reading 6

In the reading I have done this week I got together a couple of interesting papers on video games impact on speech and language development. Obviously papers like these focus mainly on people who have difficulty with speech and language development. I learned in my reading that dyslexia has some impact on somewhere around 10% of the population.

 Dyslexia is a severely invalidating learning disability that affects literacy acquisition despite normal intelligence and adequate instruction.

Dyslexia is the main ailment that is focused on in quite a few of the papers I've looked at, both the ones I'll be using and the ones I won't be using. This is because dyslexia is a very common condition with a strong impact on the topic of my paper.

The main paper which caught my attention is one about video games aiding children with dyslexia in learning to read better. The paper puts forth that 12 hours of action video games had a positive effect on the reading comprehension skills and the reading speed which was measured in syllables per second. It also posits that this is because the high pace and reactions needed to play action video games translated into an attention span improvement which impacted reading abilities. More reading in the future will hopefully yield more interesting things like this.

I was initially intimidated by the scope of this project but as I read more and more I feel that it will be easier than I initially thought. The more I read the more confident I become about this project, I have fallen behind slightly but I will be back on the horse soon.

unity tutorial 6

Unity tutorial 6

If you go back in my blog posts to a previous unity tutorial you will find that I was having fun with the lighting aspect of unity, I decided to not focus on that this time as I am already adept in it but I did use it a bit this time. I was mainly focusing on trying to get a functioning area in which the player can walk around in while also adding lighting to it in order to create and atmosphere in the area the player is in.

I struggled initially with the spawning but after messing around with it for a little bit I was able to get the player to spawn on top of the platform I placed for this purpose. I didn't bother with any detailed textures so the area the player walks around in is pretty bland and there isn't anything to do quite yet. However despite this I was able to make the area a bit more interesting with the lighting so when I am adding specific textures I feel that I will be able to make a somewhat palatable environment for the entire game to take place in.

overall I feel that I will be able to use these abilities to make a solid game for a final project. I am developing strong fundamentals in unity and I think I can master simple things like this before I focus on the smaller details. I am feeling more and more comfortable with unity every time I open it.

 
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Prototype

I have decided to go for a horror style game in which you will wander around an area, engage in combat with enemies and try to survive. I have chosen this because I enjoyed the details that I was able to achieve with lighting while learning unity.

What is working?

As previously mentioned I have been having success with lighting in my unity experience. Changing colour, intensity, direction and the like have given me some ideas I could use in my game. Perhaps I could make a handheld light that other horror games typically use to build suspense as you don't know what is coming from far away. It gives me a lot of options I can use to build an atmosphere in my game. I have also found things like building an area to be quite easy, molding shapes to be whatever I need them to be is a simple experience for me at the moment so I could definitely make something interesting in my game.

What am I finding difficult?

Some things in unity can be a bit finicky for me. If you go back to my first blog post about using unity you can see that I struggled with the environment a little. Tutorials seem to all be using different versions of unity which makes following along a bit more difficult but not impossible. There really isn't anything else I'm particularly struggling with, every issue I have can normally be worked around or there is a solution online. Deciding exactly what I am going to make is not clear at the moment but I think I will figure it out in due time.



https://i.udemycdn.com/course/240x135/1210008_6859.jpg

Unity tutorial 5

If you go back to my first post about unity you'll find that I found it difficult to learn, however over time I am getting more and more comfortable and I think I may be able to make a game quite soon. I particularly found the lighting interesting, use of shadows and different colour lighting make me want to create an atmospheric horror game. I think this could be very possible for me to use my lighting abilities to create a good atmosphere, along with simple controls and AI for enemies this seems like a very achievable goal for me.

Making areas and lighting them appropriately could make for an interesting challenge that I am excited to undertake. Simple AI, atmospheric lighting, simple environments could all combine for a simple, fun horror game and as I learn more and more about unity I'm sure that I could add a twist and make it stand out from other games in the genre.

At the beginning of my unity career I thought a game would be difficult and perhaps tedious, however upon learning the basics of unity I discovered that it is not the difficult task I once proposed, it is a whole other type of difficulty, the challenge of making something fun with my albeit limited skills. I'm excited to make a game after playing them for years.



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Games GDD

Games GDD

http://www.thegamesjournal.com/articles/DesignConsiderations.shtml

The main thing I pulled from this article is that the presentation of a game is extremely important to some people. The article was about a board game and some of the simple things were things that would seem obvious but could easily be missed such as making pieces smaller than their place on a board, using strong contrasting colours and things like that. This made me think about the games I will be making, board games aren't necessarily on the menu at the moment however these principals could be applied to the UI in any video games I make in the future.

https://learn.canvas.net/courses/3/pages/level-5-dot-0-generating-ideas?module_item_id=44545

This article posits that to design a game you should start with a simple idea, set of rules or something else important and work from there, this will root your game in reality and not lead to you making a huge idea and having to taper down. Know you're aim and your limits before beginning. Start with a realistic idea and do it well, a simple game made well is far better than an overly ambitious game done poorly. The core idea is idea generation because once you have a solid idea you can work from there.

http://gamingconceptz.blogspot.com/2011/12/simple-and-elegant-essence-of-game.html

This article focuses on PONG, one of the first successful games ever. It points out the pure minimalism of the game design and the extremely simple rules of the game. Requiring 2 players makes it a social experience and the article goes on to state that solid game design can stand the test of time as pong has.


https://www.traininginchennai.in/3d-animation-training-images/game-design.jpg