After weeks of working in the coding missions and making games following tutorials I started feeling more confident in my understanding of code and having a general idea of what I was typing and what some of the code was doing. After arriving at the mission check point we had to try to debug an app that had an end goal of making text pop up saying "congrats" and having the sparks emit from the middle of the screen. I think that these tools can help in developing my own games since it reinforced the ideas from the tutorials by putting the script into the right place to have the sparks come on screen and have text pop on the players screen and have different text when needed. The harder part of the mission checkpoint was making like a kind of your own game that involved a counting system and making it your own thing. It was pretty important because counting in a game can be used in many situations like picking up money and having the values pop up in the corner so I think overall the missions were a very important part in making sure the viewer understands the concepts of the videos they just watched.
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I have now finally finished the second course in the Unity Junior program and I am going to talk about my experience with it. I think that the course was a very good one going slowly through the subjects in each video really helping the viewer learn what each thing does and how it would be practical in actual use when making their own game. We learned new things like how to make working buttons and new coding terms like "Bool" when making something. I think easily the biggest downside to this course was how long all the videos were and how we had to cram it into such a short time. I felt more rushed than I wanted to which made me feel like I wasn't learning as much or as well as I could have been but that's not the courses fault. Overall I feel like this course is a necessity for anyone who is new to coding and wants to get into it they just need to make sure they have enough time for it.
This was the classes first "solo" coding assignment which were we supposed to use our maze games from earlier this year and add working enemies as well as an entire health system where you can die and have a game over screen as well as healing and taking damage. It sounded like a fun project, we would soon realize how rough this really is. The problem with the assignment was that no one really learned anything from the prior linked in course since when we were doing the linked in no one knew what anything he was saying and we just copied down what he was writing so when we didn't have something like a tutorial we were just lost. I ended up having working enemies by the end of the project since I had lots of tutorials online to fall back on and some good class mates to help me. The problem was that no one was really learning anything so now we are working on a more new friendly coding course from unity.
While making the GDD for my game “Vendetta” I had to think about how to make a game that would be entertaining, fit in a fantasy environment and not be super complicated so that I could actually make it. I knew I wanted my game to be an open world experience with a third person camera so the player can see surrounding enemies and objects, so I made sure in the unity asset store there was a free third person camera asset. After I figured that out I knew I wanted to have my game be about revenge towards the king so I made some concept art and mood boards that are seen in my GDD so the reader can know what type of fantasy I am going for. When designing my HUD for the game I knew it would need a few different things like stamina and health bars since those are crucial things to know in a game. The layout for the GDD was sectioned out so the reader would know exactly what they were reading about with pictures in the GDD as well so they could get a good idea on what things would look like and the style I am going for.
For this blog post I want to talk about the number one idea that I thought of. For this game I thought that a game with a fugitive man during the medieval time making a living off of quest hunting or slaying monster would be a nice change. You would need to keep a low profile in towns to not alert the guards of your presence so you could hunt for food and live in the wilderness as well if you needed to. It would be a typical RPG game where you level up get better armor as time progresses enemy type would change and get more challenging with different attack patterns. Since you're already a fugitive you cab steal from shops and shop at places like a black market for rare loot. Overall it would be a open world stealth(ish) game where you play in the medieval time.As a class we have just dove into the unity engine so I am talking about my experience with the basics so far. We have just gone over the basics and it reminds me a lot of 3DS max the way its laid out and some of the key binds in it like W being move tool E being rotate and R being to scale. Its kind of similar with the lay out like viewport and the hierarchy tab. I learned how to use the game tab to experiment with the changes you make as you make them. An interesting feature I learned about was the way you can make a flashlight by attaching it into the player section in the hierarchy so the light travels with you. Another feature is using the hierarchy tab to combine elements to make them all together so when you move them it all moves at once. Overall working in the Unity engine has been really fun and I'm looking forward to seeing what else I can do and what I can make.
Sub Terra is a board game in which you and a group of cavers try to escape a cave filled with horrors and hazards. Each turn has different phases one where players can choose actions to take, what a horror does and what hazard will they have to avoid and what are the consequences of those actions. It is pretty fast paced once you get the hang of it and ends up being pretty fun.
Sub Terra fits all eight mechanic categories very well, its easy to see which one goes where. For time there is a couple of examples with how its used, firstly the game progresses through tiles that get flipped as the game goes on they are all randomly stacked so once you draw the exit to the cave tile you can leave whenever. The second example of time here is the "out of time" card which is drawn as the last hazard card meaning if you haven't escaped yet by that point you instantly lose. Chance is a very large role in this game, every action you take is decided with a dice roll. If the roll is over four you get the positive outcome if its under four you get the negative one. For example players have a chance at risking a health point to get a third action point but if they roll under a four they lose a health and don't get anything. Skill in Sub Terra comes with time and knowing what the best move would be, say for example you have the leader as one of your cavers, since her passive ability is adding plus one on every role it would be smarter to exert yourself more since you have a better chance at a good outcome which helps your team. Space is confined as hexes on the board with ones flipped as the only ones you can move onto which confines you to the boundaries. There are a lot of procedures and actions in Sub Terra, one of many being the discover and move action where someone discovers another space and has to move onto it. Another example could be the squeeze function where if you need to get through a small crack you can spend two action points on getting through it. There is also a lot of rules in Sub Terra for example the game is split up into four phases all with different rule sets. in the action phase the rules say all players use there action points going in a clockwise circle. For the horror phases the horror(s) move a tile closer to the nearest player. In the hazard phase a hazard is drawn forcing different interactions to happen depending on which card had been drawn and what tiles are out. Lastly the end phase resets the cycle. So as you can see each phase has its own set of rules and unique things to it. Flow in Dark Souls 3 Flow is a term used when doing almost anything, it is a state of being where you lose track of time while doing a task. It is essential to reach this state while playing games because it can make you more focused and engaged in a topic that will make you perform better. Dark souls is a fun game for me because of the challenge it presents while not being so difficult that it feels impossible to beat, after fighting a boss a few times you get a feel for their attack patterns but they can change in each fight meaning it won’t be a copy-paste fight and you need to stay on your toes during it, many bosses can one-shot you or take half your health bar with one move meaning any small mishaps can cause you to die and lose the fight. Having that level of challenge while still having victory achievable is peak gameplay in my opinion. In dark souls, I found myself in the state of flow for about 90% of my play-through. The environments of the game had me very immersed in the world with only one area being annoying. The enemies in between bosses were well handled with sometimes a group of easier enemies being able to overwhelm you and causing you to die. Checkpoints were well put into the game with short cuts making it easier to traverse levels so you can get back to the boss after deaths. The interactions between characters in Dark Souls 3 are few and far between, with only a few characters having optional dialogue and quest that can change the way certain boss fights turn out. For example, Siegward of Catarina has an optional quest where you learn more about him and help him through various tasks, after you complete all of his tasks he fights Yhorm the giant with you which you learn was a friend of his before he was corrupted by cinder adding more depth into the world making a player more immersed. He is found in many odd locations, and with no tracker in-game it could be very easy to go the entire game without interacting with any other NPCs. My first event in the flow chart is Iudex Gundyr, the first boss in the game and a tutorial like a boss but don’t be mistaken because he was not an easy boss, he starts off as a still statue and when you pull the sword from him the fight begins, he has slow but deadly moves with a fast kick in his move set to switch it up and keep the player prepared, after he gets to 50% health he becomes corrupted and gets an entirely new move set making the fight more difficult but he has a high weakness to fire, that is a perfect example of what I said earlier about bosses being challenging with amazing move sets but also a doable fight, this fight launches the player right into the flow state by being a life or death fight that feels like David vs goliath going against this giant wielding an axe and a player needs to time rolls and attacks well while also managing stamina. The second part in my flow chart was an area of the game called “Farron Keep” this part of the game did not have me in the flow state and had me more in the frustrating section, the reason being the entire ground is a poison which has a slowing effect on you and making it so you can’t roll at all, with enemies scattered all over the area and you cant run or roll in combat many deaths happened which shouldn’t have. The area has a complicated fire puzzle thing you need to do to get to the boss fight which is quite tedious without any markers or a map to lead you there. For my third item on the list “The Abbys Watchers,” this is an amazing boss fight that had me straight into the flow zone as soon as I started the fight. The amazing lore behind the fight with an even better soundtrack to accompany the fight makes it easily one of the best in the game. As you enter the room you see them slaying one another and the last one faces you as you fight one another, then during the fight, others come back to life and kill one another a truly unexpected turn in an already adrenaline-pumping battle. He is one of the most mobile bosses in the game having leaps and fast attacks that require precise rolling out of and slim opportunities for attacking. After you slay them a cut scene happens where you see him fall and absorb all of the cinder around him making him an amped-up version of the boss you had just fought, all of his attacks are now faster with a blazing trail of fire following each attack making the window for healing and attacking even slimmer than they already were. The fight had my heart racing the entire time and after beating them I felt a legitimate sense of victory and it made me play more and more. The fourth item in the list is without a doubt the worst and most boring fight in the game, it poses little threat and is very easy to kill. A ton of enemies spawn going down with one hit until you find the real one and wack on it till it dies. Not a very good boss and it had me happy for the fight to be over with. My fifth item on my list is the boss “Pontiff Sulyvahn” this boss was extraordinarily difficult. With his absolute huge health bar insanely fast attacks and he leaves you with zero time to heal. You can beat him the typical way of rolling away and hitting him but if you manage to land a parry on one of his attacks it rewards you with absolute massive damage. This boss took me so many tries that when I finally beat him I was shaking with the amount of adrenaline pumping through me. My sixth event on my flow chart was “Aldrich The Devourer of Gods” another boss that is instantly into the flow state, with an amazing soundtrack in the fight with absolutely amazing visuals for the boss and his attacks. He has like most bosses two phases with the second being a lot harder, one of his attacks he shoots his bow into the sky and as an arrow rain falls from the sky the player is forced to dodge in these tight spaces while he is also shooting a massive beam that can almost one-shot most builds it takes a lot of precise movement to avoid and has very very small windows for healing and attacks if you are too close while he attacks its very hard to have enough stamina on most builds to get out easily. The seventh event is the boss named “The Dancer” this boss is one of the most beautiful animated bosses in the entire game, her moves are so silky smooth with continuous attacks that are insanely hard to dodge and if you get caught out you will most likely die in one of her many combos forcing the player to be hyper-focused on the fight and almost NEEDING to be in the state of flow to properly fight and avoid all of her attacks. My eighth part of the flow chart was “Lotheric castle” one of the harder areas in the game for the enemy variety with hordes of mobs and enemies who will shoot fire at you making you take extra damage and secrets bosses in the area that will absolutely destroy someone who wasn’t expecting it. This area definitely requires hyper-focus. My ninth part is “Dragonslayer Armour” an absolutely tanky and one-shotting boss with multiple phases. This boss is another that absolutely needs to be in the flow state to play well, if you don’t play this fight with near perfection you will be one-shot by a leaping attack from across the bridge. Halfway through the fight dragons awaken and shoot projectile attacks at you which are hard to see until they get near you so whilst avoiding and hitting Dragonslayer Armour you also need to watch out for these new projectiles as well. For my final part of the flow chart, I used the “Elder Lothirc Prince” which for me was by far the hardest boss that I still enjoyed. This fight took me so many tries and has such little error for margin and almost no time to heal. The boss is a pair of brothers who are both crippled so instead of running at you they will teleport behind you and attack or teleport twice and then attack you, the amount of focus you need to beat this boss is insane. The moveset that their elder brother posses is one of the most annoying but had me so engaged in the fight that I couldn’t stop until I had beaten it. Once you kill the older brother the younger one finally comes down to the fight resurrects him back to full health and the fight is only won once you kill the younger brother who rides on the other back so it’s really hard to hit him. The only real chance you get to damage him is when you get the older brother down and the younger one heals him, but at the end, he does an AOE attack so you cant overextend at all and you have to know when to get out, the fight is so amazingly done and was my favorite in the game. The amount of adrenaline pumping through me when I finally beat it was worth the desk slams and screams I had done. In conclusion, 90% of Dark Souls 3 is easily in the flow state and is a true gem game. In unit one of GAD we talked on a few subjects such as, career paths and the skills needed to get a job in the industry, game history and, industry ethics and the importance of ratings system I will be talking about what I have learned and what surprised me and so on. First we learned about career paths. The paths we learned about were Game Designer, Visual Artist, Audio Engineering/composer, Software Developer/Programmer, Writer/Interpreter, game tester and Technical support. Each different path is crucial to the development of a game being wildly different from one another yet they all string together perfectly to make games. Second of all talking about job applications for specific job positions which was very different than what we have done in the past. We were using a web site that is really used to find jobs and learn how to search for positions and see things like requirements for the positions needed soft and hard skills for the part and the wages for the job. The third part of the unit was game history learning about the way games started from ancient times to modern day video games. We did a project on this which we had to choose a game and connect through mechanics and from ancient to board games to video games how they connect to one another. You can see an example of mine below and how the games relate to one another.
When making my first POL (proof of learning) I thought it would be a lot harder than it actually was. I had very clear and well written instructions which I was thankful for, going from units A-E I will talk about each one. Unit A was our first one which we were tasked to update a resume and talk about the importance of criticism. For unit B it was focused more on modeling which we had started on at the beginning of the year, this was very useful because t had helped me remember old tricks that I had forgotten about in modeling. The simulation was extra credit when we first went through the unit so I went back and learned how to use the cloth modifier to make a nice looking table cloth, this was a nice tool to learn and I'm happy I went back to redo it. For unit C we had to talk about textures and mapping which was my favorite unit so far, for example on the barrel scene I felt very accomplished seeing my work and how it changed the scene completely. The next thing we had to talk about was lighting. Going back into lighting now knowing more about it I felt like I could do a lot better on the assignments and want to learn to use better lighting this summer. Unit D was the most recent one so not much happened with remembering how to do old tricks and I felt pretty good about my turntable so not much to say there. Overall making a proof of learning was good fun and helped me remember some tricks I should know.
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AuthorMy name is Jared Lowe and i'm a student at Durham School if the Arts in the game design concentration. Categories
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