Feedback thoughts

After browsing through the articles, the first article that I picked was Why rejection hurts so much by Guy Winch. I chose this article because everyone has dealt with rejection at some stage in their lives and any tips on dealing with rejection are extremely useful. In the article Winch talks about how it’s been scientifically proven that the same part of the brain that is activated during felling physical pain is also activated when feeling the hurt of rejection which is weird that your mind is programmed to feel rejection so bad. My favourite part was when he talked about how your really your own worst enemy after rejection that instead of trying to help yourself get over the hurt you are experiencing you give yourself a harder time, he says that "The greatest damage rejection causes is usually self inflicted. Just when our self esteem is hurting most, we go and damage it even further". I loved this article and will definitely use the tips Winch gives about how you can help yourself after feeling unwanted and rejected.


The second article I read was Seven ways to crush self doubt by John Spencer. I found this article very useful as I often have a lot of self doubt especially when it comes to college work for example last week in my Drama Filmmaking module had to present our ideas for or short films, I dreaded having to present mine all day because I was afraid that my idea would sound stupid compared to other people in my classes ideas which is a negative outlook to have. The first tip that John Spencer has is to not compare yourself to others he point out its natural to try and compare yourself to others because you "don't want to suck" at what your doing "and it's way too easy to find validation by comparing" but its unhealthy and can only result in arrogance or self doubt.

Spencer also talked about how trying to think of all of your work and ideas as experiments can really help with self doubt "if it didn't work it's not a failure, its a chance to figure out what does work". Not doing any work or trying at all is the biggest result and will always result in failure.

Trust yourself picture

I really enjoyed reading theses two articles and feel like there are some really good tips that will help me in my day to day life. In my opinion feedback is really important, for anyone to be able to succeed they need a lot of feedback on their work. I think It's about finding the balance you need to be getting feedback but getting productive feedback. For example when I was in school I had a teacher who would always tell you something positive about you or your work and something that needed improvement so you felt good about yourself and motivated to try harder in other in the things she critiqued. On the other hand I had other teachers who would never give any sort of motivation or positive feedback it would always be negative so I ended up feeling  horrible about the subject and not wanting to try. I think getting feedback from people who are fair, honest and understanding is a key to success in anything you try.

Game Brainstorm

1st Game idea:

 After brainstorming and researching different genre's of games my first idea is to create a car racing game. Car racing games have always been my favourite types of games especially 'Mario Kart's' as I've mentioned in a previous post. I feel like because I like these sort of games I would understand what a player would want when playing my game so it would help when developing. I found a really useful article when researching that goes into huge depth on how to create a race car game  and all the steps that need to be taken to have a good game, https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/2015/839721/. I also found and watched some tutorials on how I could go about creating this type of game by Jimmy Vegas.

If I was to make this game I would be hoping to take inspiration from Mario Kart's and create my own cartoon like characters and backgrounds making it colourful and exiting. Overall I find race car games fun, fast paced and exiting so it would be cool to be able to make my own

Race Car Game Tutorial

2nd Game idea:

My second idea for my game is a 3D shooter game. Shooter games are one of the oldest genre's of games some good examples are: Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Halo and so many more. I've never enjoyed shooter games very much and was never very good at them when my brother allowed me to play them on his Playstation. I would always be the very first player killed and was horrific at aiming. I'd like to create a first player shooter game where the first player is walking around a world with a gun and has to kill their enemy's.  I'd like to be able to make this as a PC game to see if its any easier for example I played Fornight on my brother's playstation and was atrocious but when I played it on my phone I was so much better and enjoyed playing much more.


Some useful links i found for first shooter games are:
https://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/124632/gaming/game_design_tips_for_first_person_shooter_games.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fGB2H1AGP8 - A tutorial on how to create a FPS game.

3rd Game idea:

My third idea is a 3D Adventure world game with challenges or puzzles along the way. My favourite adventure world games were all played on the Playstation 2 some examples are: Grand Theft Auto, the Bratz games and my favourite...  Dogslife. Dogslife was a 3d game where first player was a dog, players could roam around the world as they pleased and then they could also choose to complete tasks and missions along the way to progress. I liked this game as you could challenge yourself in the tasks but if you felt like just exploring the games world you could also do that. If I was to create this sort of game I would be taking inspiration from Dogslife but changing the storyline, tasks, characters and graphics.

Dogslife Packaging

Here's a tutorial that I found that could help me create this sort of game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFguvztl2nA

4th game idea:

My fourth idea is a 3D or 2D platform game. The type of platform game I like and would want to create is an endless runner game. These sort of games are the most popular ios and andriod games and are very addictive, I've definitely spent hours playing endless runner games trying to get a better high score either for myself or to beat my friends high scores some of the most popular were: Temple Run, Subway Surfers and Jetpack Joyride. My personal favourite that I've played is Endless Lake, I find it exiting and different from other ones I have played as your character can multiply while your playing making it harder to concentrate and survive. If I was to go with this idea I would like to take inspiration from endless lake and have something that other platform games don't.

While researching games like this I found lot's of useful links that would really help me develop this sort of game:
https://www.androidauthority.com/lets-build-a-simple-endless-runner-game-in-unity-759135/
This link isn't useful at the moment because the author has to update his own website and links but he has commented on the page saying he will fix the problems so I chose to include it because the images he has are what I would hope my game would look similar to.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/creating-an-3d-endless-runner-game-like-temple-run-in-unity-3d-using-c.469865/

Endless Lake Game

  I had started trying to make one of these sort of games during the summer and had a sort of fixed mindset about it so when it got difficult I would put it off or avoid it so it would be great to be able to look back and say I've made it.





Some other useful links:
https://www.thocp.net/software/games/reference/genres.htm

Thoughts on Unity Tutorial 01

I downloaded Unity onto my laptop to do the tutorials this week. I find tutorials really helpful and quick when trying to achieve anything and often watch them to help with all of my modules and the beginner game ones were really good. They were easy to follow and if you were struggling you could start and stop it at any point and rewind to re-watch it until you could follow.

Overall I learned a lot about starting off on unity and got to try and get used to some of the basics.

 Following unity tutorial

In the first tutorial i learned how to navigate around unity and to make a game object. I also learned how to scale and move game objects around and about the game screen. I found this tutorial really helpful with all of the shortcuts (cmd+Z = Undo) and I definitely wouldn't have been able to start with the second tutorial as this one had key basic instructions. This video ended with us creating a terrain and learning how to add bumps and dips.

In the second and third tutorial we learned how to add textures and materials to Unity and how to put them onto game objects. It was slightly difficult at the start but I messed around with it long enough that i feel like I had gotten the hang of it by the end. We learned how to add trees and grass and how to input first player camera, it was really cool creating a little world and being able to explore it. We were introduced to C sharp coding which took a bit of pausing and rewinding to get the hang of. I also took a while trying to create an even enough path through the game like mountains, it took some time to try and get the path even and walkable looking.

Overall I really enjoyed trying to design a little world and walk around in it after, it made me want to try and make something look better for when I clicked into playing mode again. I'm looking forward to learning more and improving.

Game Design

Game design is hard to define and after reading it was obvious that there is a huge number of definitions out there by different game designers

After browsing through some of the articles I realise how much time has to go into brainstorming and trying to find inspiration for a new game before it can even begin being coded. Every idea, character and storyline of the game has to be well thought through and fully developed before being coded but coming up with your new idea should only take a few minutes. Once you have your prototype of a new idea then you begin making the idea stronger. Game Design is only one part of Game Development.

Game Design Mindmap

When designing a game the most important part is making sure that the game is functional and working well, a few of the articles pointed out that a lot of game designers make the mistake of doing exceptional art and visuals for their game, trying to make it pretty instead of mainly focusing on the game functioning properly. 

In Lewis Pulsipher's article he talks about the importance of "reigning in your ambition" for your first game and starting simple. He also says for your first few attempts of designing a game to take inspiration from other games. I really enjoyed reading his article, he was very to the point and doesn't have loads of unnecessary content. He finishes his article by saying that "the Game is never really done" as there are always improvements and new developments that can me made.

In conclusion I enjoyed reading these articles and it's made me feel more confident about starting my own game for our project now that I know how to start properly.

Useful links: 

1. https://learn.canvas.net/courses/3/pages/level-1-dot-1-critical-vocabulary?  module_item_id=44516

2. https://learn.canvas.net/courses/3/pages/level-2-introduction-and-readings?module_item_id=44521

3. http://gamasutra.com/blogs/LewisPulsipher/20110516/7453/So_Youre_Going_To_Make_A_Game_For_The_Very_First_Time.php

Tech Tip: Blogger Template

I now have a new design for my blog, I just personalised it to what I liked I used a background image of a photo I took at a festival, this changed the whole colour scheme of my blog. I experimented a lot with different fonts and layouts and I'm pretty happy with how it looks now