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citymod

sexxxisbeautiful

that’s it that’s the whole argument.

maj0rasmasquerade-deactivated20

That’s literally the best way i’ve ever seen to describe it.

Week 12 : It’s OVERRRR

Hahaha I never thought it would end either, but here we are.

Oh golly. The week started with everyone being commanded to bring in a Christmas related object for an unrevealed purpose, a purpose which turned out to be that we were building obstacle courses. Yay! This was terrifying and hilarious and probably broke a few rules in fairness but it was worth it. My teams entry consisted of two groups of 4 or 5. One person would remain on the starting table with a small silver bell, the others had to split themselves between 2 benches and figure a way to maneuver across the room in the fastest time without touching the floor, very extraneous work. However the caviat was that the small solver bell had to be passed between the benches and the table and back before the team could move the next bench, thus making the whole process much more difficult the further the teams got. This seemed to go down well with both participants and our lecturer, Bas.

This week also featured the submission of our assignments for programming, some of which went down very well, others maybe not so much. At least they’re out of the way and we can move onto the next ones soon enough.

For Creative Practice we learned about character design and how silhouetting is very important as a basis for any character. This was honestly a very interesting class, barring the realization that I’m going to have to do art at some point.

This week also saw the final presentation of out My Life As A Game projects in Ludology. Presenting something about depression and how it can be a game turned out to be very interesting as an experience. We also got assigned teams and topics for an upcoming debate. I have to argue that in games it is the narrative of a game that is more important than the mechanics which should be interesting as this is something i personally believe.

To round off the week we finally submitted our Atari2600 remakes via the itch.io website. This was done in an almost empty optional class, all very boring when all you want to do is sleep for a year.

Anyway, that’s me done for this semester, don’t drink too heavy over Candlenights or New Years xoxo

Jamie

Week 11 : Bryannnnnn??????

This week was both bare and full, somehow.

For Games Design we began discussing ‘The Magic Circle’ in a game which essentially is the idea that the audience should not have their immersion broken by a game or other piece of media changing it’s rules from those previously stated and agreed upon by the audience. This led to some interesting thoughts in how much a ‘Deus Ex Machina’ or ‘God From the Machine’ in writing is overused and quite wholly removes the audience from the piece. To put my A in Higher Level English to use, in the play ‘Hamlet’, when the titular character is sent to England to be executed there is no way out for him, and yet he shows up again in the next scene citing that he was rescued by pirates. This breaks with the tone of the otherwise serious play, thus breaking immersion as the audience have to think harder about this event. This is the same in video games yet it extends even deeper as a sudden change in rifles or other elements can completely ruin immersion or enjoyment.

As you may have guessed from the title, there was no programming lecture due to Bryan’s absence due to personal reasons, therefore the only programming we had was to work on our assignments in the lab for Tuesday.

This week aslo featured a lack of a Creative Practice class leaving us only with a Ludology class and more time spent travelling to college than actually spent in class.

On Friday we took part in the open day in which some sixth years came in to view the various courses in DIT, we used this as a chance to show off our games and get an unbiased outside reaction to them. It was also very quiet as not many people came by our room due to the fact that it was so out of the way compared to everything else.

Any-who, hope you enjoyed, and remember, don’t drop the hot-dog!

Week 10 : Sleeping is a Thing, Do It

Hello again, Void, how you been?

This week had a very heavy focus on decisions, almost like when you learn a new word, and then you see it everywhere? Well that’s what my week was like and thinking back its oddly unsettling that a morning class would set the theme for the rest of my week but that’s neither here not there. For our Games Design project this week we were tasked with creating a game based around decisions (think Life Is Strange, because I did and I think it went well). These games were to be solely decision based and therefore did not require very much programming, thankfully.

We also had a programming exam that went pretty okay for most people, even if most of us where barely expecting a pass but that’s semester 1, not being prepared at all.

This week also featured DIT’s 12 hour charity sleep out, which consisted of a number of students spending the night sleeping outside the main doorway of the Aungier Street campus, myself being one of those fools. The idea of the event was to raise money for the RAG charities for the year, mainly Jigsaw, for teen mental health. This, however, turned out to be a monumentally awful idea, as at 10am the next morning I had a lovely doubly Ludology in which the class created characters for a dice throwing game. In my defense i went to the class and was even the first person there, I did however leave due to the fact that I almost blacked out as soon as I sat down (See - Not sleeping for 24hrs +).

The rest of the week remained uneventful barring demoing the Beta videos of our Atari games.

Au Revoir <3

Week 9 : Is This Your Card Game of Life?

So, where to begin, the start maybe?

This Monday we had our final play-tests for out card games and that involved a whole lot of shouting at each other as we tried to decipher half baked rule sets, but then again, that’s all part of the fun, right? In the end all was well and we all learned the nuance behind not only creating a game but trimming down a bulky rule set to something simplistic and easy enough to read (and also fit on a single sheet of paper #savetheforests).

In terms of programming this week we began to code ‘Conway’s Game of Life’ in our programming lecture and a little in our lab. Conway’s Game is essentially a combination of generative art and science as it allows you to create mesmerizing and constantly changing scenes of cells that slowly evolve, flourishing or slowly fading out. Through all of this you can alter certain variables to see how they effect the way in which life continues, serving as a really cool thought experiment on life and how an environment can effect the way in which it evolves. Also if you move the code stating the colour into the main body that’s refreshed every tick and set the colours for live and dead cells to have random variables it looks really awesome as well as serving as a fun thought experiment.

To end the week we had our near final play-tests of our Atari2600 games but that’s not all that interesting so I’ll spare you the details (also this post is very long already),

til next time

Week 8 : Back to Normal

This week returned back to the mundane with only college and work to fill my time. Classes went as normal for the week with nothing really changing really due to the fact that it’s Halloween week.

I spent most of the week working on projects for both Programming and Games Production. As a result of this i spent a majority of my time in the library on my laptop doing different pieces of work. Outside of this uneventful week I had work most days outside college meaning that I didn’t have a lot of free time to do much else, however on Tuesday (Halloween) I did find the time to go out with a few friends from societies.

The night was fun as I met up with my friends after I got off work for the night and we went straight to a night club.

Other than that, the week was surprisingly uneventful but that can always be a good thing after a busy week.

Week 7 : Busy Busy

This week was honestly a little hectic and involved missing just a little bit of class for a good cause (opps). On the Wednesday and Thursday of this week i took part in a two day Mental Health First Aid Training course with USI and the HSE. This course is something very important to me as i have suffered with mental health problems myself and i feel it s very important to be able to help people out who ever find themselves in the same position.I found the course very engaging and useful overall, even if I did get stuck on a large rock at one point during a lunch break in a children's playground. At the end of the two days we each received certs from the course facilitators.

This week also featured the DIT Drama Soc trip to Antrim over the weekend. This trip left on Friday afternoon (missing class yet again, whoops) and didn’t return until Sunday evening. We spent the weekend in a hostel in Antrim doing drama workshops with three alumni and drama aficionados. They each thought us something new through games and different activities, both on our own and as part of groups. In the evenings we were allowed hang around the hostel and “socialize”.

On the Saturday we went to visit a nearby tourist attraction that consisted of a very windy sea side and a lot of climbable and picturesque rocks they were incredibly fun to climb on and take photos for every conceivable form of social media. after we got back and did some more workshops we spent the evening stealing all the mattresses in the hostel in order to build a huge pillow fort in the common area of the hostel. This endeavor took the better part of two hours and consisted of a lot of diving onto mattresses after sprinting down a lengthy corridor.

The last day finished with a few more workshops and cleaning up before travelling to visit The Giants Causeway. This trip to the sea-side seemed to re invigorate the group before we got back on the bus home and proceeded to die all over again.

Week 6 : Card Games

Card games are one of the oldest forms of games present in human society and as such they demonstrate many of the basic concepts present in modern games, thus allowing an easy method to create new games and change existing ones to make them ore enjoyable. The is a lot of maths behind the scenes of card games, this is due to the fact that there is a limited number of cards (52) and every card game relies o some combination of these cards to function. As such it is important when creating a card game to ensure that the odds are never overwhelmingly against the players.

As part of our study we were each given the group assignment to create a 4 player card game. We could do this via creating a new game from scratch or altering a existing game to make it more enjoyable or modern. For this project my team and I chose to cover the game “War”, the rules of which I had already altered in a separate project in Ludology. The aim of our group became to make the game feel more fast paced and drawn out. We plan to accomplish this by assigning some new powers to different cards and adding 2 new players and another deck of cards to an originally 2 player game.

This week also presented several different events including a social evening for students who got to college via the HEAR access route. This was a chance to talk to other students whom I had not seen since week 1 of college when we were called in a week early for our orientation. This social evening consisted of a meal in Thunder Road Cafe and then many of the students went out for a few drinks to socialize afterwards.

Week 5 : Teamwork

Teamwork. It’s one of the cornerstones of civilization, it lets us as human cooperate in order o make more and more impressive structures. Teamwork also lets people cooperate to live in some semblance of harmony, even if sometimes it can begin to brake down.

Teamwork is also important on a micro scale, in the form of group work for projects, as we began to see this week in college. While we had already begin to work in smaller groups and pairs on different projects, this week was where we truly began to learn how to work together to ensure that everyone has an equal voice and that the purpose pf teamwork is fulfilled, to complete a project or piece of work in a given amount of time, and have it be of a quality unobtainable by a single person in the same amount of time.

In order to practice this we took part in the ‘’Marshmallow Challenge’’. In this challenge we were tasked with using only 20 pieces of dry spaghetti, a length of masking tape and our own knowledge of basic architecture to elevate a single large marshmallow off the ground as high as we could get it. This task required a lot of teamwork as otherwise the spaghetti would break or there may not be as single coherent design for the tower, leading to ruin. This lead to the assignment of different roles within the group, meaning that everyone knew what it was they were to focus on in order for the entire group to succeed. this showing how this project serves as a microcosm for all other group projects that we have to complete, as without specific roles no one in the team would ever be able to succeed at anything.

Thus we can see how at any scale, be in in college or the real world, be the issue life or death, or just a matter of not dropping a marshmallow on the floor, teamwork is one the most important aspects of our lives as a social species.

Week 3 : Creative Practice & Public Seaking

Well, its that time of the week where you get to learn about my adventures in college and the trials and tribulations of Games Design.

In our Games Programming classes we began to look at loops, or functions that will continue t carry out a certain piece of code until certain criteria are met, otherwise forever. These functions are difficult to master at first, as we discovered in our lab class, however one we were able to understand how to create one loop, the rest became a lot easier to complete. Our class teacher (is that what you call them in college?) lecturer then went on to illustrate how these loops can be used to illustrate extremely complex and, for lack f better words, ‘trippy’ art.

However, games design isn't all about sitting in the dark and programming ntil your eyes bleed, a major cornerstone of the games industry is presentation and public speaking. As such we began learning about the intricacies of presenting a work to an audience, one major part of this is reaching the Natural Resonant Social Frequency (NRSF) of a given room. This mean being able to identify what the room and it’s occupants think of what you are saying and how you are saying it. This is done by reading the room and picking up on ticks that most people have that occur subconsciously, such as excessive touching of ones self or fidgeting our not looking at the speaker. Once you have this read on the room all you have to do is make it seem like you know what you’re talking about and that it is the most interesting thing that these people will hear all day (maybe even all week if you get really good at it). Most of us do this naturally in one to one situations by using gestures, this works as we are able to get a read on our audience easier, however as we scale this up we have to take into consideration that something that works for part of the audience may not work for others and thus this dissatisfaction may begin to spread, and before you know it you will have lost the room. This is similar to what politicians must do, they must water down their harshest ticks and be able to seem approachable and not over zealous about a topic, no matter the topic, for fear of losing the room, or in the case vote. Our version of this is to stick to phrasing and gestures that wont inflame the audience, unless that is part of the presentation, in which case we need only water down these expressions so it doesn't seem inflammatory.

We as a class have been able to put this to use in our presentations of our concepts for remade Atari 2600 games, as i mentioned in an earlier post. This has already managed to improved our presentations as everyone seems much more open and able to speak more freely.

I shall leave you here, dear reader and go to gather more stories and facts with which to regale you, until next time

-Jamie

#collegestuff

Week 2

Should we continue the tales of my exciting adventures through my first ever experience with college life? I think we should...

The past week began with further focus on the use of variables in the Java coding language. The are elements that can change depending on certain elements that may happen within the program itself, however i wont go into specifics here because this blog is about my experiences, not about teaching the basics of coding. However I will say that variables do allow for more complex ideas to take shape within Programming meaning that I may be able to make a suitable monument to my late Great Grandmother as part of my first assignment, which I talked about previously. My current plan is to make an art piece centering around butterflies and flowers as they were some of her favorite things, but, again, I wont go much further into detail because its less about college and more about personal experiences at home than anything else.

This week also featured a heavier focus on public speaking skills with presentations of our first PowerPoint presentations in regards to the Atari2600 games that we will be re-creating.My and my teammates presentation went very well (I think) and went off with no technical difficulties and very little stuttering and repetition. We also began to go into further detail on public speaking in Creative Practice class by giving short presentations on some of our favorite games.

As we began to talk about high concepts in Games Production I began to see how games are but together using call and formulaic methods, and yet it makes them seem all the better when you play them and they still deliver a happy and emotion driving narrative. I even managed to put the play cycle to ruin video games for two people in work because either was a slow day, always amusing to see people try and save their favourite game while you point out how formulaic it’s constitution truly is.

- Jamie

Week 1

Well, you asked for it so here it is, my thoughts of my first week studying Gmaes Design in Dublin’s esteemed DIT.

The week opened with me accidentally leading about 12 of my classmates to the wrong meet spot for our first class, which, come to think of it, seemed to have served as some real world foreshadowing of my being elected as Class Representative later that day but hopefully not for my leading the entire class astray later in the year. After i eventually got everyone to the right place, a small area in the media section of DIT’s Aungier St. campus where we split into different groups to play a card game called Werewolf. This game involves a number of players being hidden werewolves (denoted by a card seen only by themselves) and the rest being villagers or several other character cards with secret abilities (which we didn't use). Round one i suggested that we form a democracy to figure out who the werewolves were. Then night fell. And i was murdered. Typical.

After we bonded by murdering each other and pointing out flaws in the mechanics of the game had our first lecture teaching us bout coding and what to expect from the coming year. It was during this class that i was elected Class Rep after standing in front of my peers and talking compete bull for 30 seconds. I as told after by one of my new friends from class that i won by a landslide, that totally helped my ego.

Day two saw our first real lab where we messed around with and learned how to draw with code. It was interesting to say the least and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I am quite proficient at it, for now.

Next is Day 3, where you, Dear Reader, gave me the task of creating and updating this blog with my weekly thoughts on college. I’m sorry to say that i was mildly hungover for this class, I hope you can forgive me. After this we had our first lecture in Ludology or the study of games. This class was deeply interesting and left me deeply excited for what is yet to come.

After Ldology a large group of us hung around in the Restaurant on campus playing card games for several hours only to discover that it was for naught, our afternoon class was cancelled. It still served as some amazing time to bond with and get to know some more people from class so I’m definitely not complaining.

After a free Thursday we returned Friday for our first lesson in Games Production, yet again wit you, Dear Reader. The class taught us what to expect in our careers and helped us to learn to think on out feet to solve problems, a very useful skill to have.

To end out week we are now part of pair groups in which we will update and alter existing Atari 2600 games using free to use production software, which should prove a difficult yet rewarding experience. And thus the story of my first week in college comes to a close, i look forward to writing again next week.

-Jamie

#college

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