Tech Task

 

Unity Tutorial 09

This week for our Unity tutorials we had to continue with the lesson we started last week. We have implemented a rotating camera, a powerup and an enemy chasing the player. In this lesson we will make more than one enemy therefore they will spawn in waves and a new powerup. When there is no more enemies left from a wave a new one starts and by each finish the enemy count increases by each wave. I found the custom methods with parameters to be a difficult. I found this tutorial to be enjoyable as I didn’t have that many difficulties and I got the tutorial done around the estimated time for this task. If I could redo this task I would spend less time on the tutorial and focus on the challenge or perhaps begin with the challenge instead.

For Challenge 4 I couldn’t get passed the bugs as I still don’t know how to fix them since the plane tutorial. Therefore this challenge will be left as incomplete. After reading the steps I had to undertake under the challenge I feel like if I knew how to fix the bugs I would easily continue. For week 10 I will focus on the upcoming tutorial and on this challenge.

Review Week Comments and Feedback

 For this week we have to reflect on the blog feedback/comments we have given and the feedback/comments we have received from fellow students in our course. Overall I personally feel like the rating of the comments and feedback I have received are a ten out of ten. They are very motivating and the feedback especially helps me with my project therefore I find the feedback comments to be the most useful for my growth in this module. Although I find the comments/ feedback useful I personally feel the some of them could be a little longer as some do not meet the minimum word count.

Similarly I would rate the quality of my comments and feedback that I have given to my fellow students in this course to be a ten out of ten. “Treat others how you would want to be treated”. I give feedback that I would like to hear myself. I motivate the student but most importantly give the best advice I could give regarding their project. 

Here I am presenting an example from a task to give feedback to a fellow student. I chose Mimi that week and as it is seen in the above image I used the W technique we have learned that week. I really enjoyed giving feedback/ comments and I personally would like to give more feedback to people especially with their projects to help. If I had to redo my feedback I would perhaps research information for the individual from articles or videos from platforms such as Youtube and by doing this I would learn from this research. In my opinion the feedback strategies we have learned in this module work the best and I get good ideas for my own work as I write feedback for other students.

Last week when I started my “First playable” I had to learn from my mistakes and had to make a testing game hence implementing assets there first before importing them into my first playable as things can go wrong. I gave this advice to Jack Roche. I feel like the blog comments were a great foundation to new friendships. There was a sense of connection and it was very uplifting to see all the support. I am happy with my introduction although I found it hard to write to the standards of the minimum word count. I feel like this was pressurising and that task shouldn't have had a minimum word count. Overall I feel like blog is a place where people can get to know me. If I could make any changes to my blog or redo it in a different way I would perhaps word my introduction better and include more of my art pieces and maybe the layout of the blog as when I went on my phone to see what everything looks like on the blog it did not look professional and aesthetic.

In conclusion there are pros and cons in the feedback/ comments I receive and the ones I give to my fellow peers.

Week 9 Reading and Writing

For this week we have to reflect on our readings and overall I do find the readings to be helpful at times for example my favourite reading is the YouTube video for week 6. It helped me construct my own Game Design Document and it was really well explained however the written articles are not my strongest suit as the authors commonly use difficult to understand language. I found the Games MDA article to be the most difficult to process and to this day I have no clear understanding of this concept. I would rate the readings to be a four or five out of ten as it wasn't all unclear as I did find useful work strategies that I will frequently use. I am getting good ideas for my own writing and project after analysing the best best reading segments.

Looking back at the tutorials I feel like some are necessary but most of them if not nearly all of them took up a lot of my time every week and this sabotaged my progress in this module and other modules. I wouldn’t say the reading helps me every week with my game but it does at times. Unity tutorials help me with my game project every week more than the readings. I have made a strategy for my future self as I write my readings and this consists of me saying what I learned, what I found difficult and what I found to be useful for the other tasks or my game. This means I can look back at this and remind myself of the information I have previously learned. I am happy with my game project although it’s a little different from what I originally envisioned but what I thought of would require more time for this kind of development. I consider my game to be my biggest accomplishment in this module. If I had to redo the readings I would spend less time trying to make lots of paragraphs for my blog as I would run out of time for the time estimate. I wouldn't absorb some of the information this way as-well.

I chose this image from my blog post from my “week 6” label on Blogger because as I mentioned before this helped my with my Game Design Document. I really enjoyed this video from the reading as it is my favourite and I am recommending it to my fellow students who chose the articles over the video and people from outside of this course that are perhaps interested in it.

Looking forward from now I would like to have more videos included in the readings just equally as much as there are articles to have a variety of options just like we do for the written articles. 

In conclusion after looking back at the readings there are pros and cons started in the above therefore I am 50:50 with the readings and how much they help me with my project and my knowledge/ skillset in this module.

First playable

 I find it very difficult to design my game for example the logs in the first part of the obstacle game is very hard to make as the player will fall off immediately. I found making the terrain quite difficult at first but after tutorials on Youtube I made mountains surrounding the start of the obstacle. I made a testing prototype to see what works and what does not. In the testing prototype many of the assets did not work and I’m glad I made this because otherwise I would have ruined my first playable and I would have to restart. I’m meeting my targets by watching YouTube tutorials and the Unity tutorials I have previously done. I am also learning by my mistakes I find that some of the tutorials on YouTube give me errors therefore they are not all reliable. I found this week to be the most productive week in my learning for this module for my project and now I find Unity to be much easier than in the beginning. The challenges I keep having to face are the scripts. For the following week I will try to figure out a way to implement the camera mechanism I strive for and if not then the current mechanisms will remain.

Unity Tutorial 07

 In this lesson I learned to make the camera rotate around a focal point and the player can activate this by using horizontal inputs. In point six I made a mistake with the word "speed" and after saving and going to Unity I had 999+ error and around 40 warnings and when I tried to fix it they didn't disappear therefore I had to restart the prototype as I previously did in the past tutorials. I feel like this tutorial can help me in the coming week with my project as I originally planned to use Roblox controls that include this mechanism. New concepts we have learned this week are texture wraps, camera as child object, global vs local coordinates and get direction of other object. New functionality includes camera rotates around the island based on horizontal input and player rolls in direction of camera based on vertical input.

In this lesson we create an enemy for this sphere to have a purpose in the game. We gave the enemy a texture, created an enemy script to follow the player and most importantly “a method return a spawn point”. This can also help me in my project and this lesson out of the three given lessons was not difficult for me.

In this lesson I learned how to make a power for the sphere that will highlight it and then disappear after 5 seconds.

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