Game Fun

Reading Week 7

The first article is Natural Funativity.

This article is all about how it is in our genes to play games. The author talks about how tens of thousands of years ago people would play games to improve their survival skills and in a way that is what we still do to this day. He used the example of a hunter coming home after a successful hunt he has three options go back out to try get more food even though its dangerous, just rest until he starts to run out of food but risk being a bit rusty when he goes out hunting again or in the safety of camp he can practise his survival skills by throwing a rock at a balancing piece of wood. The author talks about to this day we are still affected by what our ancestors done.

The second article is Players who suit MUD's (MMO's).

This article talks about the 4 different reasons people enjoyed a popular MMO years ago and how it can be seen to categorise all gamers effectively. The four different types are Achievers, Explorers, Socialisers and Killers. It talks about how many players will be a bit of all but they mainly are one and do the others to progress there main play style or just based off there mood that day. The article states games can easily die if there is too much or similarly too little of a type as it will hinder other peoples fun. 

(This is a picture of the GTA Online logo as I feel like this is a good representation of the second article, Image taken from WikiMedia)

Game Decisions

Reading Week 6

This week for our reading we read an article about cosy games. The article talks about how to make a cosy game, why people enjoy them and some common misconceptions about what makes a game cosy.

To make a cosy game you need to make it so there are no high priority tasks such as eating to survive or having shelter. This makes a player done something, once this happens a game is no longer. A cosy game has no risks or danger in it, instead of trying to survive you instead try to master a skill, connect with people or just simply explore. 

People enjoy cosy games as they are completely different than most games you'll play where there are set tasks and you are usually at some sort of risk.

Many people think to have a cosy game you just need to make it cute or to have a feeling of safety but this isn't true there are many needs for a cosy game to make it successful. One example of a common misconception people have about cosy games the article talks about is that the whole game needs to be cosy and safe but this isn't true, they make the example that if you have a little cosy reading nook with a window and cold rain is hitting the window because you are safe and the rain is outside the cosy space it actually enhances the feeling of cosiness.

Another article I looked at was Cosy Games Make Winter More Bearable, This article talks about how various aspects of cosy games can make or break them such as the minimalism of it or the use of notifications.

A second article I found interesting was I Love Astroneer For Its Optimism, this article explains how this survival game is actually cosy despite literally suffocating to death at times.

The final article I found interesting was Animal Crossing Helps Me Cope On A Day Like This, this article is wrote by someone who had a hard upbringing as they felt like an outsider in this article they talk about how animal crossing helped them both as a kid and also as an adult to appreciate life and everything around them.

(This is an image from Flickr of Animal Crossing)

 

Game Design Document

Game Design Document 

I think it was a lot easier to create the Game Design Document this week as t really focuses you on each section and helps you stay more on track. There was a lot of sections that I didn't really know what to write about. I liked Dundoc and feel it will be easy to update as we go on and get more info about our project.

This is the link to my Dundoc.   

Spyro is a game I feel relates to my idea.

This image is taken from WikiMedia

Unity Tutorial 05

Unity Tutorial 5

This week in unity we done a good bit. I think that it was really interesting as we used Animation for the first time which we will obviously need a lot for our games and using it was actually easier than I thought it would be, for more advanced animation it will obviously be harder to make them run smoothly ect. but as a starting point it was fairly easy.

I liked creating the text and extra cursor for when you hover over the gem as I think this will give us a lot of originality, one example of how we could use this is creating different cursors for different weapons, this will create different feel for different weapons and it will also just look cooler.

The text will be really useful as well as this will be the main way to communicate with different people and objects. So far we have a good bit of information to use for our game I feel like if I sat down for a good while and messed around with it I could create a few different interact able objects.(probably just different gems as of now) 

One thing which I don't know what I am doing wrong is everything I press play and go into the game the noise that happens when you collect the gem plays even though I have it set so none of the sound options play on awake.

Overall I am enjoying Unity and find it fun to mess around with.

(This is a screenshot from in my Unity World to show the Axe, Gem and Action Text.) 

Game GDD

Reading Week 5

One article I read was Only a Game Roger Caillois Patterns of Play. In this article the author talks about how Roger Caillois broke games and he said there are 4 patterns of play. Competitive, Chance, Simulation or Vertigo, I think this is an interesting concept and cool to think about different games and see where they fit in.

A second article I read was called Conversation, this article talks about how you should go about having conversations with NPCs. I liked this as it got me thinking what kind of conversations I'd like to have in my game, I think as it is an adventure game I will like for the NPCs to give out helpful information so it will be heavily scripted.

The final article I read was The In-Game economics of Ultima Online, I liked the article, it breaks down the basic concept of the game but one bit that made me think was,

 Game designers are therefore frequently confronted with the following dilemma:

1. All elements of the game need to be fun.
2. Much of the real world is not fun.
3. Elements which are unrealistic are often counterintuitive.
4. Counterintuitive rules are difficult to learn and not fun, at least at first

This is good to keep in mind when designing my own game.

For the main reading I think there was a lot of useful information on good design consideration, but I feel like there is also a good amount of information that isn't really transferable from board game to computer game such as include spare parts. Nevertheless I actually think having to root around a lot of information helps you retain the good information more. I will definitely be looking back on this when designing my game as there are a lot of useful tips such as using different colours and shapes to help people who are colour blind differentiate between things easier. 

Image taken from Pixabay, showing some board game pieces

Game Vision Statement

Game Vision Statement

Game Genre

The genre will be Adventure. It will be an open world (not too big as I want it to be designed good enough that taking on too much could be stupid) that you explore looking for treasure map pieces in order to find hidden treasure. 

Game play

I want the traversal to be fun as I feel like adventure games that can do this while having a good story always turn out to be great e.g Spiderman, GTA, Red Dead Redemption and Skyrim. Like most of these games the travelling wont just be travelling as there will be enemies to fight and cool areas to explore.

Resources Required

The main resource which will be required is time as the project is just for college and wont be commercial. I'll need a lot of time to complete my project as I'll have to look up a lot of things to make the game I want.

Link to Resource

This is a link to an article I read which talks about pressure plates and how when you walk on it you can have various things to happen such as playing sounds, opening doors and a few more things this will definitely be useful for game development

(This is an image i found on WikiMedia and I really like how this looks both the on screen HUD and the look of it this would make for a really good map in my opinion and will definitely keep it in mind during my game development, This is from the game Armello which was developed by League of Geeks and made with Unity)

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Unity Tutorial 3

Unity Tutorial 3

In this weeks tutorial we learned how to make a functioning clock. We used game objects to make it which I think is really useful as we will be able to use stuff like this in our game.

Joining objects together will help us make a lot of objects in our games from houses, bridges and structures. I think a good tutorial would be how to make textures as this could really give us a lot of individuality in how we design certain aspects.

I struggled at first rotating the hour marks as I thought I was supposed to make all the hour marks inside the face but once I realised what I was supposed to do I thought the rest was fairly easy. 

I was working on this lab in college and was 3/4s of the way through it but I couldn't really progress too much when I got home as for some reason it wouldn't let me do the coding and I couldn't download Visual Studio.

So far I am really enjoying playing with Unity and think this module will be really fun.

(This is the screen shot I took from Unity of my clock)