10th September 2019
-Understanding supported features of Unity and Game Engines
Cinemachine
This is a 1st person shooter to a 3rd person action adventure. With Cinemachine you can revolutionize you in game cameras.They also put industry-leading behaviors in everyone’s hands. Cinemachine is a suite of tools for dynamic,smart,code less cameras that let the best shots emerge based on scene composition and interaction, allowing you to tune,iterate experiment and create camera behaviors in real time.
For games, Cinemachine speeds up game development. From first-person shooter to follow cam , from 2D to 3D , from real-time play to cut scene.
Cinemachine for 2D
It supports a number of 2D- specific features, including orthographic rendering and 2D features. This includes orthographic rendering and 2D framing. This is where you can compose,track and follow objects
For film and video
Cinemachine knows how you want your shots and dynamically adjusts,even if the performances change. Cinemachine is a visual DP , which knows your aim and focus .
Cinemachine and Timeline
Cinemachine was built make it easier for everyone to add dynamic and beautiful shots to their projects. This also works for timeline, both for games and film.
My first Attempt
17th September 2019
Today i started to use different types of lights: directional and spot lights. This improved my map a lot as it created more of a sunset vibe to it. This helped my skills on unity as i am able to do a lot more things and a lot more improvements.
18th September 2019 draft
Today, I began to add meshes to the object in unity. This gave my map a darker colour giving me ideas on where I am going to take it. I also added scenes into my map, which I had a struggle with as it would work seem to work every time I did it.
24th September 2019
Today I improved my map by adding some buildings in the background and re-making the pathway to the end. I also learned how to use animation, which I used for my main camera giving an overview of my world so far. Moreover, I also learned how to create prefabs to my game by doing this I got more understanding on how unity worked with animation.
25th September 2019
Today I experimented with more animations by adding them to different objects. I use some animation on the directional light, making the sky darker. I also used animation with some blocks in the map creating the objects to move left and right. Lastly, I decided to add some animation to the point light to try and create the idea of an alarm light.
9th September 2019
what is IDE?
Integrated Development Environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. Examples of this is: Visual studio(from Microsoft), Netbeans(java), Xcode(developed by Apple), cloud9(developed by Amazon), eclipse and intellij Idea(java)
IDE features:
Syntax highlighting– it can can show both the structures, the language keywords and the syntax errors with visually distinct colours and font effect.
Version control– An IDEs is expected to provide integrated version control , in order to interact with source repositories.
Refactoring-advanced IDEs provide support for automated refactoring.
Debugging– IDEs are also used fro debugging,using an integrated debugger, with support for setting breakpoints in the editor, visual rendering of steps.
What is the benefit?
The overall goal and main benefit of an integrated development environment is improved developer productivity. IDE boost productivity by reducing setup time, increasing the speed of development tasks, keeps developers up to date and standardizing the development process.
Difference between game engine and IDE
Game engine – is a software-development environment designed for people to build video games .Developers use game engines to construct games for consoles , mobile devices and personal computers.
IDE– is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development.
15th October 2019
The Elder Scrolls : Arena (March 25th 1994)
The very first Elder Scrolls game almost didn’t include ‘The Elder Scrolls’ in the title. The game became a single-player role-playing game. It was originally envisioned as a sort of gladiatorial combat game. However, during the making of the game, the developers decided to take the project in another direction, focusing less on closed combat scenarios and more on quests taking place in an open world. The worlds were not handcrafted worlds of Morrowind, Oblivion, or Skyrim. Most of Tamriel’s wilderness was generated as movement happens, making it completely generic and not interesting to explore. Since the world was generated that way, the game world is very large and specifically designed to create a realistic and huge wilderness, where the character can find inns, farms, small towns, dungeons, and a lot of other interesting places. There are specifically 17 designed dungeons for the main quest. The arena is notable for being one of the first games to ever feature a day/night cycle, where at sunset shops close and people clear the streets before the monsters arrive and roam around till morning. Fans of the looking glass studios’ Ultima Underworlds series became their main inspiration for Arena. Furthermore, the original concept of arena combat never made it to the coding stage. Only a few parts from the development remain, the games title and a text file with the names of the fighting teams from every large city in Tamriel with a brief introduction for them. Since the game was released in the ’90s the audience surrounding the game industry would be mainly male-dominated.
The Elder Scrolls Arena would have been intended for American audiences as role-play games were becoming popular at the time. In North America and western Europe board games such as dungeon dragons(1975) where people took on different roles and played out different adventures, were the beginnings of RPG games. The age demographic would be 15 or older as the game includes a lot of violence
The elder scrolls: Arena was released on the MS-DOS platform.MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. The development of 86-DOS only took six weeks as it was a clone of digital research’s CP/M.
Bethesda Softworks is an American game publisher. The company was founded by Christopher Weaver in 1986. In 2001 Bethesda spun off its development team into Bethesda Game Studios, and Bethesda softworks became a publisher. Weaver initially intended to name the company software but found the name was already taken. Bethesda has published many games like The Elder Scrolls, Terminator series and the Fallout series. In 1990, the company moved from Bethesda to Rockville, Maryland. It is best known for its major project The Elder Scrolls video game series, the programming was original by Julian Lefay. The first chapter of the series was The Elder Scrolls Arena. Several sequels have been released since then. Bethesda Softworks have also published titles based upon films, including The Terminator, Star Trek, and Pirates of the Caribbean. The game missed their Christmas deadline, so the game was released in March 1994 which was a bad time to release the game for a small developer like Bethesda. The first of the series didn’t receive very little initial attention, Arena became a cult classic that spread in popularity through word of mouth. This secured Bethesda’s place in the RPG industry.
This particular game would attract RPG fans as they like the experience of things they can’t in real life. Enormous universes allow the role-playing element to become a desire. The more places the player can go, there are more instances to develop the character they are playing as. Furthermore, these large worlds invite more content: quests are more common, more interesting, and more rewarding. RPG also lets the player create there own new character and experience new things. Creating new characters and replaying the same content would feel like a whole new experience if you face it with a completely new character as they would have different perspectives on the circumstances, including their different strengths, weaknesses, and appearance. RPG games the player’s man-hours of excitement and adventure.
The graphics of the game was highly praised as they replaced effects like fog, firelight, and a reflective water. This is comparable to Skyrim details: the way snow swims around mountaintops, the transparency of the streams, the flicker of flames. But the Arena does also have some criticisms, such as the lifelessness of the NPC’s,Which some fans think this hasn’t changed over the years of character scripting, animation ,and voice acting. Arena’s sound effects and music are highly reviewed as the effects heighten the experience. Digitized wolf howls and the sound of shuffling zombies brought a lot of fans a real sense of the atmosphere, bringing them some anticipation.
FIFA 11 (2010)
FIFA 11 was developed by EA Canada, it was published by electronic arts worldwide under the Ea Sports label. It was released in Europe for all platforms, except for the Wii and the Nintendo DS. The game receives a lot of positive reviews and was awarded Sports Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards. A new feature was introduced with FIFA 11 which had a replacement to manager mode called career mode. This is where the player is able to play a career as a manager. Other new features include improved passing system, improved likenesses and the ability to play as a Goalkeeper for the first time. FIFA has improved a lot over the years as in FIFA 18 they introduced playable female characters to the game by doing this it attracted many more fans as they liked the idea of having more players to interact with.
Furthermore, the game seemed to have some graphic issues, the main graphic issue was with a cut scenes as a block would appear on the screen causing a lot of frustration for the players. However, most of the game was great for the players as it added more of a realistic game play as there were a lot of refinements done from previous FIFA games. The biggest change for the game was the physicality between the players, whether it was a winger player holding off a defender, or two players tussling in the box, they players are constantly fighting each other for the ball. The players strength and speed impacted this, as it made it a lot more brutal, creating nice touches for the player to use. Multi-user goal celebrations were now introduced in FIFA 11 fro online games. It would only take a couple of button to get into any online matches, including lobbies for those who wished to tweak their match options or chat to other players online. You could now also set u your own club matches using virtual pro player. This would be done through a process involving your computer and a camera or webcam, rather than the PlayStation eye camera.
FIFA 11 was released on PC for OS X and Microsoft Windows users than on some Consoles including the PlayStation 2 and 3, The Wii and the Xbox 360. It was also released on iOS, Android, Nintendo DS PlayStation portable, Blackberry App World and Java ME.
EA Sports is a division of electronic arts that develops and publishes sport video games. In 2004 EA sports signed a deal with the National Football League (NFL) and it’s player’s union for five years, they later extended the deal until the 2012 NFL season. EA lost the rights for Major League Baseball games to 2K Sports in 2005, this ended the EA MVP series. In 2012, EA signed a multi-year, multi product partnership with the Ultimate Fighting Championship. EA Sports announced that they will end its PGA Tour series after 25 years.
This game would attract all of the sports fans from both genders as sport is a huge thing to this day.The first ever sport related game is pong which began the sport industry. The game was a ‘tennis like’ game which included two paddles and a ball, the goal is to defeat your opponent. Many sport games would have took inspiration from the game pong as a lot of games include defeating your opponent.
Terraria (2011)
Terraria is an action-adventure sandbox game developed by re-logic. Terraria is a 2D game that revolves around exploration, building, crafting, combat, and mining. The game has a 3D title-based graphical style. The game is noted for its classic exploration adventure style, which is a lot similar to other games such as Minecraft. The player can find some resources, and most items may only be found in certain areas of the map. The player can use the resources to craft new items and equipment at an appropriate crafting station for that recipe. The player can encounter many different enemies, such as zombies, blobs, skeletons, and flying eyes, enemies have specific biome spawn points.
Bosses are also a feature in the game which is a lot harder to defeat making the player improve their stats for their character. Terraria also lets the player make multiple characters with a different world making the player have an endless amount of gameplay. The combat of the game is simple and satisfying, giving fans the enjoyment while equipping yourself with heavy artillery after spending far too long with a copper sword.
The game thrives in a multiplayer environment as you can enjoy exploring the depths of a random game world with a friend, enjoying the experience the scramble for their life when they make a mistake. Multiplayer makes it a lot more fun as it allows large groups of players to play in a single game. Terraria is for players who are 11 or above, however kids thin it should be 9 or above while parents think it should be 10 and above.
Re-logic is an independent game developer and publisher based in Indiana. it was founded at the beginning of Terraria’s development cycle. In 2017 Re-Logic published Pixel Privateers a turn-based strategy video game for Windows. Fans who play this game on a Nintendo switch had a problem with the controls. Jumping and using the items are bound to ZL and ZR while navigating menus is l,r ad the directional pad this became a huge issue for the players as they felt very uncomfortable. Another problem that the player had was that the small cursor that sort of hovers around the character can be moved by the left and right sticks. The cursor snaps back very quickly, making it hard to build. However, Terraria does have a smooth frame rate throughout, even when there is a lot of action on-screen during a boss fight. The characters have similar features to old styled game characters, for example Final Fantasy VI have the same type of figure style as Terraria but Terraria’s characters have a lot more of a pixel look.
The game was released on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation Vita, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, macOS, Linux, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, Nintendo Switch.
The game has been updated on multiple occasions. December 2011 they uploaded Terraria to version 1.1 which added new monsters, bosses, NPCs, and items. The update also included improvements to the games world generation technology and some lighting systems. In 2012, the developers announced that they would not continue active development, but would release a final bug fix patch. But in 2013 they resumed the development with them asking the community for ideas and features to include for future content ideas. In October 2013 Re-logic released version 1.2 for Terraria on windows after nine months of development. It included gameplay changes, new mechanics and graphic improvements. They then again updated to 1.3, this added even more items, events, enemies, bosses, and gameplay features.
4th December 2019
Game Design Documents.
A One pager is simple one page document that give a overview of a product, service or business. They are great at promoting your business location. Some uses of One Pages are: Using them to advertise you local business in other surrounding businesses, Using as flyers, show an overview of a product/service to you boss or purchasing manager.
A live Prototype , gives you a chance to stress test your solution in real world conditions . it could run for a few days to a few weeks. This gives it a chance to learn how your solution works in practice.
10th December 2019
A digital storefronts is a website that offers goods and services fro sale, which the customer can visit at any me and from anywhere. Examples of digital storefronts are Origin,Steam, Epic Games, Humble store, itch,io and gog com
STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order
Steam
The Steam digital storefront background is very simple but does include a showcase of screenshots and trailers demonstrating the game-play and graphics. The reviews of the game are located somewhere very simple showing the viewer how many reviews they have got and if they are positive or negative. A brief description of the game has been shown on the right but further down the site there is a longer description in case the viewer wants to know more about the game. The storefront also includes whether or not the game is a multiplayer or a single-player and what languages are included in the game. This is located further down the page so the view would have to scroll down the page for this type of information which also includes key features of the game as well as the rating. Comparing with other sites Steam does show a lot of information that a viewers would want while Epic games doesn’t have a lot of information about the games reviews and has a lees amount of clips of the game play.
Epic Games
The digital storefront for the epic games site is basic, however show a range of screenshots. However the site doesn’t have any reviews of the game which viewers normally go to first to see if the game is worth it. Epic games also includes less information about the game while Origin and Steam include information that interests the buyer.The site does include very detailed trailers ,which show the viewers the games graphics and some detail about the games story.
Origin
Origin includes very useful information fr the viewers unlike Epic games. This gives the viewer a good idea for what they are actually paying for . Origin also includes many trailers and screenshots like Epic games and steam have. The background of the site is very bold as the colors are not bright , they fit in well with the game. Just like Steam, Origin includes the game multiplayer system, which is also located in an easy place so the viewer doesn’t have to search everywhere for the information.
11th December 2019
Programming and Game Design Key Terminology Pop Quiz Reflection.
Today on the pop quiz i got 26/31. Topics i need to work on is Syntax and Semantics ,Blacking out /Level Design and Classes and functions. I was very confident with Marketing games with storefronts as it was recent knowledge so i was able to remember the information quite well. Another topic i was confident with was Game Design Document as i have used some knowledge of the topic when i was creating my own game for SpaceJam. The topic that surprised me the most would be the Pseudocode i thought i had gotten it wrong as i am not very confident with the topic.
Pseudocode– it is a informal way of programming description that does not require any strict programming language syntax.
Rachi Sports
Yesterday, me, Jess and James had to put together a quick idea of a sports game. Together we came up with Rachi Sports. I think we did well at being creative as we had to think outside the box to create an eye- catching game. I feel like we presented very well by explaining what out game involves and what sports games actually consist of. However,to improve i think that we could have added a bit more information about the game, including the character design.
Genres
Action-adventure – These games tend to focus on exploration and usually involve item gathering, simple puzzle solving, and combat. Action-adventure later became an established with Shigeru Miyamoto’s The Legend of Zelda(1986) which in the end being a success due to how the combined elements form different genres.
Role-playing game – This is a game where the player assumes the role of a character, normally in fantasy or science fiction setting , this can interact with the game’s imaginary world. Examples of this genre is games like Dungeons and Dragons, Battle tech and Star Wars.
14th January 2020
Game Design and Development Trends
Design Trends
Open World – This is a virtual world in which the player can explore.This would usually involve a lot of quests and item gatherings. Open world games may also include loading screens which is very common to show the different level designs. However, they do still enforce many restrictions in the game environment mainly because of technical limitations or in-game limitations. The reason open worlds became so popular is because it offers the player the possibility to explore and wonder around completing quests. Open worlds often have a huge story line behind it which players get strongly connected with. Some examples of open world games are : The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim , The Witcher 3 ; Wild Hunt and Minecraft.
Battle Royale – This concludes of many individual player , pairs of two or more small player squads (normally up to 3-5 players). The aim of the game is to be the last team or player standing by eliminating all the other players. Battle Royal became very popular as it provides an endless amount of replay value as each match will be completely different to the one before hand. Battle Royal became more popular as Fortnite was released as players became very addictive . Other examples of Battle Royal games are : Apex Legends and PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds.
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Development Trends
Virtual Reality – This is a simulated experience that can be similar or different to the real world. This would include the use of virtual reality headsets or multi-projected environments to generate realistic images. A person using virtual reality equipment is able to look around the artificial world, move around in it, and interact with virtual features or items. This became popular due to the fact that the player can be in any place they want without actually being there, causing it to become very addictive .Examples of VR games are : Superhot , Job Simulator and Beat Saber.
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Cross-platform– is the ability to allow different gaming platforms to share the same online servers in a game, allowing players to join together regardless of the platform they own. This became very popular due to the fact that you can play with all your friends with any platform you are on. Some example are : Spacelords, Rec Room and Rocket League.
15th January 2020
Elevator Pitch including one development trend and one design trend.
is a cross-platform battle royale , that has daily challenges to keep the player attached.
28th January 2020
List/array- can store a type of object; they are used to collect multiple values.
Iteration statements cause statements (or compound statements) to be executed zero or more times, subject to some loop-termination criteria.
Global Game Jam
our Game, Blimp Repair is a game where the player runs around the map going from two different islands to collect the missing parts to repair his Blimp.
12/03/2020- our progress so far:
12th September 2020
-What did you learn about how products are built form conception to completion from watching ‘playing hard’?
This game taught me that there is a lot of preparation that goes into making a fully professional game. It has also taught me about the struggles through funding, communication, and Deadlines.
-What did you learn about financial implications or how products are funded?
Through this film, I learned that without the right funding, the game can be easily cut. This puts a lot of the focus on people’s funding otherwise the development within the game would have short deadlines and fewer developers. This could lower the quality of the final game.
-What did you learn about job roles in the game industry?
I already knew that there would be specific roles for each job, but I didn’t know that having more people working on the game would be a lot harder than having less due to the fact I thought the more people involved the quicker and better the quality would turn out. Due to having a lot of people during the progress of development would also be very hard to communicate together as there would be so many people.
-what did you learn about the wider games industry from watching ‘playing hard’?
I learned just how tough the game industry is and how much goes into just forming a perfect pitch while trying to get the right funding at the time.
-what challenges face developers during production?
I think the main issues for the developer would face is the funding as it could take years of going to different people explaining your idea for a game then getting turned down, It shows that you have to have an amazing way to pitch your ideas. I also believe that communication would also be an issue as it was hard for Jason near the end of the film to keep the whole game to his vision.
Lucy's Blog 