DIT Blog

[andrewcotter]

DIT Blog

My DIT Blog week 10.

Mon:     We talked about decisions in games, what are decisions, what the types of decisions are and how to use them effectively. Baz gave us an assignment of making a decision based game for next week, After this we finished off the game of life (for the most part) and Bryan assured us that arrays would be completely optional on the test tomorrow.

Tues:     The test did not go as well as it should have. We had to make a scene with a house, a man, a key, the ground and the night sky, complete with stars which had to be done with arrays which was worth fifteen percent of the test (optional my ass), I just used a for loop and it worked/looked fine. Making the scene was fine but the man had to pick up the key and go to the house but I, for the life of me, couldn’t get him to move. So I coded in the events as if he could move and hoped they’d be okay because I couldn’t test it to make sure.

Wed:     We had the double Ludology we were meant to have last week today but due to some insane traffic I got in about forty five minutes late which was alright because there was a fair few of us that’d got caught up in the traffic and had been late. In the class we designed our own characters in a fighting card game and we had to try and make them a balanced character. It was fun but in almost no way was it balanced.

Fri:     We had another session of feedback on our gameplay footage today. I figured out OBS before now so at least we had a decent video this time.

[andrewcotter]

DIT Blog

My DIT Blog week 9.

Mon:     We did the final playtest for our card games, which took longer to arrange then necessary because Baz let somebody ‘help’ arrange which group went where. Our game took on a few changes based on the feedback we got and we spent most of our time trying to make the team we playtested’s game playable. In programming we watched a few videos about Conway’s game of life and then started to code it ourselves.

Tues:     We could work on our assignment, keep going with the game of life or study for our lab test next week.

Wed:     It was meant to be a double Ludology with one class taking the place of creative practice but Hugh got sick and couldn’t take us so we didn’t have any classes at all.

Fri:     We had another playtest this week.We had most of the game finalised at this stage but we still have a few improvements to make.

[andrewcotter]

DIT Blog

My DIT Blog week 8.

Mon:     We play tested each others card games. We played a card game that was like a dungeon crawler. It wasn’t that long and one of the cards was a bit broken but it was good. And we got feedback on our game. Then Bryan started arrays with us in programming.

Tues:     We worked on arrays in the lab, they were hard to understand before the lab and after it was a lot clearer that I was still very confused.

Wed:     We had the speaker again for creative practice where we talked about the Consider All Factors method in which you decide on a number of factors and then write out that many things about a topic, this incentivises the person to write more factors. Then in Ludology we had presentations of game concepts about our lives. My  games were “Time Meh-nagement”, a time management game, and “Glass and Pass”, about my job standing in front of a door making sure people don’t leave with a glass of enter without a pass. It went better than expected which isn’t hard when you’re not expecting much out of you public speaking skills but still I’m sad that my pun title didn’t even seem to register as a joke. Overall there was an interesting variety of game concepts.

Fri:     We had another gameplay video to get feedback for our games today. We figured out how OBS worked but we couldn’t figure out how to do it correctly so it was another phone video.

[andrewcotter]

DIT Blog

My DIT Blog week 7.

Mon:     In game design we were making our own card game in groups. I was with Jordan, Luke, Nathan, Miyoa. We made a kind of Strategy Defense game using the King,Queen,Jack and two other random cards as potential targets blocked by a randomly assigned defense value. The goal is to kill the opposing King. We started programming a game called Bug  Zap with Byran.

Tues:     We were working on Bug Zap to try and finish it in the lab today. I spent most of my time trying to make it look good but didn’t get it to work in the end.

Wed:     We had a talk with a new guy today in creative practice, Damian Gordon. He talked to us about the PMI decision making system created Edward de Bono (Billionaire). PMI stands for Plus Minus Interesting. You write down all of the good things about an idea, then all the bad and then all the interesting things that could happen. In Ludology we discussed the use of narrative story telling that Naughty Dog are famous for, (you know post Crash Bandicoot).

Fri:     We play tested our Atari games to get feedback.

[andrewcotter]

DIT Blog

My DIT Blog week 5.

Mon:     Hurricane Ophelia

Tues:     Since we weren’t in for programming we hadn’t got anything new to practice. So in the lab we did the lab test from two years ago. It was pretty basic, all we had to do was make a square go back and forth across a road as if it was a car and then we just added to it.

Wed:     In creative practice we did a team exercise called the marshmallow challenge with four others. Making the tallest self standing structure out of uncooked spaghetti that can hold a marshmallow. We all pretty much sat back and let Jamie do it, we would give a little input here and there and I held things together while he typed some of it but overall... too many cooks and all that. In Ludology we play tested our “fixed” ”broken” games. It was a good a ggod way to get feedback.

Fri:     We showed off the progress of our Atari 2600 remakes in a thirty second long gameplay video and got feedback. We filmed it on a phone because neither of us knew how OBS worked.

[andrewcotter]

Teamwork Blog

There have been quite a few times that we have been put into teams already this year. This is helping it get easier to work with and generally interact with the  other people in my course. The first instance of working in a team was straight away on the induction day, it was a good way to start things off because it gave us something to talk about.

Although, I probably wasn’t the best person to be in a group with at the start since I didn’t speak that much, in that first group i spoke just enough to avoid getting a picture with a bag of ice. It’s been easier to talk to people in the course since I’ve gotten to know them a bit better but I’d say that I still definitely fall short on the communications side of things, especially when were not in the same room.

I’m not the type of person that uses messenger, Whatsapp or discord all that much, so a lot of the time when we break from class I don’t speak to the rest of the group until the next time that I see them. It is easier to work together in person but when it’s the only time you talk it can be lacking.

 My project with Darragh was pretty drastically effected by this hold up, by the time I had managed to get a grasp on Construct 2, he had almost finished the game we had to make, I am going to try and add a few things in to try and make up for that because I kind of feel bad that he did all of it.

Then again for Ludology, me, Aaron and Evaling talked outside of school and yet we still ended up with one person doing most of the work (Evaling). I can’t blame her for doing it herself, I was in the middle of doing exactly that but she beat me to it.

Overall my experiences with teams on the course has been positive but I do need to work on better communication because that’ll probably make things a lot smoother.

[andrewcotter]

DIT Blog

My DIT Blog week 5.

Mon:     Baz wasn’t in today, I don’t know why, so instead of him taking us for Game Design a couple of third years basically supervised the class while we played a bunch of board games, we had to answer a few questions about the games we were playing but I doubt Baz will ever bring those up. Me and a few others played For Sale which was about buying and saling houses, Krakenlaken Poker (Cockroach Poker) a card game about bluffing and Exploding Kittens a weird card game. I think Krakenlaken Poker was probably the best, almost for name alone. In Bryan’s programming class we went over the solutions to the problems from last weeks lab because people were a bit iffy about it, and after that we did some Yoga, well we tried to do some yoga.

Tues:     There was more trigonometry in today’s lab, I’m starting to remember somethings but it’s weird trying to do it in practice. This one was also triangles which are a bit easier anyway. After that making a numbered grid in one loop was kind of fun.

Wed:     We didn’t have Creative Practice today so we could have a double Ludology to make up for last week. In the first class he talked about characters that ruined a game and wrongly ( in my opinion) used Watch_Dogs as an example and yet praised Watch_Dogs 2. I think there is a strong case for why Aidan is a better character than Marcus but that’s a whole other thing. We talked about being willing to suspend belief while playing a game. Then we talked about how you’d write the rules for Tic-Tac-Toe, and how it was a broken game. We split into groups and had to change it in such a way that it was more fun/balanced, we ended up with connecting four in a row on a 6x6 grid with 3 players and it worked rather nicely. Then we got an assignment to do the same thing with a different game.

Fri:     We had a speaker come in and talk to us about his 10+ years working in the games industry, having his own company and working with ssome of the big names like Ubisoft. He split us up into groups and had us go through a simplified version of the production process of a game. We designed our game and then had to manage the scale and scope of the game to the amount of people working on it and then we had to map out the production on a day by day timetable.

[andrewcotter]

DIT Blog

My DIT Blog week 4

Mon:     In Baz’s class we talked about puzzles whether or not they can count as a game, what makes a good puzzle and what makes a bad puzzle. Then he showed us a few puzzles, the first was a puzzle about nine dots in a box, I knew this puzzle from a cartoon from about 17 years ago when one of the characters was told to think outside the box, then a puzzle about a guard on a bridge and then a few from Professor Layton games. The final puzzle he showed us was one connected two people with string that I’d seen on QI on youtube a few days before this, I thought it was funny how Baz said that since he’d shown us the answers the puzzles were ruined for us and I had literally forgotten how the string puzzle was done within the space of a day. Bryan’s class was pretty annoying because I had to re-wrap my head around how to do trigonometry (the worst part of maths), and how it applies practically in Processing 3.

Tues:     The lab was pretty difficult because all it was was trigonometry and for some reason I just couldn’t see what I was trying to do, I eventually got through it but even then it was just awkward to do.

Wed:     We were given an assignment today, we have to make a one minute video of a review of a game that we either like or dislike in relation to a certain value at play card we’re given. I have got to do one on a game that I like and talk about how it uses efficiency, so it looks like Spyro is going to be my choice. Jamie got Ludology rescheduled so that we could go to the student march.

Fri:     Darragh and I met up and made a few last minute tweeks to our game before the thirty second clip we needed on Darragh’s phone. We went through everybody’s videos and we gave feedback on what they had done so far. After that John showed us a couple of videos on how to add a bit flare to your game.

[andrewcotter]

Creative Practice Blog

This weeks class was primarily about communication that isn’t spoken but about everything that you have conveyed through what you’re doing consciously or subconsciously. Some of this was based off of being able to read the Natural Resonant Social Frequency (NRSF) as Brian called it which is basically just being able to tailor yourself to your audience e.g. speaking with friends is a lot different than how you would speak to an interviewer because you have to connect in the right way to who you’re speaking to. You change Yourself to these situations by changing up your facial expressions, your voice and your physical gesture to accommodate the person/people you’re engaging with. I thought the more interesting aspect of this topic was the subtle things that you do without noticing that gives away what are saying/want to say. The examples we looked at in class were mainly of facial expressions of people either currently lying or having just been caught in a lie, the person currently lying couldn’t stop averting his gaze and the people caught lying all pursed their lips together (individually) almost as if they were trying not to say something. And one other example of this is accidentally giving someone the middle finger by using it to scratch your head or to rest your head against. The other part of the class was essentially talking about how communication works,one person says something and the person they said it to responds accordingly. We also talked about how someone can say one thing and the other person can take it to mean something else depending on how they decoded what was said and how this takes into account multiple factors like culture, ethnicity, religion and gender. We also mentioned how paranoid you can get once you become aware  of how much you use “backchannels”, words like “uh-huh” or looking at something else other than the person that’s speaking the right amount of times.

[andrewcotter]

DIT Blog

My DIT Blog week 3.

Mon:     In Game Design today we played four or five rounds of Two Rooms and a Boom (2R1B), with each round of the game having more rules or mechanics than the last. The first round had no rules at all and then came the basic rules and after that we added more characters in and the game slowly became more complex. Baz did this so we could discuss the different characteristics of the game and the constant and variable factors at play. Afterwards he split us up into groups of four to create our own characters to fit into Werewolf and 2R1B, four characters each, eight in total. In Bryan’s programming class we went over “if” statements by making a ball go from one side of the screen to the other and back again and by making a quadrant of a square light up when the cursor was in it.

Tues:     Our (Group B) programming lab is now being taken by Chris because Bryan has to take another class somewhere else at the time. Bryan still sets the tasks but Chris is there if there’s any problems. We had two tasks, the first was to create a button that when pressed would change colour and played a sound file when pressed, the button was on a picture of Rick and Morty and the sound file was “WUBBA LUBBA DUB DUB”, the second task was to make a smiley face and have it move around the screen in a loop.

Wed:     In our creative practice class with Dr. Brain Vaughn ( I re-discovered his name), we talked about the intricacies of communication, from a person’s stance, their expressions and micro-expressions, to models of communication. For our Ludology class we were told to read through the notes on google classroom for a “test” test, and I’m not sure if he knew it but not a single question we were asked was covered in the notes.

Fri:     Darragh and I came in at one for the optional lab to finish off the presentation on the changes we would be making to Surround. We played an old Tron game to see what they did differently and we talked about the different styles the game could be in as opposed to the current “block” characters in the game. Then we watched everyone else’s presentations and presented ours.

[andrewcotter]

DIT Blog

My DIT Blog week 2.

Mon:     Our first actual Game Design class with Baz was pretty good. We discussed the basics of games, e.g. narrative and mechanics, and then moved on to high concepts. High concepts are the basic components of a game, a one or two line summary, the mechanics, the genre, the target audience/platform and the game’s unique selling point (USP). After he told us what they were he split us into groups, I was with Oisin and Nathan. Baz pulled up a website that would randomly create game titles, ranging from weird to really weird, and in our groups we had to design a high concept off of the ten chosen titles. In Bryan’s class he showed us how to animate in Processing 3, using void draw()  to refresh the screen every frame,and introduced us to the different types of variables and what they’re used for.

Tues:   We had the lab with Bryan to put into practice the animate and variable controls we had just learnt about. We had to reproduce a scene in which a stick man runs from a U.F.O., the man would be animated and the U.F.O. would be controlled by the mouse. Once we were finished, we were told to make our scenes unique so I added a road and made a better U.F.O.

Wed:     We had a new person for creative practice who will be taking us for the next few weeks to do presentations. I can’t remember his name, but I do remember that he likes PUBG a lot, I’m sure I’ll find out again. He had each of us stand up and say a game that we liked and three reasons why, I was cut short when I was finishing by Tabeeb coming in fifty minutes late but I wasn’t complaining. In Ludology we spoke about the different systems in the game, subtle and flashy UIs in games, and choices and consequences and the differences between the types of decision the player makes.

Fri:     I went into the lab before the lecture and met up with Darragh to finish up the presentation on the Atari 2600 game we got last Friday. We got Surround, which is essentially the light cycle game from Tron, so there are two cubes leaving trails that they can’t touch or they’ll die. We were one of the last people to show off our game and after seeing some of the games that we could have gotten I’m glad that we got Surround.

That was week two.

[andrewcotter]

DIT Blog

My DIT Blog week 1.

Day one, probably doesn’t technically count as part of week one but I think that it is worth a mention. The induction day was good fun and it was a nice little intro to some of the people that would be in the course, students and teachers, it also was a good time to gauge how long the bus would take to get to DIT. The main lecture started at 10 and ended just before 1, and of those three hours game design was mentioned for about two minutes. After that we were sent on a sort of scavenger hunt, for three random landmarks and to recreate a scene from a movie, my group ended up choosing Forrest Gump and paying €7.50 for what we later learnt was a four month out of date box of chocolates.

Day two, which was the first actual day of the course, was pretty relaxed. We played werewolf for about two hours, met John, Basil and Bryan and had a pretty boring four hour wait between classes. Thank god I’m in group B and don’t have to do that ever again.

Day three, this was only the one class from 3 to 5 and it was the first time we were in the labs. The Macs took a bit of getting used to but once i figured out that the mouse was scrolling the wrong way things went a bit smoother. We were introduced to Processing 3, which seemed like it basically MS Paint but with coding. It was good fun as trying to get the picture pixel perfect was both mind numbingly annoying and really satisfying.

Day four, was mildly irritating because I found out that I’ll have to keep a blog, which means creating a Tumblr account for more than likely purely this blog. The day later redeemed itself when Hugh told us about the background of the course and the teachers. After Ludology there was a two hour break before Games User Research, which wasn’t on which i didn’t mind too much because all I did was tap a nap on the second floor.

Day five, once again was only the one class but it was very interesting because this was the first thing we designed a game and on top of that the parameters of the game kept being changed by the “producers”. My group had to do game based on Simon Cowell which had a good idea to start with but went downhill fast once it had to be marketed for kids. After that we were paired up and given an Atari 2600 game that we would be making our own version of over the next twelve weeks.

And that ends week one of the course, which overall was a great way to get settled in at DIT.