Transdimensional Adventures

This week in Unity I added raycasting to my spaceship's weapons, instantiating explosions and enemy movement. Raycasting is basically the game checking if the player hits something with their weapons. I followed a tutorial and added a script to do just that. (source: own screenshot) As you can see, each laser has a separate script so they don't all have to hit or miss at the same time. It took a bit of messing around with the code but I got it eventually. Next I added instantiated explosions. This basically adds a particle "fire" effect to an object when it's shot. (source: own screenshot) As you can see, it's pretty basic at the moment, but as the guy in the video said, "once we add some proper particles to it, it's gonna look pretty cool" Next up, we created a script for the enemy movement. This one was a bit of a pain in the ass, because it just kept giving me compile errors and I couldn't figure out what's wro...

The first reading for this week is called   Into the Woods: A Practical Guide to the Hero's Journey   This article talks about the "Hero's Journey". It's a concept in mythology and storytelling which is basically a template for most stories. ( image source , public domain) I'll be honest, I don't think the author did a good job explaining what "the myth" is in the first part of the article, and so I had to dig around a bit. It turns out "the myth" is just a story. The story doesn't need to have all the components listed above, and they don't necessarily have to be in the given order. The  wikipedia article for the hero's journey   explains what it is quite well and gives several examples for each point. The second article is called  What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story . This article again talks about the storylines in videogames. Side note: these articles are old, the author refers to the Xbox 360...

Everything's just going awfully. Now that that's out of the way, what is going well? I added a cool looking trail to my spaceship, which turns on when I accelerate and turns off when I let off. (own screenshots, Unity3D) There it is. That's several days of work. I think C# just isn't my thing. I also added smooth camera! Rather than just dragging the "Main Camera" object under the spaceship and calling it a day, I had to spend several hours programming and whacking out code to make the camera "delay" in movement when the player accelerates or turns. Having finished that I moved onto firing lasers. Finally something interesting! So far this is what I have (own screenshot, Unity3D) For now the lasers just kinda blink every half second, but I swear to god I will make it do things! Would I call this an alpha? ...no but it's still more finished than whatever Bethesda puts out I'll be honest, I despise C# wit...

This is the one I won't like As I've mentioned in yesterday's blog post, the past two months have been very hectic. Let's review my blog posts, shall we? Week 1 - Traffic Lights - the logic behind it World of Warcraft - my favourite game In the first week we broke down how it looks like, logically and step by step, when cars drive through traffic lights. We also talked about our favourite games which I think was cool. Mine is World of Warcraft; it's an MMORPG where you create a character and fight stuff. I've played it for over ten years (!). Week 2 - We had five blog posts this week (or at least that's how many I have done).  Introduction - everyone wrote a bit about themselves This week we also talked about the growth mindset which basically means the best way to learn new stuff and learn more is to step out of your comfort zone. Week 3 - This week we talked more about game design and did our first Unity tutorial. I liked this Unity tutorial...

So overall, I think the idea of giving feedback in the form of comments on classmate's blogs is a really good idea. When we do that, we get feedback from the point of view of several people. I think this can be helpful because this could potentially give a person several (10 maybe even 15) ways to improve their stuff.  Personally, I find constructive, negative comments the most useful because they show me ways in which I can improve. I got several regarding my games and ideas for it. Thanks to them, I improved my controls system and had several ideas for smaller parts of the game and code. In my introduction post, I mentioned I have a dog and included a photo (here it is) ...and multiple people have commented on it, saying how cute she is! It might not be very constructive but people saying my dog is adorable is always nice to hear :) Here are some of the comments people left: "I didn't know you had a dog, she's lovely, will you ask her to murd...

What a hefty two months this has been! In these short nine weeks I've learned a multitude of skills and facts, both about the process of designing and developing a game as well as about my classmates from college, since they're all writing their own blogs, and we often look at each others' blogs. My favourite reading was from week 7,  developing a princess saving app . I liked it because we took a deep dive "under the hood" of a simple app, a complex app and a videogame (which is an app too, really).  Also I liked this and wanted to share: (image taken from  week 7 reading PDF ) Overall, I would say I'm finding the game development part quite challenging because I set out to create a game that has a unique system, where you fly a spaceship rather than control a single character in an environment on terrain. I decided this at the start because we were shown  this video   which talks about the growth mindset. To me, creating a game like that would...

This time I'm doing a Wikipedia trail starting at EVE Online .  EVE Online is an MMO space simulation game which is renowned for the freedom it gives. According to the wikipedia page, the players "engage in unscripted economic competition, warfare, and political schemes with other players". I played EVE for a while but I found it too complicated and gave up on it. At the moment, the game stands at around half a million subscribers  From there I went to  Wind Commander   which is a space simulation game from 1990. This was one of the first, if not the first space simulation game. It first released on MS-DOS initially, and many more platforms after that.  By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51354770 As you can see, Wing Commander was quite advanced for its time, when most games were as simple as Mario Brothers. Following that, I clicked on  science fiction , which is quite a broad subject, it...