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!