Unity Free tutorials

The Unity Tutorials I watched this week were 3 of Jimmy Vegas' 'How to build a visual city' because I wanted half of my track to look way more city like and I thought this tutorial would give me a lot of useful tips. I used these tutorials to spruce up my car race track and have it look like the player is travelling towards a hospital. In this tutorial I was shown how to create roads and paths out of 3D cube objects and and how to create shops just simply using another 3D game object. This tutorial also reminded me of how much simpler parenting the hierarchy correctly makes navigating unity. I also got a recap of scaling textures so that they don't look stretched out on different sized objects. I then also played around with different colours and changing the materials slightly for each object so that they were exactly how I wanted them.This weeks unity tutorial was mainly focused on trying to create the feel and mood for my game in the city area and I enjoyed recapping on things I had already learnt at the beginning of the semester.

Improved City Roads I worked on

Learning Challenge: Deskercise

The Learning by H.E.A.R.T challenge I did this week was the Deskercise challenge which was under Health/Happiness. it was to read an article about the different kind of exercise you can do while sitting at your desk, and to see if I wanted to try any out. The one I was most surprised was considered an exercise was fidgeting, as I'm literally always fidgeting even when I'm talking on the phone I find myself pacing and I'm constantly asked to stop shaking my leg so I'll definitely continue to fidget now that I know it's considered an exercise.
All of the exercises seem pretty easy and handy to do so I might try and give them a go and see if I feel more positive when I've been sitting in college all day.

Growth Mindset:The Effects of Praise on Mindsets

The growth Mindset challenge I completed was watching Carol Dweck's Video on the effects of praise on the mindset.

Carol Dweck's Video

The video is about a group of 9 and 10 year old kids in America being given puzzles to do that started off easy. Every time a student completed a puzzle they were either praised on their intelligence or on the effort they made. After the children are given much harder puzzles that they might not be able to solve, according to the video some of their confidence' immediately dropped and they started thinking never mind i'm not good at this after all where as other kids continued working on the harder problem. After all of the student's were asked if they wanted to go back to the easy ones or try to keep going on the harder ones. Carol Dweck found that the kids who had been praised by being told they were intelligent at the beginning really wanted to go back and continue working on the easy puzzles when they had been told they were smart, which is an example of a fixed mindset. Where as the children who had been praised for effort leaned towards continuing doing the harder tasks, this is an example of showing a growth mindset. People with a Growth Mindset believe that intelligence can always be worked on, it's not set in stone. They feel smart just when they're working really hard on something difficult and they can progress. 

Carol Dweck then goes on to say that she believes that people are really sensitive to whats going on around them, what other people value and what they're being judged on. I definitely agree with the research in this video, I know myself I can definitely have a fixed or a growth mindset around different people, because I'm aware of what they may expect of me already or I don't want to feel inferior in front of  certain people but it's also definitely true that trying something difficult over something you find easy is always the better option as you can't improve without being challenged.

First Playable

This week started of pretty shitty with unity, it crashed and everything I had created for my game already had disappeared  so I had to start from scratch again and make sure I press save every time I move the mouse. Other than that everything I've attempted so far has been working perfectly. I think I was getting a bit distracted in trying to make the terrain look good tho instead of firstly trying to make sure I could get all the rules and the actual game itself would work. So I haven't really met my target quite yet but I am happy with how it's looking so far. This week I made the terrain and track and added trees and grass and the car, I also added fences and dirt to make the starting position. and I wanted it to look like the player was leaving their own front garden. I got a bit carried away trying to find shrubs and flowers for my game. I then added a canvas, panel and text box and made the countdown box in the top right hand corner. I am also halfway through building shops and city like buildings for further on in the track when the player gets closer to the Rotunda.

Start point for player

 

The next step is add the HUD with the wife's happy meter and change the appearance of the car to be brighter. I need to try and remind myself that I can fix up little details of the terrain and overall appearance at the end and to try and push for the rules and coding to be complete before getting distracted on small details.

Tech Tip: Add an HTML box to Sidebar

I've added a HTML box to the sidebar of my blog. I have just put a short introduction about me so that people don't have to go routing to find my introduction in Week 1 to know who I am and what my blog is about.

My blog

Week 8 Progress

After looking back over my blog and looking at my points I'm quite happy with how I've done I've put a lot of time and effort into my blog and unity and designing my game and I've enjoyed doing it. It's definitely a massive step up from last year which was something I really wanted to do for myself. I feel like if I keep up what I've been doing and just try to do a tiny bit more, I am well capable of achieving an A in this module which I'd love to get for myself.

I feel like the module this year benefited me a lot in relation to time management, it's a skill I've always been extremely bad at as well as putting things I don't know how to do off and then never doing them. Okay I'll admit there were definitely a couple of times I took advantage of the grace period but all in all I'm quite happy with the progress I've made and I feel like hopefully I'll be able to  take what I've learnt and apply a more weekly and balanced work schedule in all of my modules.

I think the tasks I enjoyed the most were the unity tutorials, which I found quite fun to my surprise and the first couple of readings we did about time management and feedback and the growth mindset as they were all readings where I could have a look at how I am in these areas and try and improve. I found them really quite beneficial.

Going forward I still have a a lot of work to do on organisation and time management in not only this module but all of them. I'm going to try and make sure I complete every upload and declaration on time and try not to leave them  until the last minute as I have done. I want to make sure I continue to put the work in for the last little bit so I'm not disappointed looking back. 

Motivation meme

Tech Task:Animated GIF Maker

I made a gif using pictures that I took at a charity event that I was asked to be the photographer for in Limerick.

I used http://gifmaker.me/ to create this gif!

Prototype

This week I began trying to prototype my game, the main aspects i was trying to prototype was the look and feel of the game. I created the terrain and added in a grass and rock material and a black road like material that I will be using for the roads. I also added in the trees and grass to make it look more real. I had a long browse on the assets store to try and find a skybox I thought would fit with my game and picked a bright colourful sunny one which I think fits nicely especially  because of the fact I wanted it to look like a city and this particular skybox has buildings in the background.
I also spent a while trying to decide what size the car should be in comparison to the roads. I think most of it looks well but there are some things that i visioned looking slightly different that I'm not completely figuring out yet.

My game so far.

I want it to look more colourful, with it really popping out how bright it is which I am finding slightly difficult as when I try and brighten the skybox everything goes white. I'm currently unsure if this is because of me needing another look at the skybox tutorial because I'm doing it wrong or whether I need a different one all together. I also wanted the road material to look smoother and more road like but for some reason its unity isn't giving me the option to change the metallic or smoothness of the material when I add it to the terrain. The final issue I'm currently having is that in the console errors I have the same error appearing 999+ times that appeared after I made the C# script for the car and main camera and I really have no idea what the issue is as on visual studio the code is perfect and everything works the way I want it to. I'm just weary to continue and let issues build up.

I'm actually really enjoying creating my game so far and it's really rewarding when something you've spent a while trying to look nice or work properly works. In relation to meeting my targets I think I'm a little bit behind as I thought my game would be further along but I'm going to really work this week and get large chuck done!

Unity Free tutorials

This week I started using tutorials that are aimed towards my sort of game.
I watched three of  How to make a driving and race game for free.

This tutorial started of the same as the previous ones had but I thought I could do with the recap and fresh start completely for my game so I started from scratch with a new terrain and new textures. I chose was  sore of height i'd like part of the terrain and proceeded to add dips and hills. I then painted the terrain to look more car game like than the hills in the previous tutorials had looked. 

I followed the tutorial and added in a car from the standard assets pack which I can go back and customise later. I then put the main camera under the car on the side hierarchy so that it was focused on the car and then had a go playing the game and see what camera angle I liked for my game. After playing around for a while it was obvious the camera settings weren't exactly correct. I used a C# script to align the camera up correctly to that it followed the car nicely without any glitches or anything when the car crashed.

I enjoyed these tutorials and i'm exited to get right into developing my game.

Final GDD

I have completed my GDD and attached a link below I hope it is really clear how my game will work by reading this.

My plan is to work weekly on Unity gradually creating this game until the end of the semester. I'm going to follow the Jimmy Vegas tutorials he has up on creating a racing game to help create this and use a lot of the Unity we have already learnt to create surrounding and the environmental aspects of the game.

my DunDoc Site: https://www.dundoc.com/project/4789

Unity Tutorial 05

This weeks Unity tutorial's began with changing the appearance, mood and feel of my game such as the lighting, with a free downloadable skybox from the asset store. The sky chosen is pastel, light, relaxed and has a sunset which would give a relaxed sort of aesthetic to a game. Vegas also showed us how to customise the skybox that was downloaded to make it your own. I learned how to create a directional light around the character so it follows them while they play.

Next we looked at adding a wind zone to the game. To create the right kind of feeling to your game you can adjust the pulse magnitude and frequency to what you like. We learned how to make it that only the trees and grass around the character would have the wind zone.

In the second tutorial we started progressed being able to interact with objects using the same C# script that was used on the gem in a previous tutorial and using animation and a different C# script we were able to fade into a scene which just adds a bit of style to the appearance of the overall game and I thought added to the overall feel of the game quite nicely.

My Skybox 

Game Decisions

The reading this week 'Decision - making and Flow Theory' covered decision making and flow theory in games, it is the interactivity between players and systems that sets games apart from most other traditional media. "Decisions are the core of what a game is", when giving feedback on someones game you have to pay attention to what the decisions are in the game for the player, what effects these decisions create and why they're there. You're more likely to be a better game designer if you can properly understand the effectiveness of the different decisions in a game. Without decisions you don't have a game, they are the main essence of the game itself. The only exceptions are the rare gambling games as the core of these games is to win money, without the thrill of getting lucky and winning money the game becomes extremely unappealing. There are a number of games that despite having a number of decisions to make they can still be rather boring e.g battleship, so how do you make sure that you're games decisions are compelling to a player?

Things to avoid when creating your decisions in your game:

1. Meaningless decisions - Decisions that have no purpose and don't contribute to the experience of the game.
2. Obvious decisions - Decisions where the choice that the player should make is extremely clear, there is no challenge at all, defeats the purpose of the decision existing.
3. Blind decisions - Decisions where the player doesn't really know what the decisions are or what effect they'll have on the games. Players end up having to make random choices defeating the purpose of the decision.

Things that make a good decision:

1. Resource trades - give up an asset you have for a different asset. Both are valuable. Player must make a judgement on which asset they think is more beneficial to they're game experience.
2. Risk Vs Rewards - One of the choices is safe, the other choice gives a reward if successfully completed but has a much higher risk of failure than the first choice.
3. Choice of actions - There is a number of choices the player can make but they can only make the decision to complete one of these actions, player must determine which choice is most beneficial to them.
4. Short term Vs Long term - Player can have something right now or something even better later on it's up to them if they want to wait or not.
5. Dilemmas - Player has to give up one of there assets, they have to determine what they can play without.
6. Social information - Players can choose between player honestly or dishonestly for example playing dishonestly may get you want you want at the time but could have later consequences.

Decision making factors

As a player learning a new skill by completing a challenge or making the right decision is extremely rewarding and leaves a player in a flow state.

"Flow states are an intensely pleasurable state for the brain to be in" a large part of the fun that players experience playing a game comes from being in a flow state. A psychologist called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about a flow state and describes it as being in a state of extreme focus of attention where you tune out of everything except the task your concentrating on. You become highly productive and your brain gives you a shot of neurochemicals thatbis pleasurable. Being in a Flow state gives you a natural high. He also identified 3 requirements for a flow state to exist:

1. Creating challenging activity that requires skill.
2. The activity has to provide clear goals and feedback.
3. The outcome is uncertain but can be influenced by your actions.

Additional Readings:
http://www.lostgarden.com/