Alpha

"Alpha" 

We're on week nine and I'm happy to say that most of my game is finished. The only reason it's basically finished is because I told myself I'm keeping the game very simple because, from the beginning I knew I would find designing a game very confusing so I set my goals low, in a way but not to say I wasn't going to try and but in little to no effort. I f it wasn't for the unity tutorials I wouldn't have been able to make any parts of this game, it was by luck that a continues running game was one of the unity sections we had to do for part of our weekly work tasks.

So this week I put a bunch of new elements into my game, not things that were very difficult just small assets to make the overall feel of the game better. So this week for my alpha I added an explosion into my game as the player jumped or ran into a spool, previously when that happened a "Game Over" just appeared at the bottom of the unity program. So, after adding the explosion I added one more small detail  which is when the player is running dirt is appearing form behind his feet, and actually I'm remembering things a I'm writing them I also made the player fall over and die when he runs into the obstacles.

Image Source: Unity Screenshot

I added sound effects to the player as he's running and jumping, also a crash sound effects along with background music that suit the theme of the game. From adding the sound effects I learned it's not just as easy as placing a a song or sound effect into an audio source, in the player icon in the hierarchy you have to add the components into the inspector, then you have to drag and drop the sound effects into the correct audio source, you also have to add public floats into the player controller c# script but after doing it the first time it's easy to do. Making the player die when it's "Game Over" was a bit tricky, I kept having to watch the tutorial over and over because I was afraid I added the code in the wrong place.

I'm very happy with how my game has come on, things I have to add are a basic start menu, just saying "press spacebar to start", and that's all I'll have there. Then the final thing will be to add a ground to the game, maybe a pebbled road or road type of ground. I have thought about changing the type of character to a person who's les blocky like a Minecraft character, so that's everything I'm pretty happy.

Review Week Comments and Feedback

 "Review of Feedback"

Feedback In:

Firstly I think giving feedback can be stressful mainly because you want to help the person, but at the same time your afraid that person might take offense, I think the other students in the year understand that so when their giving you feedback on your introduction blog or a post about your game, they'd be two different types of feedback but put across in a nice way, whether it's about your cat or your game progress.

The feedback I've gotten has been great, straight to the point, but as I said not in a rude way. I think if you try to jump around the idea of telling the person that they did something wrong or they could do something else your going to ruin that persons progress, so telling the truth, in a nice way, put to the point is the best way to do so. Everyone who's commented feedback on any of my game posts have all been honest, constructive and phrased nicely.

Image Source: Flickr

Feedback Out:

On the other side, I think the feedback I give, is the feedback I get or I'd expect to get on my blog posts. Both very helpful, to the point and constructive advice not just saying "you shouldn't have done that, do this", that's just crap feedback. Through out this module we've been given two main different methods for feedback. The first being the "WWW" feedback method, which stands for Wow-Wonder-What if. So what you would to is start of the feedback with a complement, that being "Wow", then moving on to the " I Wonder", being, I wonder if yo could explain that a bit better, not sure what you mean. The last "W", is What if, than making a suggestion.

The second method for delivering helpful feedback is the "T.A.G" method, meaning "Tell, Ask and Give", start off by telling the person about something you liked or made a big impression on you. "Ask", there are all kinds of questions you can ask about a game, you could ask about something you found interesting or confusing. The last part of the process is "Give", you can give the writer certain suggestions for them to do, or look into applying to their game. or you can share some knowledge you have relative to their game idea.

I think commenting on peoples blog posts is fun and you can read other peoples opinions on the same topic and see if others have similar ideas or opinions, but from doing them I didn't really get a sense of "getting to know people", I think reading the odd blog is far from figuring out more about a person, I found out a few hobbies and past times but I couldn't match a hobby to a face.

I think to make the feedback more effective is to be honest and helpful without being to mean r belittling to the persons work, there's a difference between not sugar-coating your feedback and being an asshole. Just following those two different feedback methods will give the people the best feedback if you practice doing it correctly. 

Week 9 Reading and Writing

"Review Week"

Looking Back:

When we started this module and I saw that each week we would have to read articles, I wasn't really up for it, I thought all the readings would be about things I found boring, like academic studies or game theory, which was all boring and horrible for me to read at the time. Now that we've gone through eight weeks of this module, what was boring to me then, is not anymore. Just like anything else, there's some readings I enjoy more than others, but then, there's more than I hate than anything else!!.

Right before we started the college year I got into reading mental well being books, or books that are about training your mind, or how to develop different mindsets, books that I really enjoy. As we started the reading tasks, there were a few that I hated, but then we got told that we'd being doing readings on mindsets, that got me excited to do these tasks, because I never thought that's the kind of reading we'd be doing, it never crossed my mind.

From then on I got excited to do the reading tasks because there we a lot of options to choose from, and a lot of great ones. My favourite reading we've done to date would have to be the growth mindset reading task, and it was the second reading of the whole semester, I think that's what got me excited about this module without those readings I would have lost interest at the beginning.

Image Source: wikimedia

This is the first image from the reading tasks about a growth and fixed mindset reading we did in week 2, the time has gone so fast I can't believe it. Hopefully the remaining weeks don't go by too fast, got work to do!!.

Looking Forward:

Looking forward, something I want to make sure I continue to do is, simply read more. I used to hate reading but the more I read, the more enjoyable it becomes and I think the more you read you can concentrate on doing tasks more, and that helps get work done quicker, which is something that I like so I have more time to do things that don't relate to college.

Since the start of this module, thanks to all the reading and typing and reading more and more articles than I ever thought I would I've started to start writing down how my day's are going or what my daily goals are, some of the readings said it's a good way to reflect so I started doing that. Which is something I enjoy doing, it's not like these blog posts where I have to mentally prepare myself for about 20 minutes before I start.

Overall I think doing all the reading tasks each week has helped me with my other modules this year, not directly or helped with one more than the other, it just makes reading easier so things get done quicker and you understand more. Reading just has positive effects on other things, don't really know how to describe it perfectly, but, it just does.