My Multimedia Journey

  In this blog I will be discussing my vision for my game 'Escape the Mansion'. In this vision statement, I will detail Escape the Mansion's genre, gameplay aspects and resources, and include relevant links and images to help flesh out my plans.  I wanted to create a game that had a very simple play style for casual and experienced gamers alike. I didn't want to overcomplicate the game by jam-packing it with features, but to make something anyone could pick up and enjoy. When researching what to do I felt that the best games with simple concepts had a thought-out theme that made the player create the world themselves. The original Mario game had very limited capabilities by today's standard but had the player make up their story for why Mario saves the Princess.  I want to try create a similar theme with this game to make the player ask these kind of questions in their head and create the answers - why am I trapped here? Who are my captors? What threat looms around ...

Unity Prototype 2   For this weeks Unity tutorials they took way longer than I intended on spending on them. I kept making minor mistakes in the coding which cost me a lot of time as I couldn't find what it was that was stopping the game from working the way it is meant to. In the first tutorial I learned how to move the player from left to right like last time but the difference this time round was that I stopped the player from going off the edge of the screen by adding an 'if-statement'. This piece of code says that if that player is gone too far to the left or to the right that it will automatically stop.  The next two tutorials I completed I found much harder than the first. In my head I am still trying to make sense of the Unity interface and the basics of making a game. As the tutorials get progressively harder I am finding myself finding it more and more difficult to complete them by the suggested time.  However I know how important it is to complete these tutoria...

  MDA image This week for my readings I look into the Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics (MDA) framework of game design. The first reading I delved into was  MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research  by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek. This was a very in-depth look into what the MDA framework is and how it is applied to the majority of aspects in game design.  'Mechanics describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms. Dynamics describes the run-time behavior of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each others outputs over time. Aesthetics describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system.' When setting out to design a brand new game, game designers often take inspiration from games of a similar nature and add aspects of that to their own game. When doing so you have to ask yourself 'what is it that makes this game fun?' ...