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fallingfromaboveget1033-blog · 7 years ago

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Reflection Lim Pei Yi, Celine (A0157523E)

• Introduction

The video games lecture that was introduced to us in week 4 was one which is one of the more interesting and relatable topic to us as the three of us were into playing video games at some point of our lives, and we hope to relive that video gaming times.

Our project, Falling From Above is a 2D platform game made with the Unity Platform. We have decided on using the robust Unity platform as it allows cross-platform development and can support up to 27 platforms in total, as well as the extensive features it has. Moreover, it was the most popular game-development platform and there are plentiful of tutorials online on their Unity documentation pages and various social platforms such as Youtube and Udemy which we can learn from.

• Critically Analyse your project

Analysis - Written, Visual, Procedural Rhetoric

Written rhetoric is depicted in the “How to play” scenes in our game, where we explained the rules by which the game is governed. In our game, players can get extra points if they collect additional powerups or break tiles. Players points are also deducted if they collect durians (spikes on the durian cause the animals to get injured).

Visual rhetoric is represented in our game by placing different difficulties on the number of times an ice, grass and wooden tile takes to break. It can also be seen through the characters that we have designed. The characters, lion, elephant and turtle are also designed to give off the fierce, gentle and innocent appearance respectively, to portray the animals’ character.

Procedural rhetoric is portrayed through the different levels. The three characters in our game is also crafted with three different levels of difficulties in terms of the speed which they descend. The rationale behind this is because the animals have different weights and their gravity differs.

• How does it connect to ideas you have learned?

During the lecture on the history and development of computers, we learnt that a computer is an object which is able to take in a stimulus and change itself according to specific rules. With the evolution of universal computers, we are able to create something virtually or physically based on codes and we figured it would be a good opportunity to explore programming a game since it is challenging and none of us have tried coding a game before.

As we learnt about the varieties of video games in week 4, we know that video games have evolved both digitally and physically over the decades.

Since video games on mobile phones have been more popular in recent times, we decided to use mobile devices as the platform for our project. However, since we are utilising the Unity platform, we also have the options to create our gameplay in a PC or mobile setting.

• Analyse the affordances of digital media it uses.

Janet Murray’s four affordances asserts that everything made of electronic bits is potentially participatory, procedural, spatial as well as encyclopedic (Four Affordances in Details).

Procedural being composed of executable rules, participatory being inviting human action and manipulation of the represented world, encyclopedic being containing high capacity of information in multiple media formats and spatial being navigable as an information repository and/or a virtual place.

Our game, Falling From Above, is designed to be more Participatory and Procedural side, rather than the Encyclopedic and Spatial side.

It is more Participatory as most of the time, the game is dependent on the user controls to function.

It lies high on the Procedural affordance because it follows a set of rules in the game to navigate from a scene to another. For example, from the scene where a character is chosen, till the lose scene, the game is governed by game conditions that dictates which scene is displayed next.

It lies low on the spatial affordance as it makes use of the space visible to the user to create a descending effect, which also means that the virtual space is very limited dependent on the device of the user’s screen size. The descending speed of the character increases in proportion to the user’s score, in order to challenge the user.

It also lies low on the encyclopedic affordance as it does not exactly contain loads of information as compared to other forms of digital medium.

• How does it make use of the new abilities of computers?

Since our game was created on the Unity platform, it has different build settings incorporated into it so that the developer can build the game in different devices such as on a Windows PC, MacOS, Android or even iOS.

For each of the devices, it will create different builds that corresponds to the development environments. It makes use of the new abilities of computers because programs in the past were not congruous enough to integrate all the different developments into one, like the current Unity. With the rise of recent platforms like Unity, developers can write their code once, and develop their games on various devices all at once.

Additionally, the Unity platform also has a function for collaborators to share their codes with one another using revision control. Hence, it helps our team share and collate our code easily when we are implementing the logic of the game.

• How does it build off other projects you have seen?

This is my first attempt of building a 2D game application. As a beginner developer on the Unity platform, I felt that we built this project with a clear goal in mind – to create a simple game with a storyline and interactive. I actually got inspired to create this game whilst I was reminiscing about a game called “Icy Tower” – it was also a 2D platform game where users have to climb up a tower by jumping and performing tricks and stuns. In comparison to that, even though the graphics were nowhere comparable, I felt that it builds off the competitive spirits that users have to break their high score in our game.

During one of our tutorials, we also explored creating games with OpenProcessing and creating the pong game with HTML and CSS, which sparked my interest for building cooler and more innovative game like Falling From Above.

Future Versions

To make the gameplay more interactive, there are a few ideas that I have come up with. One of them is to transform the game into Virtual Reality game where players envision themselves as the character in the game, running away from the monsters from the mountains. The player will be placed in a free falling setting from the beginning of the game, and challenge themselves by taking steps to their right or left to avoid obstacles or pick up powerups.

Future Improvements

Another improvement that I can make was a suggestion given by Teacher Dennis in class, where he mentioned that the 2D Collider object of each of the characters can just be limited to their legs instead of the whole body, which makes the game play smoother and more navigable.

Conclusion

With the creation of Falling From Above, I have learnt many new skills including drawing the characters pixel by pixel from scratch using Adobe Photoshop and picking up a new language C#. I have also learnt how to navigate through the vast functionalities that the Unity platform has to offer, and would have to say that these six weeks of coding experience is a challenging yet accomplishing one as our team saw the progress of the game from nothing to what it is today.

Citations:

Four Affordances In Details

https://inventingthemedium.com/four-affordances/

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fallingfromaboveget1033-blog · 7 years ago

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Reflection Puah Jia Hui (A0160171U)

1. Introduction

Out of all the interesting lessons that we were introduced to each week, we found that “video games” is the most relatable topic as all of us have played video games before at least once in our lifetime, and we are still actively doing so. Thus, we believed that video game is the area we would like to explore in this final project and we hope to apply the concepts we learned in classes into the domain we interested in.

This project is a 2D mobile game on Android created using Unity with the objectives of being simple and addictive to players. We learned about OpenProcessing during the tutorials, and we believe that although the platform allows us to create digital art and video games within minutes effortlessly, it still has its limitations. Thus, we decided to build out game with Unity, the world’s leading real-time engine, due to its benefits: it’s free, multi-platform (Android, iOS, Windows) development, and the abundance of online tutorials for us to learn from scratch.

2. Connecting to ideas learnt

In week 2’s lecture of history and development of computation, we learnt that computers have evolved from single-purpose machines to universal computer (in which Charles Babbage is credited for the first computer design and Alan Turing being credited for the design’s realisation). An universal computer is a device that captures input and reacts according to the rules specified. A true universal computer is able to adapt and perform any function of other computers. The idea of universal computers being able to do virtually anything based on our codes is very intriguing to us. This invention allows us to work on the project in the first place, and we decided to use this creation to create a video game.

We learnt about many different kind of video games in week 4. Video games have evolved not just digitally, but also physically based on the machines that they are played on. Gaming machines have changed from 8-bit machines to home computers to home consoles to handheld consoles. Since video games on mobile phones have been more popular in recent times, we decided to use mobile devices as the platform for our project.

The rest of the concepts and ideas learnt are stated in subsequent sections.

3. Critical Analysis

Written Rhetoric

Written rhetoric is the art of how a creator/author can influence his or her audience through words. The instructions of the game are written clearly in text form, allowing the players to comprehend the mechanics and the objective of the game. The difficulty levels (i.e. easy, medium, hard) are written under each character in the character selection screen, where different character determines the difference in difficulty of the game.

Visual Rhetoric

It is necessary to analyse how non-verbal media, in image and video form, produces arguments, which is known as visual rhetoric. In our game, the three different characters were drawn in order to match their difficulty. The smallest character, a petite turtle, symbolizes the easiest difficulty. The average-sized lion determines the normal difficulty of the game. Finally, the big and oversized elephant signifies the hardest difficulty. The fruits laid out in the game asserts that they are beneficial to the players when collected. However, the threatening spiky durians would induce players to avoid them. The strength of the tiles spawning throughout the game are also symbolized by what they are made of. The first phase of the game spawns tiles made of ice which can be easily destroyed. After achieving certain points, tiles made from earth (i.e. soil and grass) are spawned which shows the difference in sturdiness when compared to ice tiles. Lastly, thick wooden tiles are spawned after the second milestone, emphasizing on the strength of the tiles’ endurance. The spikes on the ceiling and floor of every instance of the screen induces the fear of the character’s death, which the player should avoid.

Procedural Rhetoric

According to Bogost (2007), procedural rhetoric is the art of influencing through processes such as computational rules. The concept of procedural rhetoric could be applied to a large extent in our project especially because it is a video game. Firstly, each character falls downward with different speeds. The petite turtle falls the slowest, while the average-sized lion falls at normal speed, and the heaviest-looking elephant falling at the highest speed. The speed of each character is the main differentiation between each difficulty level. The number of hits required to break the tiles represents the strength of each tiles. The relatively fragile ice tiles requires 1 hit to break, earth tile requiring 2 hits, and the sturdiest wooden tiles requiring 3 hits. The different number of fruits collected affects the final outcome (I.e. score) of the game. The fresh fruits collected by the player increase the score, while the score decreases when the player hits the spiky durians. Touching the spikes at the edges of the screen immediately ends the game.

4. Four Affordances

Janet H. Murray’s four affordances are used to describe the different functional properties of a digital medium (Murray, 2011).

Spatial

Low: Spatial affordance refers to information repository that can be navigated through virtual space. The virtual space is technically endless in our project, as the background and position of the character continues to move until the game ends. However, the frames and background are actually the same, thus it doesn’t show that the game is very spatial virtually.

Encyclopedic

Low: Encyclopedic affordance refers to the amount of information stored in various forms. Other than the instructions and character names, the project does not have any information.

Participatory

Medium: Participatory Affordance refers to the input from organism action used to create interactivity. Due to the nature of the project, user inputs from mobile phones’ touchscreen are crucial for controlling the game. However, user inputs are not entirely necessary for the game to run. Even if there is no input from the user, the character still moves downwards (although the game would end very quickly though).

Procedural

Medium: Procedural affordance refers to the executable rules. The game reacts according to the different conditions met during the gameplay. The character swerving left and right and pressing the “dig” button to break the tiles are examples of the rules coded into the game. Due to the game being fairly simple and straightforward, it does not have many complex executable rules, thus the medium “score”.

5. How does it make use of the new abilities of computers?

Because of the advancement of computer over the years, development projects are becoming easier and quicker to develop with new software, libraries and frameworks. Unity Engine allows us to test our source code on the go and also let us share our codes between each other easily through Unity Collaboration. This is achievable through the largest network of computers – Internet. The internet connects our machines together for us to communicate and share codes.

Although we do not have enough knowledge, we have thought of ways to implement new abilities of computers in the future. One example could be to convert our project from using graphical user interface to using tangible user interface. We believe that it would increase the interactive aspect of the game if the players are able to control the digital game through physical environment. An example would be changing the game for the character to jump on tiles to move upwards. The character would jump upwards in different directions, and players would have to place physical blocks on the interface to prevent the character from dropping downwards.

Another implementation would be virtual reality. The idea of allowing the player to be immersed in the digital world allows for a whole new experience. This enables the player to experience the falling sensation to a certain extent, increasing the entertainment value of the game.

6. How does it build off other projects you have seen?

During the phase of brainstorming, my group members and I talked about the games that we have played before. “Icy Tower” is one of the projects that came to mind. It is a game where the character jumps on tiles to reach high levels. The player loses should the character falls off and touch the bottom of the screen. Instead of the character jumping upwards, we decided to modify the game and let the character fall downwards in our project.

Other features of the game were inspired by the different game projects on OpenProcessing discovered during our tutorials. We picked up the syntax of programming languages (E.g. JavaScript) along the way and use that knowledge in our project. We have also discovered some games created with Unity Engine. Due to the limitations of OpenProcessing, we decided to use Unity Engine as the platform for our project and occasionally use Unity projects as reference.

7. Conclusion

Throughout the course of this project, I’ve picked up C# and how to use the Unity Platform. Although the language is new to me, it didn’t take much time for me to adapt to it due to me having knowledge of Java. The project allows me to apply many interesting concepts learnt in lectures and tutorials and also enables me to understand them more deeply. The idea of using an universal computer to develop programs is very intriguing and I hope to use it to create digital mediums of a different category, such as digital art and digital fabrication, in the future.

Reference

Bogost, I. (2007) The Expressive Power of Videogames: Procedural Rhetoric. Murray, J. (2011, November 20) Four Affordances. Retrieved from https://inventingthemedium.com/four-affordances/

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fallingfromaboveget1033-blog · 7 years ago

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Reflection Cheng Wun Jing (A0185505A)

Introduction Video games are proof of the amazing advancement in technology where it has developed from 2D to Virtual Reality games. After learning how to code the simple ping pong game on Open Processing platform, we were inspired to create our very own video game. Thus, Falling from Above is a game that we hope can portray what we learnt from the past weeks in class.

Affordances

Janet Murray says affordances are a concept used in the field of human computer interaction to describe the functional properties of objects or environments that allow for particular uses. Within her definition she states that the digital medium has four affordances that make up every designer’s palette representation in any digital format or genre. They are participatory, spatial, encyclopedic and procedural. (Murray)

A digital medium is defined as a physical way of storing media or archiving it. It can hold data, graphics, audio, and video. Creativity is expressed by the engineers who embraced the prospect of cyborg architectures and technologies that changes the human history of 500 years of print culture. (Murray) This shows that digital medium is extremely flexible where people constantly find new ways to express themselves digitally.

Procedural affordance is where the computer is treated as a procedural medium composed of executable rules. According to Murray, when creating a digital artifact, users can use it in many ways. For example, a book can only be used one way – can only read from first page to last page. The main and most critical difference between digital media and all other forms of media is its procedural element. Participatory affordance is the relationship between any person and any digital object where there is interaction, which means a person has a role to play. This person can manipulate and contribute to the content of the digital medium. Encyclopedic affordance is a digital medium that contains an immense amount of information in various media platforms where it is impossible for people to see it all. Its capacity can range from any kind of media formats and genres to processing any logical representation. Spatial affordance involves information regarding virtual space. It can represent space using maps, images and video but is not a visual representation. (Murray)

Analysis

Falling from Above is a game that is more geared towards Procedural and Participatory. This is because the game consists of scripts that whenever the user clicks on this particular button, there are a procedural set of rules that the computer processes and proceeds to give the respective outputs. For example, when the user clicks on “How to Play” on the main menu, the scripts changes from the main menu scene to the “How to Play” scene and the user can choose what to do from there again. Even in the game scene when the user is playing, whenever the user press on the left or right button, the game is following another set of rules for the animal in the game to move accordingly. This also shows participatory as it needs the user to control the movement of the animal during the game. The user is able to choose the characters in the game and without the user, the game will not be functional. Thus, this game portrays the trait of being more interactive.

The game is definitely less encyclopedic and spatial. This is because the game does not include as much information on multiple media formats as compared to other digital medium such as Facebook. The game has limited navigation where the main menu only has four navigations.

Unity as a platform has characteristics of all of the four affordances strongly. Unity has a strong procedural affordance because it is a platform that is built to facilitate the procedures according to the user’s preferences. There are so many functions in Unity that has their individual set of rules for the computer to follow. There are procedural generation tutorials in Unity where once the user clicks into, a certain set of videos will appear accordingly. The making of a 2D game where there are different scripts to dictate the logic of the game, are all stored in the Unity platform and the software must work step by step in consolidating the scripts and producing the result for the game to function. Thus, high procedural affordance in Unity enable efficient processing and compilation for our game Falling from Above. Unity also has a strong participatory affordance as Unity platform is all about one’s development and creativity of one’s own personalized application or game. The user will develop a game from scratch and he or she can easily control how the game works, how it looks and what it does. Unity has a flexible and open-minded environment for user to explore creatively. For Falling from Above, we were able to creatively think of a storyline and based on the exact story, design the game according to it. Moreover, Unity includes many information such as tutorials on many different types of coding, forums and threads for people to share information and consists of information of the technology that the software can utilize. For example, they have readily available information on real-time revolution, multiplayer services and PiXYZ software. This shows that Unity has a strong encyclopedic affordance. For Falling from Above, we needed to go on forums to debug our codes, watch the respective and relevant tutorials to code the scripts and all these resources are available on Unity platform itself. Unity’s website and software also shows how organized they are in allowing the users to navigate easily and finding information quickly. The platform not only uses words but also uses many images and videos to explain certain information to the users. Thus, Unity has a strong spatial affordance.

Written, Visual and Procedural Rhetoric

Written rhetoric is a technique of using language in written form to persuade, convince or influence an audience. Visual rhetoric is a means of communication through the use of visual images and texts. Procedural rhetoric can bring about a concept that explains rules and processes not simply through the use of words or visuals but through the processes. For games, procedural rhetoric conveys a particular ideology and portray a rule based on representations and interactions. It is also where core concepts deal with rhetoric as means of learning through rules and processes. Procedural rhetoric is different from Murray’s definition of procedural in the sense where procedural rhetoric refers to the core practice of software authorship which means the algorithms that model the way things behave and not so much to have the ability to execute a series of rules. (Bogost)

Analysis

In Falling from Above, written rhetoric is shown through the “How to Play” scene where instructions on how the game works were stated in text such as the points accumulated and how to break the land or tiles. Visual Rhetoric is illustrated through the same platform in images of the land or tiles and through the images of the characters. On the second scene of “How to Play”, the different food was also shown to the users instead of being in the word form. Procedural rhetoric is portrayed through the difficulty levels depending on the weight of the animals. The three different animals are elephant, lion and turtle. The weights are clearly differentiated where the elephant is the heaviest followed by the lion and lastly the turtle. Hence, the elephant will fall faster than the other two animals. It can be inferred that the elephant has the highest difficulty level with the fastest speed and the turtle is the easiest level with the slowest speed. The script for the coding of the speed for the individual animals is the algorithm that determines the gameplay.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) and Tangible User Interface (TUI)

GUIs let users see digital information only through a screen where users can interact with through remote controls such as mouse, keyboards and a touch screen. GUI represent information (bits) through pixels on bit-mapped displays. (Ishii)

Analysis

Falling from Above uses GUI to conduct the game. The game works on Microsoft Window, MAC OSX and android which are GUIs and allows the use of the screen to interact with the keyboard. When the game is being played on a computer, the controls needed are a screen, keyboard and a mouse. When the game is played on a phone, it uses the touch screen function of a mobile. All of which has no direct interaction and engagement from the digital world to the physical world.

TUI builds upon our dexterity by embodying digital information in physical space. (Ishii) There are games that were implemented using TUI from WOWCube. For instance, a 2x2x2 Rubik’s Cube consists of eight identical elements working as a whole and streamlined gaming processes such as mazes. It is based on a mixed reality approach which combines twisting and shaking the cube in reality with digital actions. (Revolvy, n.d.)

Figure 1 https://www.revolvy.com/page/WOWCube

Future Versions/ Improvements/ New abilities of Computer

For Falling from Above game, I feel that it is possible to implement TUI instead of GUI through a similar concept from WOWCube. If the game was in a 3D physical form, it would be in the shape of a cylinder and consists of 2 segments where it could rotate right or left. This would serve as the controls for the movement of the animals to move left or right as they fall through digital actions. Breaking the land or tile would require a shaking action of the entire cylinder.

Other improvements could be to include Virtual Reality elements where the player themselves would be the animals. The player will be dropping down the sky and instead of breaking the tiles or lands, they must land on the tile or land so that they will not lose the game. In order to do so, they have to run and jump either right or left to land correctly. The food that the animal collects in Falling from Above is something the player can also collect where durian make them loses points to the score and other food allows them to add points to the score. In the virtual reality game, an element that could be added is someone chasing them from above. This adds excitement for the user where the idea of being chased continuously feels so real in the virtual reality environment that it creates an adrenaline rush.

Similar Projects

Crossy Road is a similar game to Falling from Above in terms of the concept which is to continue playing for an endless series of roads and obstacles as far as possible without dying. For Crossy Road, the player must tap to go forward or swipe the screen left or right to avoid obstacles such as trees and cars. For Falling from Above, the player has to avoid hitting the durian and has to clear the obstacles which in this case are the land or tiles by swiping the screen right or left or pressing the keyboard buttons.

However, Falling from Above added twists such as accumulating power points from food. Collecting food increases power points for the animal to be able to break the land or tiles. Moreover, users also have to take note and avoid the durian fruit as the durian fruit will decrease the power point. There are more elements added to the game in hopes to instill a pinch of thrill and excitement among users during the game. Thus, attract users to play the game continuously. The game is also more difficult as the added elements requires users to react quickly to the changes.

Bibliography

Bogost. (n.d.). Procedural Rhetoric.

Ishii, H. (n.d.). Radical Atoms: Beyond Tangible Bits, Toward Transformabel Materials.

Murray, J. H. (n.d.). Inventing the Medium .

Revolvy. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.revolvy.com/page/WOWCube

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