Linda Russell's Blog

  Google Map I have selected to show where I went last September in Croatia as some people were very interested when I spoke about it in my introduction! So here is where the festival was and where I also stayed for them 8 days:  The Garden Resort  

  Alpha For this week, I wanted to add a few more bits to my game, the first thing I did this week, was I wanted to have a moving cube that went up and down as part of my course but I found the tutorials I came across very very long and I didn't want to spend that much time to only add one moving step into my game... I may find a few 'roll a ball' games on the app store to get inspiration for other obstacles and stuff to add instead. The next thing I did in my game was that I added background music. I am debating whether or not to add the music I selected to a menu screen instead of play mode as it could cause some people  to get distracted. I may replace or swap it out with a very quiet nature sound, like of the wind or something... screenshot I have since got rid of this layout above. But will keep to the theme of having a water feature etc. screenshot screenshot I think I'm meeting my weekly topics when it comes to my game and hope to start finishing the entire thing...

  Comments and Feedback Blog graphic, (Source) Feedback in Overall, the comments I have been receiving under my blog posts have been very positive. The comments under my Introduction were all so lovely and welcoming and it was so cool to see how many people have similar hobbies as I do and I now know more a bout a few people! I love to read the comments under my game progress or even under my unity tutorials. I would love to get asked more questions about my game as I only realised now you can reply to comments...oops. Seeing other peoples interpretations of my game is really good as it can open my eyes to what a player would be seeing. Most useful part of people commenting on my blog is when I get asked questions as it could potentially lead me to adding onto my ideas, as the more heads the better. It opens up the conversation! Feedback out Overall, the comments I have been writing under other peoples blogs have been constructed carefully after reviewing their post, all positive o...

  Unity Tutorial 09 For this weeks Tutorial I looked at Sounds! I want to include a backing track into my game, but I don't want to go ahead and add one in just yet as is has to be a certain showed for it. But I added music over the Sumo battle tutorial we did last week just so I could have a feeling of roughly how it could work. I found a brilliant website called FreeSound  were there are endless amounts of different sounds to download! I will of course be using this website again for when it comes to my backing track for my game. I selected an intense battle sound for the sumo game as I felt it would make the gameplay even more intense.  Screen of audio source. I added an audio source to the camera and then dragged my sounds into the audio clip section. I made sure to loop the music as it was only like 40 seconds in length. It was pretty easy to add this sound! I have added sound effects to my actually game when picking up gems so this was actually easier! Happy with th...

  Week 9 Reading and Writing What has been the most memorable Reading post for myself? This is a hard question for me as I have found that each week when I read and write about articles about game design, they add up and I grow my knowledge about these elements. The one that does stick in my head the most though would have to be Game Elements  which I did in week 4.  Why is that week so important to me? Good question...Week 4 was a big week in regards to knowing we had to create our own game but I hadn't a clue what to expect. I do like games, and I play them a lot but I have never stopped to think how these games are made and why do I like them so much to play them a lot. I remember discussing about what goes into games in regards to their elements. I have put my knowledge of what I learned since week 4 into my own game! Even without actually realizing in a way... I never knew that writing about articles or pieces of writing that I have read out myself would actually mad...

  Game Fun The first reading of this week was " Gamification Design: What's fun got to do with it? " by Annie Velev. Fun has a lot of path ways and curves when it comes to game design. There can be so many types of "fun". If we think of what is the meaning of fun off the top of our heads, we quickly think enjoyment of something, but when is comes to game design it goes down the path of pleasurable engagement . If a viewer doesn't like what they are playing it wont be "fun" for them of course. When a viewer likes a game and has the desire to keep playing, the designer knows they are having fun. Source: 8Kindsoffun After looking at this picture describing eight different kinds of "Fun" we can see there is many types of fun out there. It combines the players experience and their appeal towards that game in different measures to make it more "fun" for them. Easy Fun can be described as exploring in a game or creating within a game...

  Unity Tutorials Unit 4 - Gameplay Mechanics(Sumo Battle Prototype) For this tutorial I was excited as it was similar to my own game design. I found this tutorial really helpful to see the different ways of moving your player around, I had to move the camera for my ball to go in that certain direction in this tutorial which was an interesting way. I was thinking of going back to my own game design and seeing if that code could potentially work but the more I thought about it, it would make guiding the ball harder for my game. I loved how we made the platform "Spin", well we really made the camera spin...Illusions!. I also loved the particle effects added to the game tutorial. Roll a Ball After the first tutorial I decided to see if there was anymore Unity tutorials I could follow along that were more specific to my own game as I actually wanted to change my code for rolling a ball, to make it easy in the long run. I found the holy grail of tutorials, "Roll a Ball" ...

  First Playable Game Screenshot What a journey it has been so far... For my game, I knew once I got to grips with the player controllers it was then going to be the start of my designing for my game. In my head I wanted to use light colours for my game and that is exactly what I did. I chose sand colours and light blue colours to add  an element of ease to it. After I completed my tutorial "Roll a Ball" on Unity, I started looking up more YouTube videos to see what else I could add to the basics of my game. I have added sounds to when you pick up gems, I have added a gem counter in the top left corner and I have added a "You Win" icon when you collect all the gems. I will hopefully find a soothing backing track soon for the next steps. Game Screenshot Here is a quick screenshot of my game, so far... As you can see I have added a series of paths and created one large puzzle piece! Some paths have gems, while others have hard obstacles you have to try and overcome. I...

  Happiness Jar Happiness Jar Graphic, Source: Shutterstock After coming back a week later from this challenge, I find it really refreshing to look back on what made me happy for one week. I think this 'Experiment' works beautifully and I will want to try keep this up and include it in my daily routine in the evening time to remind myself whether I had a good or bad day that something in that day made me smile. Some of my days were as simple as "I was happy that I went to Pennys"... or "I booked my first driving lesson". No matter how funny or simple some days sounded compared to others, it was a good way to reflect on how my day went as we as people never really give ourselves that time at night to sit and think of how our day went and what made us happy today.

 Mantra I created a Mantra poster using Canva . This was really run to get to design my own poster and express my thoughts through visuals. It is a nice reminder now and again to tell myself I have the strength to face the challenges before me.

  Meme Generator https://imgflip.com/i/5u604w I really enjoyed using Meme Generator - imgflip  to create a meme! I thought it was appropriate to associate it with my Unity project to make it funny. I will be using this again as it is a fun way to express situations throughout this module through memes.

  Games Decisions S.T.A.R.S graphic, week 07 "Building a Princess Rescue App"  by Dan Cook speaks about what the "Productivity applications can learn from games" He discuss the idea of "STARS" ( Skills, Tools & Action, Rules, Stimulus ). The goal of a game is reached when we look at all of these components. You need to get that 'good feeling' about a game, if you you are not interested in the basic idea/storyline of a game, nine times out of ten you won't play it. After you decide that "hey this is gonna be a game I want to play", you then decide how you are going to use your mental skills to play. A game that Dan spoke about was Mario Brothers. You avoid enemies by jumping, the game doesn't scream at you telling you that you need to jump right now!. You are using your mental skills to play and survive...Well done. This is an example of the user using their Tools & Actions. So now this is where is gets interesting. If the ...

 Game Prototype Starting off my prototype was a bit messy at first...I tried many tutorials on how to code a ball to roll but finally found one that worked smoothly for my game. I made sure my ball rolled at just the right pace, not to slow but not too fast. I also ensure it could move left, right, up and down. The next thing I need to do for my prototype is to get my ball to jump. I constructed a sample path for my ball to roll down and it got me very excited to see my vision come to life slowly, but surely! I am looking forward to jumping back into designing my prototype next week and continuing building my game. I have been saving YouTube videos throughout the week that may help me with further steps with my game. Before finishing up this weeks project task, I quickly added textures to my ball and ground just to get a glimpse to what it could possibly look like, but I am not diving into the colours and textures just yet. Here are some screenshots of my prototype: Screenshots of ...

  Unity Tutorial 06 Lesson 3.3 Don't Just Stand There This weeks Unity Tutorial was super fun in my opinion! We got to explore how to put life into our little character we selected for our 03 lesson task. Before we dove into what to add to our character he was lifeless when we selected play-mode. His arms, and legs were stiff but we made him still able to jump etc. So, we started of looking through the Animator options in our unity tutorial. we selected a run option so make him look more alive. When he jumped, we added for his arms to wave in the air. I then added a death animation for when the players hits off an obstacle the characters falls to the ground, showing that the player is "Dead" = game over. Lesson 3.4 Particles and Sound Effects After we put some life into our character we began by adding an explosion to our player if they hit a obstacle in the game. I added this to the feet of my character to make it explode from the bottom up. I changed the colour of my ex...

  Unity Tutorial 05 Unity graphic tutorial 05, source:  Unity Week 06 - My Experience I really enjoyed seeing the progression of this particular tutorial. I was curious after completing last weeks tutorial how we could match up the background to the game, as it got cut off within maybe 3 seconds in play-mode. In this tutorial we also needed to add another element to the game in regards to when the player hits an obstacle by mistake, we need to basically 'stop' the game. We have to pause the movement of our repeating background and also the objects. I love the way it is basically an illusion of making the player look like they're moving but we are truly making everything but the player move... I think I can gain some tips from this particular tutorial to add into my own game. I could use the repeat of a background method in my case. Thoughts on using Unity so far? I am really gaining confidence in my game design skills with the help of these tutorials! Every week I am learni...

  Game Design Document(GDD) Game design graphic, source:  Shutterstock Link to my GDD:  https://www.dundoc.com/project/7867/npbha65itw This document will help keep myself up to date of what my plans are and especially if I want to change or ad ideas, I can simply keep track in my GDD. After creating my Game Design Document, it has helped me realise what my plan is in a simplified way. Each week I will be going back into my document and updating it. Dundoc  is an amazing tool to help for this module. I was frightened at first, but a few YouTube clips later I am feeling confident about my Game Design Document!

  Make a mindset Acronym L et O ur V oices E cho is my acronym I came up with for this weeks growth mindset post. This means to let our voices be free and own your ideas, shout them from the rooftops! 

  Happiness Challenge: Happiness Jar Happiness Quote, source:  Shutterstock For my Happiness challenge I will write down on a post-it-note every evening on what made me happy that day. It can be something small that I did or something that put a smile on my face! I will come back in a week review my post-it-notes and write up another blog post to show my results and how I feel at the end. I am very excited for this little challenge as it seems like as the days go by, I will be more grateful for the things in my day to day life.

  HTML Link html graphic, source:  Shutterstock 😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁 I have had experience using HTML from Web Development in Year 1. It can be tricky as if one single inch of your code is off, it will mess up your line of code...so lets hope this doesn't have for my clickable link! 😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁

Games GDD  Level graphic production. source:  Shutterstock Game Design Documents  (Click here)   (GDD) are very important to both the creator and for the reader. It is a good thing to start writing everything down at the early stages of your game ideas as you can easily forget your solutions and plans that you thought of weeks ago. It is important that you keep the document clean and easy to understand. If you get too technical it may start looking like an IKEA instruction manual...Keeping it simple and to the point with some illustrations to guide the reader is a good start!   "Game Developers article"  explains how to write a good GDD. Gonzalez talks about how it is very important to how your plan of your vision in front of you before jumping in the production of your game. He discusses how you should keep your Project Description short and sweet but it's important to include your type of game, for example, " a Hardcore Puzzle game". If your game involv...