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Post Mortem Unit 4

Story writing can be fun to some people, I am for sure not one of those people, mainly for the fact how long it takes me to write something and it can be completely incoherent and no one understand it, so that's what we had to do for this unit which was focused around story writing, again I wasn’t in class for this unit.

What we had to do for this unit was essentially was to make a character that goes into a work that you make up with a story that they interact with after making the character I was okay with, then making the story he went into, I ended up making it so that the character was in the past a part of a cult that did a lot of illegal stuff to the people who went against them inside the cult such as sabotage, my character was one of those people but got away and he suffers from flashback to the events of the cult.

The character found a house to squat in and stayed there as long as he could often becoming dehydrated and would avoid going outside as much as possible, after a lot of time passes the cult has started to grow and he starts losing a large amount of sleep because of it, causing him to get hallucinations, one night (this is the level part that we had to design for it) he wakes after passing out and he hears a strange noise kind of being a lot like static, so he gets up and sees that a lights on in the house's office room and goes in there, and there is a note saying “we found you” freaking him out after seeing the note he heads upstairs and the tv is on after going into the bathroom with the door slightly open he leaves it and from fright he faints.

The story after that is essentially him going after the cult trying to take them down, I really didn’t do the best with it and I had to use one of my classmates assets for my level, I quite enjoyed putting it together because I needed to make the house and it makes it easier for me to understand how to use maya.

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Post Mortem Unit 3

Unit 3 has been completed and I feel like I still need help with coding, so what was this unit about well mainly learning code and making a game with it, I was very happy with the final product and I found that people found it fun which is what you always want to hear about making games. We did some learning on how to do code and certain things like that which I found very relaxing unless there was a problem to be debugged. So I completed this unit during unit 7 after doing unit 4 so I had a better understanding of code because I spend more time on it. With what we did for this unit I wasn’t really around for, so I had to do all of the exercises without any help from a teacher which made it quite hard when debugging but I slowly got better at it, so what my game was called was Falling Ice and we had to make a mini GDD my game was a platform puzzler with the theme of being on an icy mountain trying to get down because of an avalanche but the player had to be as warm as possible so they don't freeze, unfortunately I could not at that to the game not the puzzle part.

So them what was I left with I was left with a platformer which I kinda had but then removed that to it and changed the game into a kind of a ski/snowboard game where the player slides down and through a tunnel, so there's not much to talk about with the game when it comes to it, the game idea completely changed once I saw the player sliding down the tunnel and I got people to test it and they had fun with it.

The game ended up being just sliding down this tunnel, what was good with making this game I learnt and have some very cool code that I can use to make a good game with such as a respawn system, gravity direction changer, a scene changer, a player controller and a main menu script, I found these quite easy to make and I think I will probably end up using these scripts again.

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Post Mortem Unit 2

So Unit 2 has been finished and I’m disappointed in myself, I feel like I let my team down, so what happened and what was unit 2 about. As a start unit 2 was mainly about level design and making a level, the start of the unit no problem just a fair amount of learning about what we will be doing and information we need.

then we move onto the project for the unit which is making a level based off a location in Melbourne our group chose the Melbourne arts center, we started off by going to the location and getting a lot of photos of the location so we know what it feels like to be their, then we designed a level around it the theme being autumn colours.

When we went to get photographs we got a lot of direct pictures on flat surfaces for materials, so then now after that we have to make a graybox scene of the level which all designers make each a graybox level of the game, so I ended up making a graybox that we liked but I needed to make a couple changes, which I ended up not doing so we ended up using another one.

After that we were at beta and we needed to replace the greyboxing with maya assets that we make, this was the first time I have even heard of maya and had no idea what I was doing with it, so through the whole unit I was making models and assets that were unusable because of z fighting which was completely unfixable even using a mending tool and all the issues would keep reappearing, so not only was I slow with maya I was also causing issues with maya.

So those issues were happening through alpha and gold, I kept causing issues because of my lack of understanding of maya, after everything had been done with the unit I essentially had not made a single model for the whole scene, but I did however do a lot of the UV maps and I also made a hero model because that was one of the requirements but the model was very simple and quite bad.

So from the level design unit I didn’t do much and mostly I slowed down the process of making the level i’m sorry to the designer that was with me. But from the unit I feel like this wasn’t a proper representation of what a level designer does, it feels like more of a model making unit.

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Post Mortem Unit 1

Unit 1 at AIE has been finish It was very informative through the first unit of different aspects of game design, we learnt and did: things such as how to analyse both video and board games, what the MDA framework is and how it is applied to games, making a GDD through making a game idea, we also went over photoshop and unity. Through all of this I found a lot of fun through using unity with a goal instead of randomly using at home and the same with unity.

When we went over unity and photoshop luckily I had previous experience in the use of both these programs and didn’t have a bunch of problems with them, Doing this unit using these tools helped me understand more of the programs uses and commands that I haven’t used before, I found that when we did the activities for unity it was a real help understanding the program more and I seemed to be quick at the usage of the commands.

After going through these activities the class moved onto the MDA framework for games, M standing for Mechanics, D for Dynamics and A for Aesthetics. What I found interesting in the framework was the usage of Aesthetics, in the terms of art Aesthetics is about looks but in games design it’s about what makes a Mechanic fun.

We had to go through the MDA framework when making the GDD(Game Design Document) with the document you make a game idea and essentially make a game idea, so I went with a top down infinet wave spawner where the player would have to fight off enemies and upgrade their character after each round after a couple rounds a boss would spawn, So after making the GDD we had to present the game in front of the class my main problem with the presentation was the order of information and when it’s given.

My thoughts on the unit as a whole thing is that it has been a very enjoyable time, meeting people and learning the type of games people like and just in general getting to know people, after this year is done I aim to do a GDD for a game that I properly and fully care about so I have something to create and present.

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Post Mortem Unit 7

After finish Unit 6 & 7 I think the group did pretty well given the circumstances out of the 11 people that showed up we would average around 5-6 people showing up with this being our biggest issue in our group.

Looking back over the unit aside from attendance some of the issues where code taking to long. For coding most of the time we would need 3 coders because of issues that we may face when bug testing, but we only had an average of 1 coder for most of the unit until near the end.

For the arts side of things a lot of pressure was put onto the 2 artists that mainly showed up one of them would be good at getting a lot done and other things done really well. If we had more artists show up it would have made the game look much better and closer to the intended style.

Then for the design side of things I was behind and needed to catch up putting a lot of pressure on the other designer in my group. After catching up however it made it a lot smoother, a thing that would have helped was naming conventions which I was working on but they needed to be changed midway and because the naming conventions were causing issues with the animations so I ended up having to stop working on them. 

My other designer did a lot at home and im very thankful for all his work at home and for myself as an improvement I need to focus on being able to work at home putting less stress on him and future designers I work with. 

The big thing that held our group back was the lack of people, later on it got much better for us but there were days when we had 3 people show up, Future improvements would have to be people showing up.

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My view of League of Legends

Throughout my whole experience of playing League of Legends with more than a couple thousand hours playing League I personally have had struggles more and more on what actually makes me continue the game, for myself I have had experience in playing in a school team and further playing on the professional stage.

League today seems wrong with how the balancing goes, what’s strong gets nerfed because they are called overpowered then they realise all the champions are weak so they buff them and the cycle continues, but what makes it bad is when some champions are left to be weak and the mains of that champion will just feel bad and make a choice of three change there main, continue only playing that champion or just leave the game entirely.

Even with league of legends being so popular today people are leaving because of neglect to what they love about the game, people relate them to the champion they like and if that champion isn’t fun to play then why should they continue. This goes the same with a champion they like in a specific lane, like Camille she used to be a top and now she is left as a jungler barely. Champions change but players don’t, if you want a thriving game for years to come make the players happen rather than making a sport out of it.

The game isn’t friendly on new players which is bad for league continuing as a game, League takes time for people to get into it, with the unfriendly nature of how someone learns to the toxicity of league of legends for new players it isn’t easy to have fun playing. How to deal with these problems take time but you should already be thinking about how to keep people playing and how to attract new people to play, Esports isn’t going to do it nor will songs. If riot games knows what’s good for league of legends then they should be investing in the aesthetics of the game for long time players and a proper way to introduce people into the game rather than a bad tutorial, when i’m asked how do you recommend to get better I just say watch YouTube because the game doesn’t do a good job at it.

League Should be focusing on what’s mentioned above and it’s fine for league to do what they are currently doing but they need to fix how people continue, learn, engage and riot games needs to learn themselves that League is a game with a large audience that dislike playing the game but play it anyway because they don’t like ending on a loss. The game seems very hard for a player like me to get back into League since every time I play I feel annoyed for the the cohesion of the team. I’ve always been a team player but it’s hard to play league as a team when I can’t trust a single one of them when I get into a draft select.

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Esports

I have played on a pro league of legends stage

was very fun!