My Multimedia Journey

  This weeks Unity tutorial consisted of two parts. I found it much more straight forward to follow compared to last weeks tutorial which took me well over 3 hours. Luckily this one took me around an hour and a half to complete.  For the first part of the tutorial I added a package called Cinemachine - this is an addition to your game that automatically controls the games camera without the need for adding code to your game which is extremely helpful and saves a lot of time. Following on from that I also added boundaries to the camera movement to ensure that it doesn't show the user anything outside the map I have created. The second part of the tutorial was titled 'Visual Styling'. This consisted of adding particle like objects to the game which can mimic smoke, sparks and even fire. As the weeks go on I am getting more and more used to having no video tutorial to follow along to, although if there was a video I feel I could complete each tutorial much faster. 

This weeks unity tutorial really tested me! I was really struggling with it and it took me so long to complete. There was so many different aspects that had to be completed, it felt never ending.  The first part of the tutorial consisted of learning about 'Sprite Animations' - these additions to the game help your player move more smoothly, taking away the static like movements that were previously in the game. I also added sprite animations the my enemies in the game which gave the game a much more professional feel. To input sprite animations I worked mainly on the unity interface but it also required coding. I struggled with the coding aspect of it which resulted in me spending a lot more time on this then needed. The second part of the tutorial   consisted of creating a script to the game using code. 

This weeks Unity tutorials consisted of adding damageable objects and enemies to a game and also having 'lives' that decrease each time your character runs into a dangerous obstacle / enemy. The first part of the tutorial focused on coding the health stat into the game. It began with five lives which I then had to code to decrease when I lost a life and then code it to increase again when the character gained a life by collecting one in gameplay.  For the second part of the tutorial this week I had to actually make the damageable objects and enemies and incorporate them into the game. I decided to add in a grenade looking object that I found in the Unity assets. I then had to link the coding so that when the character came into contact with the object that the health stat would decrease by one life. Overall this was an informative unity tutorial and thankfully I didn't meet too many problems along the way.

Screenshot from paper My topic for the readings is 'Commonly Used Challenges in Games' . As I said before in a previous blog post I felt there would be a lot of material on this subject for me to research. To be honest I really struggle with academic writing and reading, it is not something I enjoy so it is difficult for me to focus on a particular paper.  For my reading this week I took at a paper by  Jukka Vahlo (Ph.D.) and  Veli-Matti Karhulahti (Ph.D.). It is titled   Challenge types in gaming validation of video game challenge inventory (CHA).  I have linked the paper here . Overall it was very informative and provided an extremely in-depth look into the different challenges used in games and why, we as a a player, prefer certain aspects of different challenges.

This week we had two Unity tutorials to complete. Thankfully they were shorter than last weeks, however I am still struggling with the fact that this time around there is no video tutorials to follow along to. Me personally I am a visual learner so just reading instructions and not actually being shown what to do is not ideal. For the first tutorial we learned to create a folder to place all of your game objects into so that when an you apply a setting to an object in the folder it will apply to all of them which is actually very useful and will save up a lot of time. I discovered early on that by accident I was adding objects that I didn't mean to add into the folders but I realised I was doing it and fixed the issue.  The second tutorial consisted of Box Colliders and Rigidbodys. These are also both very useful as they give the game a more lifelike feel.  I will be back next week with more Unity tutorials. Thanks for reading - Leslie

  More Unity tutorials! I wish I could say I was happy about it but Unity isn't getting any easier for me unfortunately. This week we started on a new set of tutorials. We had an option to choose the difficulty level we wanted to work with, I feel like my skill level isn't where it needs to be in order to attempt a more difficult tutorial so I chose to do '2D Game Dev' From the outset I began experiencing problems as Unity kept crashing on my laptop when I opened it which forced me to uninstall and download it again. This eventually resolved my problem. I was surprised to see when I opened the tutorial that there was no video instruction to go with it like there was in the previous tutorials I completed.  To begin with I didn't think it would hinder me as much as it ended up doing. I found it really difficult to follow along with the instructions when there wasn't a visual aid to back it up, this lead to the tasks being much more time consuming then they should