Week 3, Semester 2.

Monday
We recieved our Game Play Design assignment, which looks pretty exciting. We are tasked to produce a game idea and central theme, as well as write 3 character descriptions, create a virtual environment, produce thumbnails and sketches etc.

I have decided to draw inspiration from the cultures and lifestyles from the people in Papua New Guinea.

Tuesday
We recieved our next assignment, a text based interactive story which I completed during the lesson and continued to work on throughout the week. We were also tasked with another assignment, building a short game with the code we learnt during class. I have decided to build a game which involves dodging fireballs falling from the sky, as you play a highly fire intolerable scare scrow.

Thursday
Similar to last week, I worked on my visual design assignment as well as our policy document, work booklets and other documents for OH&S. We also practiced panning audio, as well as looking at the audio assignment which involves putting audio to a Star Wars animation clip.

Game Play Design

Okay, so here are my ideas, they're pretty rough, so don't be too harsh.

Concept 1.
A desert waste land influenced by the poverty and depression current across many of the middle eastern regions today. I want the cultures, religions and lifestyles to have a major influence on this game concept, things like their gigantic divide in the lower and upper class societies and the struggles between the two.

Concept 2.
An industrial world covered in things like train tracks, plants, buildings, factories, similiar to star wars except featured more towards our current period. I want this world to be in a state of conflict between its natural environment, which will be swamping and strangling the planet in retaliation to mankinds industrial expansion.

Week 2, Semester 2.

Monday
Today we began exploring a little more of Unity's capabilities, as well as working on our home work task, creating a small first person shooter level/environment. Moving on from Unity, we started using several tools in 3DS Max to control foot step animation from bipeds (human skeleton).

Tuesday
Naturally we got stuck into C#, learning how to program calculations. Later on in the lesson we switched to Unity, focusing more on applying the scrips we wrote in C# to assets in Unity, such as creating cubes, moving, timer events etc. We were given a homework task, which involved programing a bucked to move left and write whilst catching eggs that fell from the sky.... Practical.

Thursday
Occupation health & safety! Policy documents etc... For the first part of the day anyway, which was actually pretty interesting. At the end of the class we were taught how to pan audio in adobe soundbooth. Later on in the afternoon we had our visual design class which we spent working on our assignments and in the library looking for books.

Week 1, Semester 2.

Week 1

Monday

The very beginning of semester, another 4 months of study... awesome. I had two classes this day, Game Design and 3D Design, basically a four hour introduction to the semester and what we will cover with these two subjects. We received our first home work task, exciting really, as well as ridiculously easy. 

Tuesday

The gong strikes as the second day of semester arrives, with a brutal six hour introduction to our double programming class. We ran though some basic code using the language C#, nothing all that difficult. We spent about.... three hours writing code in Microsoft Visual Studio, and what we achieved was absolutely phenomenal. We managed to program the computer to open up the command prompt window with the word "Hello!"... we then spent the next couple of hours writing in lines of code, programming the computer to respond with different variations of hello, enter your name, your name is. Not to worry, I managed to scam a fellow class mate by programming the computer to open up the command prompt window and ask its user for their credentials.  My lecturer wasn't so easily fooled. 

We then moved on to a program called Unity, which involved creating and duplicating a cube, fiddling with the softwares physics engine as well as programming a cube to move left right forwards and backwards. 

Thursday

Due to horrific unforeseen circumstances I was unable to attend class this morning, and our Visual Design teacher, for completely legitimate reasons I'm sure was unable to run his class this afternoon, so today was as bit of a bummer.


Homework Task

Game Design Task

Week 1

1.       With the limitations of 8 and 16-bit systems in the 1980’s, my game would be very basic and simple in terms of its visual appearance as well as its mechanics and design. Something as simple as pac man or tetris, simple yet effective, interesting, competitive and fun.

2.       Pac-man has a very simple design. The game is shot through a fixed camera at a bird’s eye view as the player observes the game. The game objectives are extremely simple,  and the player is limited in terms of freedom and variety to gameplay.

Sonic took a gigantic leap in its complexity, visual appearance and level design. Longer, more interesting environments where implemented as technology improved, allowing a huge amount of flexibility and creativity in contrast to games of the 1980’s like pac-man. In contrast with Pac-Man, sonic is very fast paced, visually impressive and far more complex.

World of Warcraft was a pioneer of the MMORPG genre of video games. With technology improving at a ridiculously fast rate, World of Warcraft players engage in a gigantic virtual environment, simulating a fantasy world where the player can explore and roam regions upon regions. The levels are all integrated as one enormous world, riddled with countless dungeons which teleport the player to a new virtual environment. World of Warcraft is very  complicated in contrast with Sonic and Pac-Man, with a range of objectives, game modes, virtual environments, quests and interaction with artificial intelligence and other players across the globe. This game is far more sociable then Pac-man and Sonic, as players have to interact, communicate and work as teams to progress through particular parts of the game.

3.       Genre affects a games levels and environments in many different ways. Each genre has a unique way of expressing and capturing what the player will see and how they will experience it. For example, a real time strategy game is usually seen through a camera fixed above the game world, looking down upon the world as an observer or dictator. The player will be able to scan around terrain, explore un-covered areas. These games a typically very open, large and influenced by exploration. Age of empires is a classic example of real time strategy games.

Side scrolling games are another very unique genre, shot through a camera observing the game from the horizon. These games are very linear, following a series of plat forms, as well as being faced paced. Super meat boy is a perfect example of a side scrolling.

First person shooters are another very distinct genre, captured through the eyes of the character. First person shooters are very personal as the player is put into the shoes of the character they possess, exploring the levels as they would in reality. These games generally have a simple story line, packed with faced paced highly intense action. Call of Duty is a perfect example of a first person shooter.