and I am unsure of how to fix this. However, I did learn handy code such as how to prevent the player from double jumping and also how to move a whole scene left.

Screenshot of my Unity project

Source: My laptop

Lesson 3.2 - Make the World Whiz

The coding to make the background repeat and seamless worked flawlessly and is fully functional! This is really useful in many elements but especially platformer style games. However, when the player hits an obstacle it does not register, so the Game Over script along with the stop scrolling does not work- but the code is implemented so if the player did register being hit then the code should work no problem.

Screenshot of my Unity project

Source: My laptop

Lesson 3.3 - Don't Just Stand There

This tutorial was very useful as it explored more in depth character animation and how to add them to the character. I learned how to navigate the animator component, and how to adjust values such as the speed of the running animation in order to make it match the speed the background was moving. Again, I had trouble with animating the dead player animation as the player does not register if it hit an obstacle, but the running and jumping animations worked fine!

Player running animation

Source: My Laptop

Unity Tutorial 04

Unity Tutorial 04

Tutorial 2.1- Player Positioning

I found this tutorial relatively straightforward as it was mainly script based and we have used the majority of the script shown in the previous tutorials. It did confuse me at one point through due to changing the values to xRange and I had to recheck the code several times because I kept getting errors (it was only for simple things like accidentally forgetting a semi-colon though). Overall I found this tutorial useful as it taught me how to add range to a players movements which prevents them form falling off the map.

Screenshot of my Unity tutorial

Source: My laptop

Tutorial 2.2- Food Flight

This tutorial was a little trickier than the first as it involved creating prefabs and destroying them when they go out of bounds, which is something I don't think I've explored much before. This tutorial took me a little longer to code and understand but the nature of these tutorials are to make it easy to follow so I got there eventually. I liked learning how to launch the steaks when pressing the spacebar and I like how it destroys them when they go out of bounds to make the game less laggy. 

Screenshot of my Unity workspace

Source: My laptop

Lesson 2.3- Random Animal Stampede

This tutorial was the hardest of the three for me- the code for the random spawn and positioning of the animals didn't want to work for me no matter how much I tried. I managed to get the animals to spawn when you change the index in the inspector, but I couldn't manage to get the code for the random spawns to work. I spent quite a while on this- my Visual Studio says that there's no issues with the code but Unity says otherwise so I'm at a loss. I'll have to revisit this at a later date to see if I can understand what the issue is and fix it.

Screenshot of my Unity space

Source: My laptop

Reading 3 - Starting my Research

Reading 3 - Starting my Research

For this weeks reading I started my research on my first topic- creating my own research matrix to fill out and using available resources to locate journals and articles to gather and read.

Admittedly I struggled a lot at first with this- I was totally lost with the matrix as it confused me and I had no idea what to fill in where, but after clearing it and starting to read and compile some articles it became clearer.

I used Google Scholar, SpringerOpen and Sage Research Methods to find relevant articles and papers by searching using my keywords/key sentences I created last week. When I found a relevant article, I first read the abstract to see if it covered anything relevant to my topic. I then went on to read the conclusions to see if there was any useful topics covered within the reading. If I found there were relevant things in the abstract and conclusion, I skimmed through the readings and read the sub headings to see if there was anything relevant. I then started to fill in my Matrix with relevant, simplified information based on my readings.

Getting a start on my research matrix

Source: My laptop

I explored numerous resources and articles in search of useful information, but came across lots that weren't relevant to my topic. However, I did come across some useful articles and papers.

This paper explores in depth different elements of narrative structure and design, and how these give way to unfolding a story. It explores plot setup, development, complications and resolutions and how to apply these to the gameplay to satisfy the player experience. It goes into narrative in television, film, theatre etc. and has a lot of elements that aren't relevant to my topic but it has some useful tidbits in it. There are some interesting points on player immersion and player driven plots in here also that may be helpful when reading further.

This article explores the idea of The Hero's Journey- a commonly used plot structure which has proven successful and is used in games such as "The Legend of Zelda". The main focus in this plot structure is the main protagonist, the hero, who's world is thrown out of order by an evil entity who the hero in the end must defeat to restore order to the world. This article contains lots of relevant content and is a great example of common plot structure. It shows while this structure is commonly used, it can be widely successful and gives good points on how to advance the plot.

Here are all the articles and papers I have compiled thus far- I read their abstracts, conclusions, and skimmed their subheadings and noted them if I found anything or relevance for my topic.

• https://rke.abertay.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/16652199/King_ImplementingDramaManagment_Published_2019.pdf
• https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8742555
• https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoshNewland/20150624/246930/Games_and_interactive_storytelling.php
• https://summit.sfu.ca/item/18578
• https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130742/into_the_woods_a_practical_guide_.php?page=2
• https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130770/what_every_game_developer_needs_to_.php?page=2

Unity Tutorial 03

Unity Tutorial 03

This week's Unity tutorial explored making a movable vehicle the player can control and steer to hit or dodge the obstacles on the road using C#, and the second tutorial was a challenge to use our knowledge to fix the movements and camera of a plane.

I found the first tutorial easy to follow along and good at explaining the process and code, though I personally have a hard time remembering exactly what each code does therefore I always have to refer back to tutorials or sample code to get things to work. I picked up a bad habit of just using existing code and not trying to learn how it works that I need to get out of.

Screenshot of my code in Visual Studio

Source: My laptop

I really enjoyed piecing the code together to create a movable vehicle! It was satisfying to watch it go from automatically speeding down the road to actually being able to control it and to dodge or ram into the obstacles on the road. You can even drive it off the road and have it plummet into the void which is always amusing too.

Screenshot of vehicle in playmode

Source: My laptop

The second tutorial was much trickier since it wasn't actually a tutorial, but a challenge. The goal was to fix the code and position of the camera in order to make the plane move forward at a good speed and to be able to manually tilt it and have the camera follow the plane.

I got the hang of it pretty quickly and referenced back to the other tutorials to fix the code, and I adjusted the camera and made it follow the plane and managed to complete the challenge by fixing the errors!

It made me realise I learned a lot more than I thought from the previous tutorials!

Fixing the camera position

Source: My laptop

Me struggling to get a screenshot of flying the plane

Source: My laptop

Moving forward I'm looking forward to exploring further into player controls and camera movements as I feel it's very important for the players and can make a game more enjoyable to have good controls of movements and the camera!

Unity Tutorial 02

Unity Tutorial 02

This week we dived back into Unity tutorials- this time official Unity tutorials instead of Jimmy Vegas ones. It was a little weird to hear a different voice guiding me through the various tutorials, but I got used to it pretty quick.

With these tutorials I learned how more advanced controls for viewing objects and placing objects in the scene with utilising the Ctrl and Alt buttons. I also never knew that simply pressing F with an object selected the view would snap to it- definitely a handy one.

The tutorials also explored creating custom layouts along with editing the colour preferences to change the tint of the playmode to make it clearer so that you don't accidentally make changes in the playmode and have it reset when you go out of it which I found very useful.

And of course, I learned how to create a moving vehicle that collides with obstacles and sends them flying along with a player camera that follows the vehicle.

Screenshot of my Unity setup

Source: My laptop

I found the tutorial very helpful especially in creating the scripts as it was very clear in what needed to be coded and explained very well- I actually had no problems with getting it to work which is a first! I also had some fun messing around with the object weights- I made the crates heavier than the vehicle which resulted in the vehicle to go flying instead for a bit of a chuckle.

Screenshot of my playmode tint

Source: My Laptop

I didn't actually find anything difficult this time around with the tutorials so I must have followed it very well! I learned a lot of new tricks to make my life easier navigating the scene and objects and learned some more scripts that will surely help in the future.

I'm looking forward to learning more new things through the tutorials to further my knowledge and allow me to develop different types of games than to the survival styled one I made before!

Reading 2: Planning my Approach!

Reading 2: Planning my Approach

Welcome back to my blog!

It’s exciting to get back into the swing of things, especially now that we’re planning on creating a book on game design together. I’m excited to work with you all again and to learn more about academic writing and further into the topic of game design!

For my writing topics I picked two from the storytelling chapter- “mechanisms for advancing the plot” and “scripted conversations and dialogue trees”. Many players tend to connect with games through their plot and characters so I’m excited to explore this further.

To help me conduct my research, I had to think of a research question. To do this, I thought of my topics and asked myself who, what, where and why to narrow down and focus on topics to research as part of my literature review. There are lots of questions that could be explored with these two topics; here are some I thought of:

1.       Is it necessary to have complex characters to aid a plot-line?

2.       How does character dialogue impact the plot of a game?

3.       How does character dialogue impact the player?

4.       Do players connect with well developed, complex characters more than simpler characters?

5.       Does something bad always have to happen to advance a plot?

6.       Do dialogue trees personalise and enhance the player experience?

7.       What are the effects of choice in scripted conversations?

8.       What are the most common ways to advance a plot-line?

9.       Does player choice matter in dialogue trees?

10.   How do unexpected twists affect a plot and its players?

Taking these questions into account, I refined them further. I combined some questions to give way for deeper analysis and research potential for both topics, and I think they would be interesting to explore!

For mechanisms for advancing the plot, I picked the question “What are the most common ways to advance a plot, and how does breaking the norm affect the player?”

For scripted conversations and dialogue trees, I picked the question “How does character dialogue impact the plot and does player choice in dialogue matter?”

Research illustration

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Readings in the past such as the hero’s journey plot structure stuck out to me when thinking of the first question, while my own experiences in games such as Telltale’s “The Walking Dead”, “Detroit: Become Human” and “Until Dawn” inspired me to explore the effect of player choice in dialogue and how it can impact the plot.

I have mentally ticked off the research question checklist for both of my questions and they all fell under “yes”, so I think I followed the steps in coming up with my questions well.

Some keywords that I can use to help me research are:

• Dialogue
• Dialogue tree
• Dialogue affect
• Dialogue impact
• Scripted conversation
• Character conversation
• Character interaction
• Butterfly effect
• Plot
• Game plot
• Plot mechanics
• Advancing plot
• The hero’s journey
• Common plots
• Plot twists
• Plot importance
• Plot impact

Tools I could use when conducting my research are the TU Dublin library, the library on our own campus, Google Scholar and other journals and reviewed articles available on the TU Dublin library site and on the internet.

I’m looking forward to getting a start on my research and exploring my chosen topics further!

Thank you for reading my blog!

Eterna Hunt Beta

Eterna Hunt Beta

I have been working towards making a complete beta for my game "Eterna Hunt" over the course of this module, with some success but lots of difficulty.

Here are some screenshots from my current beta.

Screenshot of Eterna Hunt

Source: My Unity Project

Screenshot of Eterna Hunt

Source: My Unity Project

Screenshot of Eterna Hunt

Source: My Unity Project

I updated and tweaked my map a little bit and added trees and grass and path textures to make the map feel less boring and more fleshed out. I updated my UI and added a timer element to the game, though with little success. I spent quite a lot of time looking at tutorials and sample code and none of it worked for me. Speaking of script, I also spent hours trying to fix my health script. I managed to fix the code so now the player health goes up when they collect hearts, but for some reason the hearts in the UI don't update.

The spider enemies function perfectly well and look, move towards the player and attack the player however the damage script is not working. Again- I tried to figure this out for quite a while but to no avail.

I made multiple enemies and collectables and scattered them throughout the map- so the game would be perfect as of right now if the code was working.

I'm aware that a beta is supposed to have bugs ironed out but with my laptop being so slow and my lack of knowledge of scripts I did what I could towards building a beta.

I am meeting my targets by working on my project every week and implementing new features and updating the map and existing features towards creating a playable finished game. I am using my existing knowledge from tutorials and readings in order to create my game.

Overall I am pleased with my progress despite the setbacks and complications- as I am a complete beginner to Unity and game development I'm surprised I've made it so far. I hope that one day I figure out how to code so that my game can be fully functional and live up to my original vision.

Games Testing

Games Testing

The first reading I explored discussed the topic of how to give constructive criticism and why giving criticism is important. The second reading goes on to discuss the concept of playtesting and how to make the best use out of it.

Criticism by itself isn't helpful to a person if it's just negative- it can lead to arguments. We typically let our emotions speak before our logic so it's important to really question what you're giving criticism instead of just saying that you like it.

Constructive criticism is both positive and negative in terms of feedback- such as telling the person what they did well in their work and then also what they could improve on or things that can be avoided. This can help people grow in their work and also avoid hurt feelings or coming off as a personal attack or insult due to the structure of constructive criticism.

It's important to give valid and unbiased feedback- feedback that is free of personal taste or opinion and is credible and helpful since everyone has different tastes and opinions and it's not useful to the other person to push your own views onto them. It's also important to be in depth about what you're giving constructive criticism on, such as specifying what would look better eg. size and line spacing rather than just saying that you don't like it.

As a designer it's important to playtest your own games and to set up conditions for other people to playtest your games so that you can get useful information from other people's perspectives.

Playtesting with people who play games is very different from playtesting with game designers as the gamers are the target audience and therefore the feedback gotten from them can be far more valuable as they would be the people who eventually play the final product.

Playtesting without the designer in the room opens room for more observation from the testers and is called blindtesting.


Person testing a game
Source: Armed with Science

Games Stories

Games Stories

This week's readings explore the idea of the importance behind a hero's journey in games, the importance of myths in game writing

The hero's journey is important to game writers and story tellers as it tells myths- which convey the values of society and teach us about ourselves and how we should behave. Myths guide our actions, for example people believe in the literal truth of the Bible, suicide bombers believe that they will go to paradise if they blow themselves up etc.

Myths give us a sense of personal identity, gives us a sense of communuty, lie way to moral values and helps us deal with the mystery of life and death. 

The reading which can be found here goes on to talk of how human tribes in the past would encourage their members to act for the good of the tribe and not for themselves through the telling of myths and stories- and ultimately these were the tribes that survived. Myths become models for how we should behave and influence the way we act.

This is important to games as they allow people to control their environment for a short period of time. As an example, a young boy got control over events and his own feelings thanks to the portrayal of myths in games, he grew less scared of others and his own feelings.

The hero's journey refers to a collection of common elements in thousands of myths that are categorised to create a narrative.

Important elements of the hero's journey include; establishing the world of the hero, the call to start the adventure, entering the mythological woods, trials, meeting the evil one, getting the hero's prize and returning that prize to the community.

The reading outlines steps on how to use the hero's journey to build a story:

1. Pick the premise of the story
2. Create the hero
3. Create the villain
4. Showcase the hero's normal world
5. Disrupt the hero's world
6. Enter the woods
7. Confront the villain
8. Acquire the prize
9. The hero returns

The second reading which can be found here states that common misconceptions of stories in game stories are that the story is just dialogue and doesn't matter in a game. 

Classical stories are important for game developers to know as they are simple and successful. There is a basic structure to creating a classic story, which is as follows:

• There is a protagonist/hero.
• There is an inciting incident that throws the world out of order.
• A gap in the life of the hero opens.
• The hero tries to close the gap through normal means but fails.
• The hero takes a risk to overcome their problems.
• Something new happens and the world is out of order again.
• The hero must take an even greater risk to overcome this,
• There is anothe reversal opening a third gap.
• The hero must take the greatest risk to close the final gap and get to the object of desire.

 A character is not dictated by what they do, but who they are and what they choose to do. Putting a character into a difficult or morally challenging situation pressures the character to bring out these choices which reflects and shapes the character. 

The rest of the character cast should be designed around the hero, and the world should be designed to oppose the hero at every turn.

 

Link from The Legend of Zelda series

Source: DeviantART 

Alpha

The Beginnings of an Alpha

This week, I continued to work on developing my game Eterna Hunt by adding more core mechanics into the game in order to develop an Alpha version.

I wouldn't call this a fully complete alpha as my terrain is lacking and I only have the basics set in place as of now, but it does show the basic elements of the game.

I will not be adding more to the terrain until all of my scripting is complete for now as it slows down my laptop considerably and would rather have the game elements work than have a pretty game that doesn't function.

This week I did quite a lot of scripting! 

I included a little spider enemy that looks at the player as they walk around the map, and walks towards the player and attacks when they get into a certain distance of the spider. When the player swings the axe at the spider it dies! When the spider attacks the player, it takes away some a heart from the health bar... or it should. I can't seem to get this feature to work at the moment but the scripting is there so it's only a matter of figuring out what went wrong.

Image of the spider enemy coming towards the player

Source: My Unity Project

I also added a health bar, along with hearts that can be collected from the map which increase the health by 1. This gives players a chance to recover health after an attack from the spider! The hearts are greyed out when the player loses them from damage, and when the player collects the heart it turns back to red. The hearts by default rotate, and when the player walks over them they make a sound and disappear.

Image of collectable heart

Source: My Unity

I also made a Game Over screen that activates when the player health reaches 0. As there is a bug with the code to get the health to reach 0, I can't actually test this feature at the moment until the code issue is resolved. The script to trigger the Game Over screen is there however, so in theory it should work once the spider is actually able to damage the player.

Game Over screen

Source: My Unity Project

Overall I'm happy with my development of my game so far and have been finding it easy to follow tutorials and use assets. However, my script seems to want to have a hiccup here and there, which has been difficult to try and resolve since I don't really know what I'm doing.

I am meeting my targets- I planned last week to add enemies and a health bar for this week which I did! I have a game with a main menu, collectable objects, health bar, enemies, weapons and a game over screen so I would consider it playable and in the stages of being an alpha.

Next up I'm going to look at implementing a hunger bar, fixing up my code errors, finding assets to use for my game and working on making several enemies and hearts and objects placed throughout the map.

Tech Tip: Blogger Template

Tech Tip: Blogger Template

As extra credit for this week, I decided I should update the theme and layout of my blog since I haven't updated or changed it at all since I first started running the blog and felt that it was getting a little boring.

I also noticed some glitches that would sometimes occur with the previous theme; the text would sometimes overlap and become unreadable so changing the theme would hopefully fix this.

Screenshot of my blog

Source: My blog

I picked this theme and layout as I liked the way the labels are laid out clearly on the right hand side so people can navigate the blog content easily. I also picked a different image for the background- I liked this image as it adds a pop of colour to the otherwise very monochrome look of the blog which I like.

Hopefully this change is for the better and you guys like it too!

Week 9 Progress

Review Progress

Looking Back

Looking back at my progress during the course of the entire semester I feel that I have learned a lot and progressed well with my blogs and tasks. I’m happy with my progress so far with my blogs and with my consistent commenting and with my Unity progress. I feel that my weekly routine works for completing my work; I do the majority over the weekend as I have the most time them and do bits throughout the week which has been working well for me. I have enjoyed doing the project assignments a lot as designing a game and making it come to life is very rewarding despite the hard work and I hope that my end game will be functional and similar to what I had planned. I haven’t really been doing the extra credits but I will look into doing some more over the last few weeks to get more marks to reach my desired grade.

Looking Forward 

For the second half of the semester I want to try and get ahead of my work as much as possible when I have the chance to so that if I ever need to skip some blog posts or tasks I wont lose out on points. I want to also start doing the extra credit options more often in the future to ensure I reach the points I want to get. I want to avoid leaving things until the very last minute to do and have them done ahead of time to ease my stress and give me some time to breathe. I also want to try and avoid the issues I’ve been having with Unity by taking extra time to do it in college (or when I get a new laptop my problems should be resolved). I'd love to try making my own models and assets in the future as I feel it gives me a lot of creative freedom and I can create things that are in my vision for my projects.

I found this picture while Googling motivational pictures of dogs and thought it would fit here. The ladder may symbolise something but the doggo inspires me moreso than the imagery of the ladder.

Dog looking at a ladder 

Source: US Marines site

Week 9 Reading and Writing

Reading and Writing

Looking Back

Looking back at all the readings I've done over the course, I feel that they've definitely helped expand my knowledge of topics I may have already been aware of or taught me something completely new. I feel that overall the readings have been going well however sometimes I feel like I can barely make a dent in some of the longer ones in the time allotted for reading content. The reading I felt that I enjoyed the most was this one I did about social psychology and Dunbar's number because it explores the psychology between bonds users make between each other in games through the use of Dunbar's number and also explored how game design can aid players in being social. I feel that the readings help me in my game creation and I definitely have discovered new reading strategies. I feel like I absorb more information when writing notes down as I'm doing the readings rather than reading all in one sitting and then writing afterwards.I'm relatively happy with my game project but I wish I had better resources to work on it such as a laptop that can actually run Unity smoothly and suitable assets for my game. I definitely consider my progress in creating my project to be the biggest achievement for me as I am completely inexperienced in making games and am proud of how far I've gotten with it so far.

Dunbar's Number visual

Source: Wikipedia

From my readings I like this image the most as it is a nice visual of the theory of Dunbar's number- this visual shows off the number of relationships that a person has in their life, the red 5 indicating intimate relationships, the 15 indicating best friends etc. 

Looking Forward

Looking forward I definitely want to improve in my reading as I feel that I tend to stop taking in information after a while, especially with the longer readings, and I tend to get overwhelmed with big blocks of text. I have been doing better with the readings ever since I started taking down notes as I read the content and hope that continuing to do this will improve the scope of the information I take in while reading. I also want to learn more from the readings that I could apply into my game design and help to improve it's gameplay and quality of life features based on the research from the readings. I'm looking forward to learning more about academic writing in the planned workshops in the near future as I feel that it'll help improve my writing overall and help me in my future modules when conducting research and writing.

Looking forward I want to keep improving my knowledge about the topic of games and game design as it will help me if I develop any more games in the future and it's also useful information to have when looking at games both critically and while I play them myself since I do tend to play games a lot in my spare time.

I am particularly looking forward to the following weeks as seeing my game develop is very exciting and rewarding and I'm very excited to see other people's games and get a chance to play them!

First Playable - The Struggles of Unity

First Playable

For this week's project development, our task was to create a playable version of our games with some of the core features included. 

I struggled a lot this week with my Unity- it's like it was trying to fight me! Even though I made my map 50% smaller and removed the trees, to say it was framey and unresponsive is an understatement. When playtesting my game, it took a few seconds for it to respond to and clicking or moving. Because of this I didn't get to implement as much as I would have liked to this week, but still made some progress despite the struggles.

 

Eterna Hunt main menu screen

Source: My Unity project 

In my Unity free tutorials this week I created a main menu for my game, which drops the player into the world when the "Play" button is clicked. I still need to implement the options button features which I will do in the near future. This took me a little while to implement and to get working but I'm really happy with how it looks and works!

 

View of axe and gem

Source: My Unity project 

I added in a first person player camera, and decided to give the player an axe when starting the game. The axe includes C# code which allows it to swing and make a sound when the player left clicks, and it follows the player as they move. This is an important step for this playable as weapons play a big part in the survival aspect of my game.

I also added a collectable object to the game that makes a sound and disappears when the player walks over the object. The gem is just a placeholder for now until I find suitable assets to use in its place. I want to refine this more and add text to the object when hovered over, but my laptop was struggling so much that I had to leave it for now.

I used my knowledge from the Jimmy Vegas tutorials to implement these (I also had a look back as a refresher) as I find his tutorials are very easy to follow and he's also using the same version of Unity as me so it doesn't complicate things.

 

First person view 

Source: My Unity Project 

First person view of my game- I have to play around with adjusting the axe postion as I think it currently takes over the screen a little bit. I'm aware that the terrain is very barren at the minute, this is to preserve my laptop and be able to implement mechanics and features without as much lag a beefy terrain would bring.

While I do feel like I'm making decent progress I'm frustrated that I'm not really able to do more due to Unity being so slow. I have to try to find ways to combat this- perhaps I'll have to work from the college Macs instead of my laptop to get further into my development.

I'm most likely gonna have to cut out a ton of features I had originally planned to include for a more realistic project with the time I have to develop it, which is sad, but I'd rather have a functional game than one that's half broken. 

Next I'm going to hopefully implement some enemies and a health bar!

.

Unity Free Tutorials

Unity Free Tutorials

For this week's Unity tutorials, we were tasked with finding 2-4 of our own tutorials to follow. I really liked doing this- as it gave me a chance to develop something for my game project.

This week I looked at some tutorials by Jimmy Vegas for creating a main menu, along with functioning buttons including a play button that loads the player into a scene of choice.

I thought I would stick to Jimmy Vegas tutorials this week as he is using the same version of Unity as I am, and his tutorials are clear and easy to follow (at least to me).

These are the two tutorials I followed.

I started off with creating a new scene in my project for the main menu. Using the UI GameObject, I created text which reads the title of my game, "Eterna Hunt". I then added a side bar and bottom bar and anchored them to the menu, and made them semi-transparent so that you could see the scene behind it which I made later. Using the button option, I created three buttons, one with "Play", "Options" and "Quit Game". 

This is where the tutorial got a bit confusing- Jimmy went on a bit of a tangent about the importance of text and button colour as some colours make a glitch where the button functionality doesn't work- so I just followed his advice and din't make my button black. I made sure to change the colours for when the button is hovered over and clicked to help distinguish it. 

I then went on to create a mini scene reminiscent of my main world- I built a terrain behind the main menu and made some mountains and painted textures and trees, and also moved the main camera to look down on the scene so that you wouldn't see any clipping.

Main menu demonstrating button hovering change

Source: My Unity project

The next step of this tutorial was to add functionality to the buttons using C#. 

As I find C# very confusing to follow and understand, I downloaded the script from Jimmy Vegas' website and applied it to my buttons, tweaking the code to remove buttons I didn't feel were necessary to include in my game which Jimmy did in his game, and to change the linked scene number to ensure the right scene would be opened when the play button is pressed.

And.., it worked! For once. 

What happens after you press the play button

Source: My Unity Project

I removed the trees from my world to reduce lag- I'm going to make the map smaller when I work on developing my game further during the weekend before I add them back.

I was so happy and satisfied seeing my world pop up when the play button is pressed, since C# tends to want to fight me and not work. Pasting the code provided by the tutorial definitely helped me in this regard and it's safe to say I'll be doing it for every script I have to make from now on.

The options and quit game button aren't functional yet, but I'll tackle it when I develop my game more during the weekend.

I'm looking forward to developing my game more, as seeing things come together is really satisfying for me!

Tech Tip Cheezburger

Tech Tip Cheezeburger

Upon realising that memes were a part of of the tech tips, I decided to make one on Cheezburger since 1. I need to catch up with some points and 2. cats are the best.

I saw a beautiful image of a cat peeking around a wall and it reminded me of myself constantly lurking around the kitchen corners whenever I put on a pot of pasta, so I put a similar caption on to the picture.

I made this using Cheezburger!

Though a bit outdated of a meme format, I did enjoy looking at all the cat pictures on the site and it has a certain charm to it.

Game Fun

Game Fun

"Fun" in games is a very subjective term and it's dictionary definition isn't helpful in understanding what makes a game fun. Though, in recent years game developers have a much better idea of what fun in games is all about.

Looking back at our evolutionary history shows our basic drives for survival, reproduction, social interaction in family and communities. Looking back in time is also beneficial as technology now has made a particularly potent play experience that is both new and old in it's origins.

Games are specialised, and play is deep rooted into our history and we can see it in other species. Basic things animals do such as play fighting, tumbling etc. is a way for them to practice survival skills. Taking this into account, these games/play are all about reproduction and survival and social rules and behaviours.

Playing is common in childhood, and technology and video games have promoted interest in adulthood, and our culture also promotes us to keep learning in life. These observations give path to a theory to explain why people get pleasure from leisure activities that honed their ancestor's survival skills. 

You can read the article here!

Another reading discusses player types and measure of fun in a MUD.

When people examined and evaluated a MUD (Multi-user Dungeon) and what aspects of them players enjoyed the most, the four things the majority of people enjoy when playing are:

Achievement within the game context, exploration of the game, socialising with others and imposition upon others.

We can divide these categories into four player types; achievers, explorers, socialists and killers. Players tend to drift between these

play types depending on their moods, but most players tend to have a primary play style.

Interest graph

Source: mud.co.uk

The axes in this graph represent the interest of a player in a MUD. Certain player types fall into different places on the graph, for example explorers are interested in interacting with the world, so they fall on the top right of the graph.