Week 8

Perth GAD170 Resource Hub

Check this page every week.

It has a overview of what you need to do and the resources you need to compete those tasks.

Pre-Class

Congratulations on reaching week 8.

Please aim to have project 2 completed before class this week.

Please have your learning journal complete and up to date and ready to present to the class this week.

Make sure that you have watched all the resource videos and read most of the resource slides that were provided in week 0. This will help you to be ready to make a cool game for project 3.

In Class

In class we will start with a recap and reflection of project 2 and our learning journal and then we will begin planning for project 3.

Exercise 1: 30 minutes.

Complete this learning journal exercise with a partner. We will be imagining that we are doing a job interview to get a role as a trainee or intern at a game design company. Would you get the job based on your learning journal being a portfolio of your skills.

Exercise 2: 30 - 60 Minutes

In pairs complete and polish up your project 2 submission. If you cannot complete it in this time make a detailed plan of how and when you will complete it and how you will present it on your learning journal.

Project 3

In project 1 we learnt how to use code to do jobs.
In project 2 we learnt a little about how to create objects that can do jobs and how to create relationships between these objects.
In project 3 we will try and apply what we learned in project 1 and 2 to make a new simple game. You will design this game with some guidance and limitations.
In project 3 you will also learn more advanced ways to use code to do jobs. You will also learn more advanced ways to build objects that can do jobs and more advanced ways to create relationships between objects.

Exercise 3.

We will run a guided activity in which you will look at the requirements of the project 3 brief and then we will use brainstorming to rapidly develop ideas for a game that will fulfill the requirements, will be fun, and will have a small enough scope so that you can reasonably complete it.

The game should be either, a 3rd person 3D platformer, a top down view hack and slash dungeon crawl, or a simple first person shooter.

We will be extending the work we did in project 1, and adapting it to the genre you choose. It should be very very simple.

In developing the game idea you will identify Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics.

Mechanics are the jobs, or behavior that the objects in your game can do.

Dynamics are the impacts of relationships between objects that have mechanics.

Aesthetics are what the player experiences when they interact with the objects, mechanics and dynamics in your game world.

For this planning activity you will complete the following planning lists on your learning journal Project 3 page:

1. Create a list of objects in your game world.

2. Create a list of the behavior and characteristics of each object in your game world. (Mechanics)

3. Create a list of how you intend the objects to interact and what consequences will arise from the interaction of objects with different behavior and characteristics. (Dynamics)

4. Create a list of ideas of how you will use code to create the mechanics.

5. Create a list of how you will use code to get objects to interact by communicating between component scripts. (Dynamics)

6. Confirm that your plan meets all of the project brief requirements.

7. Confirm that you have kept your project scope small. (No galaxy brain ideas with hundreds of mechanics and dynamics.)

Post Class

Find tutorial videos or example scripts that will give you the knowledge you need to code each of the mechanics that you have planned for your game.
For each planned mechanic, make sure that you have found resources that will show you how to create this mechanic with code.

Your solutions may be messy or hacked together. This is OK at this stage of development. Over future weeks we will refine this. In future classes we will give example that show more effective ways to code more common game functionality and how to code elegant relationships between objects.

3. Make sure that you have watched all the resource videos and read all the resource slides that were provided in week 0.

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