Reading and Writing
This week we are reviewing our readings and writing from the last 7 weeks and talking about what we have learned and what we want to learn.
My thoughts on the readings
I feel like a lot of the readings have been interesting but I don't think they were heaped full of useful information. All of the readings were about vastly different things, some being about board games and some being about players dynamics, but most of them felt that they weren't that transferable to our own stuff. With stuff like Web Development you learn how to do the basics first and then you start looking at reasons why you should do things and why it works. I feel like Multimedia could do a similar thing like in the first semester our readings could be more based on what we literally need to know to make a game maybe it was expected we would go and search for this stuff ourselves. I think readings about how and why coding works, how to create textures and designs in Photoshop that you can use in Unity would have been more useful and practical for our first semester of Multimedia so that we can actually have some good information behind us that we know is needed because although we are college student and we should be able to look up our own research a lot of the time it is very overbearing and daunting especially with the workload from all the modules.
My thought on what we learned
The readings thought me that you have to think a lot about every aspect of your game from colours and icons to make sure thing is accessible for everyone. For instance a person who is slightly colour blind might have a hard time differentiating between red and orange so you need to make vastly different things stand out from each other using say red and blue but someone who is completely colour blind will not even be able to tell the difference of these so you should also have an icon so that players don't need to see the colour to be able to differentiate objects. Another one of our readings talked about how players van be broke into 4 main categories, Achievers, Diggers, Socalisers and Killers. The article talks about how in a game a player will mainly be one of 4 play styles, they might dabble in the other ones but it is usually just to progress there original play style. I liked this reading most as i felt like it was most useful to understand as I think it is easier to make a fun game for people if you know what people like so by understanding what people like you can try facilitate as many people as possible. We also had a really useful reading in one of the earlier weeks about MDA, this is Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics these are the three main tings you should consider when designing a game, Mechanics are what you can and can't do i.e jump but you can't double jump, Dynamics are how the mechanics work and cooperate and Aesthetics is the feeling it evokes in people.
What I'd Like to Learn
I'd like to learn more about the coding and animation part of game design as I feel this is the real bread and butter of making a game, your game will be very boring if there is no code put into it and without animation any NPC's you have may as well just be an inanimate object.
( This is probably my favourite image I have used as I feel like Super Mario is definitely one of the more recognisable games and it has a lot you can learn from. This image is Devant Art)