Alpha

This week for my project I worked on getting the timer and triggers functioning properly so that It was actually a playable game instead of driving around the terrain. I also worked on adding buildings and better roads and paths and a train station to create the city portion of the terrain. nothing has gone wrong so far while i'm working on my game but I would like to fix the way that you can see the grass developing as your driving towards it while playing I had originally thought I had already addressed and fixed this problem but I've began noticing it a lot and it makes the roads slightly confusing to follow when the outline of the road and the grass is only showing as the players driving by it.

This week coming I need to work on respawning if you get stuck somewhere over a couple of seconds as if you have a bad crash you can get stuck somewhere you don't have to restart the whole game when you have time left on the countdown.

I am starting to worry about meeting targets I don't know if its just that I'm spending far too long on one specific thing I want to complete but I am starting to worry if I'll manage to get everything that I originally planned complete. I am really enjoying the process though.

Terrain

Game being Played

Buildings in game

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