Evaluation 4

EvaluationQuestion 4.) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

When making my game form planning through to researching and then toactually building the game, I had limited knowledge on the subject. All Iknew is that I had a brilliant idea for a game, and I just needed to the toolsto use it. When researching video games I investigated real games andconsoles to see how the player interacts with the game and what kind ofgames entice the user more. 3D games, which are what I was planning to do,are built using, in laymen terms, boxes and other shapes that allow acharacter made of a mesh to walk around in and interact with. I wouldconsider this a use of technology since it involved me painstakingly playingdifferent video games that explored the kind of game type and genre I wanted to replicate. When planning to make my game I investigated different gaming manufacturing software’s I could use, eventually I came to Unity. Unity seemed like the best choice, I’d seen games made by it before and they are brilliant. It seemed easy to use, and it was popular which meant there would be tutorials and instructions on how to use it. Unity allowed me to make 3D areas I could model, and then program the movement of characters and sprites so the result would be a game that I could publish within the software.Unity did not disappoint and I quickly learn the basics, though I planned to model just one street, I wanted to make it realistic like other games, for a border will draw a picture of city surrounding the one area, (like in a field you'd have mountains and scenery surrounding it, one way to imagine what I’m describing is imagining the Truman Show, and the big painted drawing that surrounds the modelled city he lives in) I decide that with this the city wouldn’t seem real therefore I deigned a basic futuristic looking three dimensional city but with only the one street that you could explore. However I had come across a problem, Unity was not modelling software and I was using it for that purpose. This meant that it became slow and impossible to use. Thus I was sent back a stage, I needed to model the detailed 3D model I had in my head but couldn’t do it in unity.

I researched further into 3d modelling software and found Sketchup. Sketchup is very efficient and easy to use software which allowed to me got model a very detailed and real looking city. I would like to stress this, that I designed the game form this point to be an exploring game where more detail and effort would be put into model a real and living city, rather than the gameplay itself. Usually there are teams that work on the separate areas; instead I was on my ownOnce I had modelled the areas, I added textures, which are basically the graphic you paste onto the face of the 3D object to give colour and texture. For example I used brick on the brick buildings and even transparent blue for the glass. When the modelling was done I needed to export it to Unity, but I occurred many problems that prevented me from doing this simply tasks. Solved by adding extension to both software’s to allow me to export the 3D file as a compatible file to import it into unity. Eventually I had successfully done this but the character that I imported would fall through the ground. I needed mesh collider, so I added colliders to every surface so the character would not be able to move freely around the model I had created. Colliders are an option you can add to an object so it will repel the player as opposed to letting the player fall through.With the basic modelling done and the character being able to move around the areas I went on scripting. Scripting is done through a linked program to unity Microsoft Visual Basic. This program ended up causing me to learn the fundamentals of JavaScript and C++ I did want to avoid having to learn code but afterwards I was glad I did, it is technically like learning a new language. MVA allowed me to add functions to the boxes, so when a box is set as an ‘Is Trigger’ it will activate the function. I could make a box teleport the character to another box, I could make a box change the objective and I could animate a car so it was realistic hovering above the ground. These scripts helped make the game like a real media product, and I was close to completion I had a working game, now all I had to do was work on the user interface.

The user interface is what the player will interact with to start the game or see for example how much health their character has through a health bar. The program I used for tis, as well as Unity was Photoshop. Unity has an option to insert a canvas which you can set the resolution so what you see in the canvas, and all the images you paste on that the user will see above the game they are playing. I set the canvas to 640px by 480px because it is the most common resolution so people with low resoloution computer can still play my game. I next used Photoshop to design a science fiction border that would go around the canvas, and make it seem like you were looking through a spy camera at the character. I also poisoned where the buttons would go. The menu was given to me by the unity store; therefore I didn’t have to spend time making it, though I deigned it to look futuristic. I used script in MVA to make every button on the menu do something, like open a level or open a help screen. Now I had a working game form beginning to end. Well not technically to end. Using Photoshop I needed to make some Geographical User Interfaces there are graphics that appear on screen and can signify meaning of the game. For my game id designed several, I designed graphic for the Floppy Disc pop ups so when you walk over a floppy discs you see a larger floppy disc on screen. A pop up for the computer screens to tell the user they’ve completed the objective to turn the computer on. And a full screen death screen that would show the user that they’ve completed the game. That appears when the ship crashes into youand you are left with the cliff-hanger and the TimeAssassin tile screen, signifying the end of the first level.

My main text was not the only thing I used Photoshop for. One of my favorite things that I had done to complete this project was designing my ancillaries. The game magazine and the game cover were both made using Photoshop. Because I wanted to make them look as real and legitimate as possible, I found the examples I had researched, pasted them into Photoshop and created an n identical layout, with everything changed. So the positon of the titles, logos and stories were in almost the same place but the content was completely different. This was the same process I did for the XBOX ONE and PS4 covers. I think I have achieved a very real game cover and magazine using Photoshop, which in my opinion was the best software to use.With everything visual working before I could export the game I needed dot add to more things light and sound. Unity allowed me to add different forms of light to areas in the gave so made every lamppost or sign seem to glow, then I added a spotlight so it looked like a real street. Unfortunately since the light emissions cause the game to render a lot slower I was left with a very slow and lagging game. Thus I had to change computers, and start working with my mother’s somewhat faster computer. Now I could add sound. Again unity gives you the option to do this in the form of bubbles. When you import sound it is in the form of a bubble, you can change the sixer of the bubble so when the player on screen is inside they hear audio, and when they leave the bubble they stop hearing it. To make the sounds I used a combination of YouTube and movie maker so I could edit the length and loudness of sound effect and music.I spent several hours double checking everything ran smoothly and that they were no errors like the character falling through the game or the sounds being too loud, or the GUI’s not appearing in the right place when I finished this I published the game. Fortunately Unity again allows you to compete this action. Unity gave me the option to build a game connecting the scenes and publish it onto a web HTML game or a EXE file for windows computer.Using the combination of these software I was able to create a game, game cover and game magazine. That contains every detail in a three dimensional sense and archive my aim of creating a realistic and living world. If I were to do this again I would only want to make it bigger.