Multimedia Development

 So I have completed my last round of reading tasks. I thought it was interesting writing a chapter, but it didn't come without its challenges. First I thought about writing a chapter about why people play games, but I couldn't get stuck into it. So I decided to switch my chapter to be about how representation is changing in video games, a topic I'm much more interested in. Having more representation in video games is important to me as I'm not the 'typical' cisgender American, straight white male gamer. I am cisgender and I am a white male, but I'm not American and I identify as asexual. It is important to me that more characters of different nationalities get represented, and it's not something people commonly talk about. The fact that in almost every piece of media, books, video games, movies, or TV shows, the most popular ones ALWAYS have a majority cast of American characters, whether they are fully American or partly American. As someone who is not...

I have finished my last round of Unity tutorials. While I did find them interesting, I know that game development is not for me, as I cannot remember what any of the code I wrote in my scripts do. In these tutorials, we were taught about audio and preparing a build for publishing. I thought the audio was interesting, but we weren't taught how to get some of it working, like the footsteps for the player character, or the sounds for hitting the robots with the cogs. The build part, I kind of breezed through, as my build was no where near good enough for publishing. My only problem with these tutorials is we weren't taught how to make the character have a finite about of cogs, players could just throw cogs infinitely which gets away some of the challenge for a game like this. I would have appreciated a tutorial on how to create a set amount of ammo and collecting ammo. I also couldn't fix some problems I've been having, like the robot's animations not working or, makin...

I have read the chapters of two of my peers wrote. I did find the chapters very interesting and learnt a few things in the process. I did think the two chapters, Gaming psychology and the history of games were interesting. In the history of gaming chapter, I wasn't aware that there was a difference between formal and informal play. I thought every game, even the simplest had at least one rule. In the gaming psychology chapter, I was aware of many of the points made in it. And I do know just how bad gaming addiction can be. While I am a gamer, I'm lucky enough that I'm not as bad as some other people and I actually cannot stay on my computer or an electronic device for too long. One thing that I do need to do with my chapter is add the references and bibliography. Overall I think my peers wrote good chapters that brought up interesting and important points. I did learn some new things reading them and now I've gotten curious on reading other chapters. Anyway, I'm gla...

  I have completed the next batch of tutorials. I have to admit, it wasn't as frustrating at the last ones. I had complained that I didn't think I had coded the ability to throw projectiles, but it turns out I did, I just forgot which button it was assigned to.  In these tutorials, we created the UI, which is very important in games. When I was trying to get it to work, I had some problems moving the Pivot with my mouse, as it would just move the images themselves, so I had to type in its position, which I had to trial and error to get right, but I got it working in the end. We also created as NPC, though this NPC is as simple as they get, you interact with them with a button and they say some dialogue, but, it was interesting to create them and I wonder if they are going to get more complicated. One thing I did notice however with the robot, is that its animations for walking aren't working and I don't know how to fix it. I also notice that its hitbox for the gears are...

 So I did more research into representation in video games. I shifted my focus to researching how different nationalities are represented. Surprisingly, I couldn't really find any papers about this specific topic, but I myself see the problem. If any video games you play that take place in some sort of Earth or similar, 90% of the player characters will be some type of American or Japanese nationality, whether it's partial or fully. And for me, being non-American or Japanese, it makes me feel insecure about my own nationality because I don't see it represented enough in a non stereotypical way, some of which I'm actually starting to find it offensive because of how much they are stereotyped, this is more seen in American animated sitcoms, but that's beside the point. Because I couldn't really find much papers on this topic, I had to do my own research, as people don't seem to see this as a problem, and I do, as how can the video game industry be diverse if e...

  I have completed my next round of Unity Tutorials. These were not the most interesting, not going to lie. The first one was all about making the camera follow the player character, which is important, but it's not exciting. The next tutorial was about particles. Particles are important, but they are really complicated to get right. I followed the tutorial to get the smoke particles for the robot, but based on some text in the tutorial, it implies I should have the player character able to throw projectiles, which is something I haven't done. I don't know what happened there. Also after doing the smoke, the tutorial said to do other particles yourself such as health particles or damage particles. I tried making an attempt at the damage particles, but quickly got fed up trying to figure this out, because damage particles are so much different than the smoke particles. I am hoping the next patch of tutorials will not be so boring. I also don't like it when the tutorials ...

I've continued on my research on the representation of different minority groups in gaming. This time, I've focused on racial representation. What I found was shocking, as I didn't notice it until I really started to look at it. This in of itself can be a problem, because I, being a Caucasian male, shows that I don't notice other racial groups being under-represented, which is a problem that needs to be addressed. A big problem with this part of my research is a lot of the papers I was finding required me to pay money to see the full paper, so I had to make do with the previews for my reading, which did work out, but it would have been nice to be able to see the full paper. One  paper I looked at talked about how someone, who I assume is African American, talked about revisiting a childhood boxing game and talked about how in their adult game, found it offensive how they represented the African American characters. They then talked about how younger players didn't ...

 So I have continued my analysis. Of course, my main focus will be the LGBT community in the gaming industry, but I do plan on touching on other minorities as well, this time, I focused my attention on the portrayal of women in the gaming industry. Off the bat, before I even started my research, I knew there was a problem with the portrayal of women in gaming. I, myself, even find it fascinating and unusual when a game has a sole female protagonist. The games I can think of that have female protagonists are games where there are multiple protagonists and the females are outnumbered by the males, or it's a game where you can chose the gender of your character. This is all stuff I knew even before I started my in-dept analysis. Going into my research I found a  paper  that details the portrayal of women in gaming. While I probably not reference this one in my essay, as it is from 2006, it does bring up some important notes that I have noticed in the gaming industry. The mai...

  So I have completed my next batch of Unity Tutorials, I still like them, but they are started to get really complicated. One Thing I was glad we did was animation, it was very complicated, which I knew before I even started. While I was familiar with key-frames from Adobe Premiere Pro and Audition, Unity made things a bit more tricky as it was very specific with the steps when making new animations, which was to be expected. One problem I having with the tutorials, is that they are starting to skim on showing us very new line of code to write. I am confident doing new things as long as I have someone helping me every step of the way until I am familiar enough to do it myself, which I am no where near with writing C# scripts. Another problem with my scripts is that, as of writing this post, my keyboard has started to double or even triple every key I type, I've had to go back in this post a lot to remove extra letters that my keyboard put down. This has happened with my keybo...

  So I have finished my next Unity tutorial. It was fun as I finally got to add actual game-play apart from movement, which is health, although, You can't view health in-game just yet. I added environment hazards, enemies and health items. I am not being very creative with the level design just yet, I'm going to wait until I have more of the tutorials completed first I wonder how complicated we're going to make the enemy A.I., however I should get my hopes up that it will be that complicated. As usual I did complete these tutorials faster than the estimated time. While I usually have no problem with the tutorials, there has been one problem that I have encountered time and time again that I have no idea how to fix, which I will show in the following screenshot. I have no idea how to fix this problem as even when I copy and paste the code from the tutorial, it persists, there is only one fix I have found. Change the follow code from this Into this   My only problem with this...

 I've finished my second round of Unity tutorials and they are simple enough I had no real problems with this one, I'm glad we were able to add colliders to things that the character shouldn't be walking over, like the water. The tutorials did suggest adding more decorations to the environment besides boxes, but I was too lazy to reread the tutorial for adding the collisions and adding the prefabs and all that.  The only problem I did come across was when I was editing the script so the character would collide with the boxes properly and didn't stutter while running into them, I edited the script in a way that I couldn't move the character any more. Both my script and the script that the tutorial had looked identical, but when I decided to copy the whole script on the tutorial and paste it into my script, suddenly the character could move again. I don't know what was the problem, but it doesn't matter anymore. One thing I am hoping for is being able to creat...

 After taking time to think about it, I've decided to look at how the representation of the LGBT community and other minority groups in video games has changed. While I will be looking at minority groups as a whole, my main focus will be the LGBT community, the reason is that I find them very interesting and the fact that I've seen straight couples so many times, that they are now boring me. I've read on how in reality, the gaming industry still has a long ways to go in terms of LGBT representation. I read that there are homophobic players who don't want any LGBT themes. However that could be counteracted by saying there used to be sexist players who didn't want women as playable characters and look where we are now. On a serious note, a lot of AAA developers, from what I read, are very intimated on having more prominent LGBT themes because they are afraid of losing the market on their homophobic players, but to that I say screw them, and a lot of straight players a...

  I've finished the first Unity tutorial of this semester. I found it hard to motivate myself to get started, but I did eventually. Making a 2-D game is interesting, it can be easier than a 3-D game, as you don't need to know how to make and texture 3-D models. I wonder what this tutorial will turn this game into. From looking at some of the assets, I guess some type of R.P.G. The actual tutorials didn't take me too long I don't think, I believe I did most of them quicker than the suggested time. One thing that did trip me up was the Tile-maps. Unity had changed since the tutorial I was following was written.  We were given a video on the official class website on what was different and how it would look to set up. But I was stubborn and wanted to figure it out on my own. It did take me a while to figure things out and I did make some mistakes, but I did get it working eventually.  I knew, just by reading the other options when making the Tile-palette, that the one I wa...

 So I have begun my research planning. This is not an easy thing for me because I don't like researching. I prefer to use my own knowledge and get knowledge from primary sources. I do not like doing secondary research, as my attention span would not last long enough. I am torn on what topic I'd like to chose for the book. I know a lot about why humans play games based on my own knowledge and listening to other people, but I am also interested in how game narrative has changed over the years. Researching is probably my weakest point. I prefer to just get going with things and look into things I'm not as familiar with as I go along. My biggest problem with developing skills like this is complicated. I'm a fast learner, but when something has a learning curve, it is so much more difficult for me to get over it. Another problem with researching is that I don't know where to find information for what I'm looking for, except for Wikipedia, which is my go to, if I want...

  I have completed the next few Unity Tutorials and I feel like I am a natural at this, as altogether I completed these in an hour and thirty minutes. This batch of tutorials are interesting as we get to explore more types of code. I am an animal lover, so I couldn't resist putting more than three animals in the game, plus four of them are dogs. I don't know if I am just really good, or if these tutorials should be taking me a lot longer as I usually complete them well under the recommended time to complete them, though it is a confident boost. The only problem I had was that Unity kept telling me I had an error in my spawn manager script that stopped me from playing the game. I couldn't find the error anywhere, so I had to tell Unity to ignore that error I have a screenshot of my script here if anyone can identify the error, as I can't see it anywhere and I wonder if Unity is just broken in its error finding. If anyone can comment what the error is, I'd really appr...

  I have completed the second Unity tutorial and I think I am getting the hang of it, although, I still worry about forgetting the code as I do have a lot going on in terms of work. My overall experience has been a lot better than it was when I first tried Unity. I got to give the player actual control in this tutorial which I think is a big achievement. One thing I've noticed is that it is taking much shorter to do these tutorials than expected, my first one, I forget to say, but it is estimated that it would take 200 minutes, while for me I feel like I did it in 45 to 60 minutes. This tutorial was estimated to take 50 minutes, I did it in just over 30 minutes. Although I did notice this time around I went back a couple times to make sure I was doing it right. There are some tasks I wasn't really interested in doing, such as putting comments in my code. Maybe that's just me, but I can usually work out what's going on just by looking at it without comments. But for the ...

So from the title of this post, you know that I have finally started the Unity tutorials. I got filled with the determination I needed to get through this after hearing encouraging words from people. I dusted off my old Unity account and installed it to my computer. Following the tutorials I found them very time consuming for some simple tasks. Also because I am kind of familiar with the Unity interface already I wasn't a fan of listening to the explanation about it and I just wanted to jump right in. But I hope future tutorials pick up the pace. They are videos after all, people can just pause and rewind if they get lost. When I did use Unity all those years ago I tried to make a 2D game, but these tutorials were for a 3D game. Though they are different, I got the hang of it very quickly. One thing that struck me was actually writing code. Back when I did use Unity I have no memory about actually writing code, so this is already going better than my last experience. After completi...

 What is a game?  Not an easy question to answer.  Games come in all different shapes, sizes, genres, etc. Games, from what I know are a means of entertainment. They are for everyone of all ages. There are some games that are targeted towards a certain group of people more than others, but in reality anyone can play any game they want to. Even though some people try to act like they can't. Making a game is not an easy task, especially video games, and it usually requires a team of people. A lot of people who try to make video games give up when they realise how much more work needs to be put into it than they thought. I know how difficult making a video game is so I'm not even going to try. I remember I tried to make a game, but I was put in a situation where no-one was showing me what to do, I didn't get the help I needed and it has ruined the chance of me trying to make a game ever again. I am okay looking through game files to look at different things such as texture f...

Growth Mindset. I can't say I've ever heard of it before. When I looked into it, I didn't know what to think of it. My only problem that I can think of is that I believe having a growth mindset is easier said than done, which can be said for a lot of things. It's not a topic that I have a strong opinion about. When I look at it I can see where they are coming from and why it would be beneficial, but I do find having a growth mindset difficult. I feel like it's down to the situation. Some situations you can have a growth mindset while in others it's a fixed mindset. I am in the middle of these. Some situations my mindset is fixed, others it's not. Although I've noticed that it is usually fixed, although I think it has something to do with feeling unmotivated to something, even if I want to do it. As I don't have a strong interest in this topic, I would not be interested in learning more about it on my own, but if someone else was talking about it to m...

 Hi, I'm Chris. I'm 20 years old and this is an introduction about me, as almost nobody knows anything about me. I'm very reserved, so here I plan on talking a bit about myself. One of the big things about me is Video games. I previously wrote about a few of my favorite video games. My first console I remember playing was the PlayStation 2 and two of my favorite games on it were The Simpsons: Hit and Run and The Polar Express Video Game. Gaming is such a big part of my life that my current favorite game, Minecraft, gave me my Internet last name from a joke that in Minecraft I attract creepers like a magnet. I am not good with horror games, but I'm trying to get better at it. I do like tycoon style games. One I've tried that I'd like to start playing again was called Prison Architect. I'm pretty flexible with Video Game genres except for a few. For example I do not like endless runner style games. I would rather a goal to race towards rather than try to run f...