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[term4itmedia]

Research - Time travel + Paradoxes

Time travel is the practice of travelling through time in a way that a past or future event can be visited, with hopes of changing a certain aspect of it to alter the timeline in the current moment.

For years, people thought of time travel as beneficial and as a world-destroyer, dependant on the angle you look at it from. Time travel can be a life-saver, but... is it worth the risk? No, and here’s why...

Paradoxes

For one, if you wanted to go back in time and stop World War II from happening, yes, you would stop all of the horrible things from happening, which would remove any reason for you to go back in time to stop it in the first place. No knowledge of World War II would exist in the future, and therefore no need for you to go back in time to stop it.

In addition, past events possibly influenced the births of many different people. So going back in time and stopping the event that eventually led to your birth (if you were the time traveller) doesn’t make any sense.

Imagine you go back in time with all of the Harry Potter books that J.K Rowling had written in our present time. You then meet J.K Rowling herself and you give them to her. J.K Rowling then goes ahead to publish these books, but where did they originate from? It wasn’t J.K Rowling since she copied what you brought to her, and it wasn’t you since you brought them back through time. Therefore, the books would have no origin point. They would’ve come out of nowhere, which again, makes no sense.

Another example of a paradox is if you went back in time to kill your younger self. You kill your younger self, but that would mean you would’ve never made the time machine to go back in time and kill your younger self, which would mean your younger self would’ve never been killed, which means you would have the capabilities of going back in time. This loop can go on forever, and THAT’S the paradox.

In my game, I’m including some form of time travel and I will even hint at why it was such a bad idea... for the player that is.

[term4itmedia]

Research - User Interface

User interface is a display in video games that tells the player what their individual statistics are, such as health, magic power and experience levels. Almost all UI is typically displayed in the corners of the screen, while additional UI (which is shown under certain conditions) can be shown at different parts of the screen while keeping the previous menu still visible.

Minecraft

Take Minecraft for instance, where the default UI is shown in the bottom middle of the screen during gameplay. The additional UI (the inventory of the player, as seen above this paragraph) is shown in the very middle of the screen, darkening everything outside of it to make it easily viewable. The same traits apply to menu UI, which is the interface of an interactive menu.

Warframe

Warframe’s UI is spread out over multiple corners. The top left is the mini-map (a map for players to look at to know their current location), the top right is the health bar (you can learn more about that in my Hit Points post) and the bottom right is the ammunition and energy bars.

Occasionally, a character will speak and show their faces on the middle left of the screen, which is… a bit of an odd placement, but gives room for the subtitles, should the player have a very long username or the character have a really long line of dialogue.

(apologies for the blurry image, I couldn’t find one of a better quality)

The pause menu in Warframe is shown on the very left of the screen, besides the character, with nothing else around it. As soon as the menu disappears, a short animation plays before the gameplay UI comes back into view.

Unlike most games, the UI moves around a bit when the character takes a giant leap or moves very fast. This is probably due to the canvas which stores the UI to misalign with the current camera angle, which is apparent if you move the character’s rotation too quickly. In the video above, watch the UI in the corners. The rest of the video does not matter.

No user interface games

Not every game has a user interface, as some don’t really need one. For example, in this video game called Portal (you don’t have to watch the whole thing):

In Portal, there is no user interface other than the main menu when you start the game up. This is for two reasons, possibly more:

You can only get hit once before dying in the game.

There is no limit to how many portals you use (you would have to watch the video or have played the game to understand this one).

Both Portal and it’s sequel, Portal 2 don’t have user interface at all. However, during challenges in Portal 2, user interface is shown for time and the number of portals used within the game, so the game doesn’t completely lack a user interface. Well, if it didn’t have user interface at all, would you even be able to play it if it was supposed to have a menu of sorts? No.

Portal is not the only franchise without user interface, as The Stanley Parable lacks it during gameplay too, because again, there is no need for it due to it’s nature of gameplay, which is just walking around and clicking on objects. Nothing else.

For my game, I will include a user interface, which will be needed, otherwise how will you know if you’re close to destroying an entity?

[term4itmedia]

Research - Games + How They Are Made

Games are a form of interactive entertainment that is played by one person or more, which can derive from many different themes, including education. Games can come in multiple different forms, such as a board game, a compact disc with the game on it (particularly on consoles, which you can learn more about in my History post) and one that is completely made up and requires nothing but a few people (like Elevenses, which many people play at once and are eliminated over time). For this post, I will be focusing on the digital side of games (which is commonly known as “video games” today), because my game will be digital-based.

I’m going to warn you, this game will spoil a few things about my game. For those who don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading this post now.

Fallout

Fallout is one of the most recognisable video game series, due to it’s highly detailed map design, story and how it is related to other games which I’m also going to cover in this post, including my own.

There are many Fallout games, so I’ve decided to choose the third one because it is somewhere in the middle (series like these started in the early 2000s where there wasn’t much detail and shapes in video games), which isn’t too old or too modern.

Mad Max

Mad Max is another game I’m looking at (even though I’ve never really played it, which is about 60% of the games I’m looking at on this blog) that has a story and genre similar to Fallout and my game - war, stop the source.

Unlike Fallout and my game though, this looks like a driving game, however there are segments of the game where you can walk your character around and explore the maps.

Metro Exodus

Metro Exodus is the third game I’m looking at in this post. Don’t worry, I’m not just going to look at games of the same nature as mine, I’m just doing these three to compare them all before I move on to something else.

Anyway, like Mad Max, Fallout and my game, it is a shooting game. You might be thinking; “Aren’t these games the same thing?”. Technically, yes, but there are differences.

Fallout is supposed to take place past the 2100s, which resembles a dystopian future similar to the film Elysium, where Earth is completely wasted and nothing is what everyone hoped it would be. Mad Max is set in the present time, but set around someone getting bullied and willing to repair their car (which had just been completely smashed to bits). Metro Exodus is also set in the future, but after a set of cataclysmic events which may or may not kill the player depending on their actions throughout gameplay.

For my game, it will be set after the game I did last year, a sequel.

How a game is made

This will cover some difficult technicalities that many people will not understand.

The concept

Ideas (particularly on a mind-map or list)

Further development

Learning how to code (if you’re making a digital game like Fallout or one like mine)

Create assets (or models if you’re making a board game)

Create maps

Planning behaviour of objects

Code, build, test, repeat

The Concept

Making up the concept of your game is the starting point, and quite possibly the most difficult. Coming up with something that nobody has ever done before is tricky, because it requires a lot of research and patience. Once you have your concept, you may need to develop it further if it doesn’t go into too much depth.

Ideas and Further Development

For my game, I had to start out with a Pinterest board, which comprised of many different images of fire, energy and many things that were war-based. From there, I made multiple plans of what I could have. There were many things I have ended up scrapping over this process because they were either too hard for me to make or not really necessary.

Learning How To Code

If you’re making a digital game like Fallout, this is where most of the work will be put together. Programming is the hardest part of getting something working, and you can’t learn it in a day. It will take a few weeks of preparation to make a good working script, unless you get someone else to provide you the code (you may have to pay them for it, which also brings up the question of why games need a team, which is ridiculously expensive). Once you get used to learning how to code, you will be fine from here… well, not quite.

For me, I started out on the Scratch engine 8 years ago, which I never went forward from until summer 2018, when I started using Game Maker Studio (see my Games Engine post for more details). Earlier this year, I learned how to use Unity and code in another language entirely, which wasn’t too difficult for me.

Creating Assets and Maps

Maps can be done in a number of ways:

You make the maps yourself.

Have someone else make the maps for you.

Downloading samples and editing them (don’t do that!).

For my game, my map is mostly flat, which only requires a modification at an edge of it to make mountains, which is done in Unity using paint tools on terrain. The easy thing to remember is, ALL terrain you make starts out flat, unless you’re heavily editing a shape, like a sphere.

Assets however, are a lot more complicated. First of all, you need to know how to use a 3D engine like Cinema4D, Mudbox or Maya, unless you are making a 2D game, in which case you need to learn how to draw sprite sheets or code animation. I’d suggest starting out in pixel-art form, as it is very easy to work with.

If you’re willing to go to 3D already, then you need to learn how to make basic objects, like a chair. It will then take some practice to get to high-end levels like a gun or even a full re-creation of the tallest building in the world (that’s a joke, by the way), but after that, you’re good to go with assets and map design.

Planning Behaviour of Objects

Will your planned object jump out at you if you get too close to it? Will that tiny box in the corner of your room endlessly spew out bullets? Will you plan that object’s behaviour (or AI in modern terms)?

Planning behaviour for an object can be a bit tricky if you’re not good at digital animation (like in Cinema 4D) or if you’re just really rusty at programming. However you plan it is up to you.

For my game, a turret will endlessly fire bullets in the direction it faces because of a timer in the script that triggers the bullet to appear when it hits a certain value, and a cube will endlessly spin in a reactor until it is destroyed.

Finally - code, build, test and repeat until the game is complete!

[term4itmedia]

Research - Programming Languages + Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a  text-editing program that is primarily used for programming.

Programming languages however, are a series of instructions that tell your constructive program to do what you say. It’s basically like a father and his child. If you tell the program to move an object, it will do so. If you tell the program to increase a value if something isn’t active, it will do so under those conditions. This is commonly called ‘code’, for those reasons.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is an advanced programming software, which allows the user to refer to different methods and alternative solutions. The code you see here is entirely written by me in C#, which is the programming language my game will be written in.

At the top is the “using directives”, which pull code from folders which contain other scripts. These have to be managed carefully, or Visual Studio gives you a red line, saying it doesn’t exist.

After that is the class structure. Classes are what make up the scripts themselves. The first class HAS to take the name of the script itself, like, you cannot call the class “TrainStation” if your code filename is “ExplosivePlant”.

Inside the class is a series of instructions that initialise values, update the instance and countless other possibilities.

In “void Update” is code that gets triggered once per frame. The keyword “void” means that the method doesn’t return a value. Other keywords like “int”, “float” or “double” HAVE to have a value returned to them at the end of the path.

I would teach you more about how to code, but you would be here forever.

Programming Languages

There are many different programming languages used in software and video games, with the most common ones being C#, Java and C++. They are tricky to learn, and they do affect performance. For example, Java requires emulation using the Java executable itself.

I know a fair bit about C++ and Java, so I can go over the differences. If you’re not a programmer, ignore this part:

C++ doesn’t use “using” directives. Instead, it uses “include” with a hashtag next to it. Java uses “import” and “package”, with “package” coming first.

In C#, “public void” becomes “public: void” in C++. C# is relatable to Java, but there are only a few major differences that I don’t know about.

In Unity, C# or Java can be used for the game’s main programming language, while Unreal uses C++ to make a smooth performing program.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? Because it is. Learning to code takes a lot of time and practice, let alone to make a game.

Because my project is a game, I will have to be scripting a lot of new functions, especially since I’m trying new things. You’ll know more about this if you look at my Progression post.

[term4itmedia]

Research - Games Engines

Games engines are software that allow development of games or movies. Each one is unique in some way, using a different programming language (see that post for more info about them) for each one.

Unity

Unity is a cross-platform games engine that is used to create movies, games and environment designs. Like Cinema 4D, it is a 3D software, but it does have a 2D option to those who aren’t really fond of 3D design.

Unity is free, but it does have a paid option where you can get a fancy black theme… and that’s it. The default theme is white, and cannot be changed unless the black theme is paid for (or if you are a crazy hacker, which I’m not).

From the looks of these images, they look like some sort of dungeon-based role-playing game. I like the look of them based around my assumptions since the fire, darkness and lack of light gives it that really dark feeling that you’re in a dungeon.

But Unity isn’t just about making games, if you were reading carefully:

A picture of this isn’t enough so I thought I’d share the video itself.

The video starts out as what looks like an thin figure crossing a swampland, before cutting to a cyborg’s cell, where it falls and wires become detached from it’s back. It then escapes, to which it sees hundreds of other cyborgs, which are getting shot down by a nearby security group if they slow down behind their ancestors. They then walk away into the distance, and the film ends with the Unity logo showing up.

As the film tells you, it is made within the Unity engine, which is done with many different assets, cameras and keyframes.

Episode 1 is uploaded on the official Unity channel, while future episodes are uploaded on OATS Studios (see my first blog, term1itmedia for more about them), as they’re the ones who have made it.

My game will be made within this engine since it is the only one that I know how to use… well, second. I know another game engine called…

Game Maker Studio

Game Maker Studio is a games engine which is one of the easiest to use. It is primarily used for 2D games, 3D games are barely possible within the engine it uses (GML, meaning Game Maker Language).

Half of the code snippets are written in C#, while the software itself adds some of it’s own code to make things easier for novice programmers.

I have actually used this software in preparation before the project started. What you’re seeing in the picture above isn’t a random image I pulled from Google Images, it is actually something I am working on! I’m not submitting this for the final major, this is just something I’m doing for fun in my spare time.

Game Maker Studio was used to make Undertale (and it’s sequel,Deltarune), one of the popular game titles, and was the first game to be ported to the Nintendo Switch console using this engine.

People who use Game Maker Studio are mainly indie developers (people who make games on their own with nobody else), as this software isn’t really one that is useful within the industry, as Unity and what-is-coming-up-next are used the most.

Unreal

Unreal is a high-end games engine which is used the most often in the industry. It is a complex engine, written entirely using C++, making everything very difficult to make.

Unreal was used to make Fortnite, one of the most popular video games of all time:

There isn’t much to say about Unreal, other than the fact it is an engine nothing like I’ve seen before. I don’t dislike it, but I don’t like it either due to it’s complexity, and as such, I will NOT be using this engine to build my game in.

And I thought learning to code was tough enough…

[term4itmedia]

Research - Game Mechanics (Hit Points)

Hit points (commonly abbreviated as HP, otherwise known as health or life) are attributes in video games, particularly combat-based, that indicate the remaining lifespan of an entity, determining how much damage it can withstand before being completely incapacitated and unable to continue.

Hit points can be told via text or by a long bar, its size is determined by how many hit points the entity has. If it hasn’t taken a hit yet, the bar will be full. If it is almost at zero, the bar will be almost completely invisible.

There can be an object in another game that works similar to a health bar, but is made in such a way to distinguish it from the classic rectangular shape.

Fortnite

Fortnite uses health bars for all entities that can be destroyed, including other players. It appears as two bars, one of which being the main health bar, which is green. The other bar is for the player’s shield, which also has a HP value.

Upon striking an uncontrollable entity, like a tree, the green bar will deplete gradually dependant on how much damage is dealt to the entity. Upon the player being struck, a red portion of what used to be the green health bar before shortening is shown, which depletes shortly afterwards. This does not happen with the blue health bar.

In video games, whenever your character is hit, you may see a red flash, vignette or blood splattering on your screen. This is to show that the character has taken damage and needs to heal.

Half-Life

In Half-Life, the player’s hit points are shown in a user interface instance in the bottom left of the screen. This is an example of a health bar that doesn’t use the “filled bar” method, but a number instead.

When the number drops to or below a certain value (e.g. 25), the background of the interface will flash to give the player a warning that they are close to death.

Minecraft

Minecraft’s health bar is indicated with hearts instead of a bar, or a number. When the player starts to lose hearts (like, at three grey hearts), the hearts will start to twitch. At four grey hearts, the hearts will start to shake. At two hearts or less, the hearts will shake violently. This is to warn the player that if they take fatal damage, their character will die.

Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero’s HP bar isn’t really a bar, but a meter with a needle inside that points to a certain portion depending on how well the player is playing.

If the player is playing well, the meter will be in the green area. At the very end of the green (right side), the needle stops moving and cannot go any higher, presumably to prevent being cheap.

If the player is on an average level, the needle will be in the yellow area.

If the player is playing badly, the needle will be in the red area. If they continue to play badly, they will eventually see flashing red, meaning they’re about to fail. If the needle goes all the way to the end of the red (left side), the player has failed and must restart.

This is a rare example of a health bar that isn’t really about life, but performance, with one end being “You are great at this game!” and the other end being “You’re not good enough. Try again!”

Since my project is a game, I’m including a health bar. You will know about this if you saw my Progression post.

[term4itmedia]

Progression of New Experimentation (Weeks 33-36)

Welcome back! This post will cover the first project of Year 2, or the fourth term of Interactive Media. In this year, we are trying out new things, which will uncover new strengths and weaknesses.

The First Week

The first week involved making assets, as my specialism was game design last year. Depending on our specialism, we would go ahead and improve our skills to get ready for university. I don’t want to go to university as I don’t see it as useful, plus I would have to go far away to study even more in my area.

Anyway, on with the assets. The first asset I made was a time machine:

I originally went with a cylindrical design, which proved to be too difficult. Trying to resolve the issues would take more time than we had on the project, which was 4 weeks. Yeah, not long compared to the previous 12 weeks on my Year 1 FMP (which you can read about all over my term3itmedia blog).

So instead of cylindrical, I went with a square design, which was easier to manage. Because I have never done so before, I decided to start morphing the shapes.

To do this, I had to make each individual segment of the cuboid editable. This made each edge of the shape manageable, which led to:

...this. I thought it was a bit bland at this point and made no sense as it looked like a crushed metal box. So I put some bolts on it to make it look like it was specially built.

Then I decided to edit the inside. I started out by putting a black rectangle against the back wall, which would act as a digital screen in the game. Next to it, to make it more science-fiction looking, I added a keypad. This keypad doesn’t work in the final product, but I could make it work if I wanted to.

After some tweaking, it was time to add colours. I went with a black and red colour scheme, as it matches the theme of my project, because black and red is the colour scheme of it.

Then I decided to port it into the game. But there were some problems...

It may not look like much, but that is because I’m on the inside of the object. By default, Unity doesn’t accept objects with an inside. To fix this, I went back to Cinema 4D and did Simulate > Cloth > alt-clicking Cloth Surface, which increased the thickness of the object, both internally and externally.

And now it works perfectly fine. So I began to structure the beginning stage.

The first stage involves the character escaping the now destroyed Final Tower, by going into a time machine to go back and stop the cataclysm from happening in the first place.

The Second Week

The second week was continuing the project and overall putting more effort into trying new things. This time I made a second stage with mountains and trying out a new mechanic - entity living bases, which structure the base life of an entity, whether it’d be a person or a random cube.

Aside from the time machine, can you see anything else? That’s right, there’s an axe! This axe is what you use in the game to destroy things. However, there was another thing I chose to do, which was animation.

I had to follow a tutorial on YouTube to get it to work, which you can find by typing the title and author name from the image below:

After that, I was able to get it to work. Now, to make the axe actually destroy things... this was tough. VERY tough.

I originally had this code to tell the object that “Yes, you need to be destroyed”. What it does first is check if the object is indestructible. Then it goes through some maths to calculate the total damage value, and subtracts the entity base life with that value. If the life value is below 1, it gets destroyed.

However, there was no way to tell if you destroyed the entity or not. So I did some research and remembered that in my previous project I included health bars, so I decided to replicate that in this game.

I did have to refresh my memory with some re-researching, which proved to be tricky at first, but I got the hang of it almost immediately.

So I did more experimenting by adding destructible trees, which do nothing other than serve as decoration.

As for the entity scripts, I had to define every single value and image in the Unity hierarchy, which was tedious but easy.

The Third Week

Time was beginning to crunch, so I had to get my game on, both figuratively and physically. I started to build the third stage of the game, which was inside the house that you find in the second stage in the middle of the mountains.

After which I decided to experiment with more scripting:

The modifier of the method listed above; Virtual, means that the method can be written to later on by another class. This is very useful if you have many different entities but do not wish to include hundreds of lines of code in the base method, since you can attach the overriding script to your entity.

The modifier here; Override, means it is “overriding” the already existing method by modifying or extending the original code. For example, if the damage value is set to 43 in the existing method, in the overriding method you can set it to a lower/higher value.

After I did that, I went ahead to test another thing; Subtitles. I don’t know how you don’t know what subtitles are, but they are lines of text that appear at a position on the screen to spell out what a person is saying or what a sound is making, such as ‘(EXPLOSION)” or “(MURMURING THE LYRICS)”.

After doing that, I did a fourth stage, which is just a modification of the second stage, and a path to the final stage, which you access by destroying a reactor.

But something new had to come:

A javelin! I made the javelin in Cinema 4D and I ported it to Unity... getting it working was very difficult. So I had to follow ANOTHER tutorial, which didn’t help at all, so I pulled some code from a Unity help page.

This is what I tried before:

And this is the final result:

The difference between them is more than one of them worked and the other didn’t work, it is much more simple and required half the lines of code I had in the first place.

For all the other reasons, don’t worry. The takeaway is that it wasted a lot of my time.

After I finished the javelin, I began work on the final stage, which is a boss battle. If you don’t know, boss battles are difficult stages in the game that require the player’s skills to beat. An example of this is:

Bosses are aggressive enemies that have a significant challenge against players. Usually, defeating a boss advances the game in some way. In my case, killing the boss finishes the game.

To test out more elements in the game, I made a test level in a separate scene as I didn’t want to mess up anything in the current levels. This test level contained 2 cubes, a teleport and the player’s main weapons - the axe and the javelin. During this time, I also tried out animation on the enemies, which worked very well:

The Fourth Week

The fourth and final week was about polishing the game to give it more quality and having the possibility to get it finished.

First of all, I made an interactive menu:

In this scene, you can see the first stage of the game situated as a menu, with GRAVITY on top of the brick wall by the broken house, which is the name of the game.

After finishing the menu, I worked on an end screen.

In this scene, you can see an end screen, which appears after the boss battle. If I had more time and if I was willing to, I would make more stages in the game. But if you know me personally, you’ll know I never like leaving off on something unfinished.

If you’re curious, here’s the original image (only changed the text):

So that’s it. A game made in 4 weeks. Not the best thing I've done and certainly not the fastest I’ve ever completed one, but is one that tells you this;

“You’ll never know if you’re bad at something unless you try it. All that you can do when attempting it is just keep trying until you hit a wall.”

...which I did a lot throughout this project. 65% downs and 35% ups, with the ups being the moment where I knew I could do it. The 65% downs were everything I tried that were new, which I thought were going to end horribly.

After the game had been built, I decided to make a fake Steam page for it in Photoshop, which would make it look like the game is for sale on Steam.

Maybe next time, I’ll stick to something simpler.

My next project will be covered on term5itmedia, but stay tuned on this blog as I may have extra research coming.

[term4itmedia]

Research - Portals

Portals are inter-dimensional rifts that have the purpose of transporting one from one location to another instantaneously.

Portal (game)

Portals don’t exist in real life as they require an impossible level of technology to make one, let alone two. But it has been a proof of concept in many science-fiction movies and games. One of which is the video game Portal:

In this video game, you can see that portals are made from the use of a portal gun (which ALSO doesn’t exist in real life, and also making the previously made portal disappear upon use, which makes no sense), which is used to get to high/far away places quickly.

The game explains itself, so let’s look at a different portal, from Big Hero 6:

In Big Hero 6, a portal is made by a mad scientist who had a failed experiment to make interconnected portals, which has the intention of sucking in any form of matter, mainly the heroes. It is revealed later that the portal was never connected to anything and is just a wormhole into a weird dimension where matter gets lost forever.

How does this relate to my project? I plan to experiment with making a portal in one way or another, but don’t expect to see it in the final outcome unless I have a great use for it.

[term4itmedia]

Research - Fictional flying machines VS Real life flight

Flying machines are vehicles that have the intent of taking the user high in the air, above many things. This can range from a plane to alleged alien spacecraft. This post will cover fictional aircraft and comparing it to real life aircraft.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Having a small, solo flying machine that can travel at insane speeds is imaginary and not possible with our current technology. One of these examples is a flying machine is from a video game called Sonic Colors, which is an installment of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise:

In this video, you can see a flying machine with controllable claws, controllable tornadoes, cannons, high energy lasers and the ability to go at a high speed. Such a machine can’t exist in real life because of the insane amount of resources required... which we don’t have. Even if we did have it, the planning behind such mechanical structure would be impossible, requiring an infinite amount of energy.

Space Invaders

Space Invaders is a classic retro title from the 1980s, which is about shooting down alien ships before they reach the ground. This kind of aircraft is theoretically possible in real life, but it would take a lot of time and prep work to make.

In this video, you can see alien ships shooting lasers down at the ground, hitting what appear to be shields or houses. This somewhat inspires me to make a spaceship in my project that does something similar to this, but for now I’m unsure whether or not to include it.

Elysium

I’ve covered Elysium in the past on my previous blog (term3itmedia), but I didn’t go over how this aircraft compares to real life.

WARNING: Gore at 1:40

This aircraft is something you would expect to see in real life, but unfortunately, this isn’t real. Unlike actual aircraft, this one can fly through space and has many advanced technicalities, like a self-destruct button. The reason why you cannot fly real life aircraft into space is because of the lack of airflow to drive the vehicle up, unless you use a rocket.

Blade Runner

Blade Runner has both flying ships and flying cars, the latter of which doesn’t exist in the real world, and probably won’t come to life for a very long time.

In this video, you can see the flying car leaving a city and landing in a junk yard. This can relate to Back to the Future (which you can learn more about in my Time Machine post), as both movies have flying cars.

Like I said earlier, flying cars don’t exist in real life, nor do we have the technology to make one.

Star Trek

Star Trek, much like Elysium, has spaceships, except these spaceships are even more advanced. How so? Well, watch the video and you’ll see:

In this video, you can see spaceships multiplying themselves, which isn’t possible at all in real life by any means. At 1:33 in the video, the spaceships are firing lasers at each other, eliminating them one by one. Another thing that is possible here but not so much in real life is a screen made out of a hologram. This is very common in science-fiction movies as it looks at the concept of having a screen you can just walk through, because it isn’t solid.

How does this relate to my project? I plan to include a flying machine of some sort as a decoy for a battle stage. Movement is currently unknown and still needs planning.

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Research - Running out of fossil fuels

Fossil fuels are combustible fuels that are formed from old organisms found in an ecological dig. This includes coal, gas and even oil. These are known to be unlimited, but at some point in the future we are going to run out of resources. How so? It’s due to the amount of production that we use these fuels for. Sure, we may not live to see what happens when we run out, but it is definitely a social concern that all of us are worried about, even though we have a really long time to try and do something about it, which is about 200 years.

Why is this a social issue? Because fossil fuels are used to give us electricity, heat and even more things for the home that give us real problems if we cannot have them.

How does this link to my project? Doesn’t at the moment, but I’m leaving this here for extra research. Should I come up with something related to it in the project soon, I’ll edit this post and put the reasoning here.

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Research - Tsunamis

Tsunamis are giant waves that deal extreme damage to coastal cities and very rarely inland, which are caused by a massive displacement in water due to a very heavy object crashing into water at a high speed, commonly in the ocean.

Tsunamis can be an outrageous height, going so high the top wouldn’t be visible at ground level! The height of the tsunami depends on the amount of weight used to make such a giant splash that causes it.

An example of one of the worst tsunamis was the Krakatoa tsunami in Indonesia, which occurred in 1883 following the eruption (which you can learn more about in my post including Volcanoes). Due to the super-strength shockwave that the volcano generated from the explosion, the water around the volcano was displaced greatly, causing a 30-metre high tsunami which obliterated the rest of Indonesia, killing up to 40,000 people. Very grim indeed...

How is this a social issue? Tsunamis can destroy cities and still have room for more as they are unstoppable, which leads to people losing their homes, or even worse, their lives.

How does this relate to my project? Well, I don’t plan on including a tsunami or anything related in my outcome, as this is just research into social issues, which is the main theme for the project.

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Research - Area 51 + World War 3?

Area 51 is one of the world’s most famous places that isn’t really supposed to be famous. Why is that? Nobody apart from the people who work there and the US government knows what is in Area 51, so it sparks so many conspiracy theories around it, such as the base being home to aliens, time travel, long-awaited video game sequels or other things that the world may never see.

What we know is that Area 51 is actually just a military base where the US Air Force is trained, hence why the amount of restrictions around it goes out so far nobody can see what is going on there, even from the best view possible.

Too bad nobody outside of the people who work in Area 51 will see what is really happening, as trespassing past the defences will either get them arrested or killed, as deadly force is authorised to be used in the area to keep out trespassers.

So why is Area 51 a secret? Nobody knows for sure, but what we DO know is that the base was never considered a secret base, but any activity on the base is said to be top secret.

How is this a social issue? Apparently they are stopping operations at Area 51, but it’s currently just a guess and probably not the full truth.

Possible World War 3?

Eventually, in July 2019, a Facebook event called “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All Of Us” was created by a guy called Matty Roberts, who then said, after the post went viral, that is was all just a joke and that he would hold no responsibility if people actually try to storm Area 51.

This was such much of a threat that a spokeswoman of the US Air Force said in a newspaper post; “Area 51 is an open training range for the U.S. Air Force, and we would discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train American armed forces. The U.S. Air Force always stands ready to protect America and its assets.”, deterring anyone from even thinking about storming Area 51.

But what would happen if 2 million+ people actually storm Area 51? There would be thousands of deaths, arrests and fines, if not all of them would be dead. If people just keep coming, it may spark a third world war. Of course it’s just a guess, nobody knows what would actually happen.

How does this link to my project? I plan to include some sort of “secret note finding” within the project, but it is entirely original and not inspired by anything else.

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Research - Endangered Species

Endangered species are a group of members in a species that are in danger of going extinct. Pandas for example, are one of the endangered species on Earth, with around 2,000 pandas left in the wild.

For a species to become endangered, the amount of members in said species are to be less than 100,000. If the amount of members in the species is less than 10,000, then they are critically endangered.

It is possible for species to go “extinct in the wild”, which is where there are no active members of that species left in the wild, but there are a few captive members alive, such as in zoos or farms. If every single member of the species is dead, then they are extinct, never to be seen again.

This is one of the most concerned social issues on the planet, as there are some of the most beautiful species out there that we fear losing and most of us aren’t doing anything to stop it. How can it be solved? Apart from putting more in zoos or other captive manner, nothing can help.

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Research - Scooby Doo + Real life crimebusting

Scooby Doo is an animated series primarily revolved around ghost mysteries, which are solved through a number of clues and relations to earlier events (the culprit could have been someone they talked to an hour later).

Most of the places explored in Scooby Doo are abandoned buildings or towns (see my Chernobyl post) and the searches mainly take place at night. This is probably due to the fact that the show is meant to be slightly scary (because this is mainly aimed at kids).

Each Scooby Doo episode/movie starts out as the gang figure out another problem outside of solving mysteries. In this example, they find out that Shaggy’s (the one with the green shirt and bushy brown hair) overwhelming fear comes from an acute condition which is extremely rare, and as such he is forbidden from going on more adventures.

After setting off on what seems to be a relaxing vacation, the gang then run into another problem... a mystery, which is then solved by looking for clues leading to the culprit, who is then taken away and says they “would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids”, which is an iconic quote from the show, typically heard at the end after the villain’s capture.

Real-life crimebusting

Scooby Doo is written in a way to make a case-solving scenario make sense, where as in real life, solving a mystery differs on the case. Since Scooby Doo is always linked around ghosts, every case that the show follows has to do with ghost-like entities. In real life though, many more cases are known, and some still remain unsolved to this day.

From a bank robbery to finding a missing person, a case is never easy to solve in a cartoon, let alone real life. Cases like this are solved via CCTV (surveillance cameras) and finger/foot prints. Eventually, the culprit is found and they are taken away for a very long time.

How does this relate to my project? Well, I don’t want to give too much out because of spoilers, but I plan to include some sort of mystery solving case. Will reveal more later.

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Research - The Time Machine + Back to the Future

The Time Machine is a sci-fi novel written by H.G. Wells. It is about a Victorian scientist who constructs a time-machine to travel through time, by going very far into the future (around the year 1,000,000). At the end of the novel he goes back to his present time, but the next day decides to go forward in time again with no evidence of it happening, which puts the audience in suspense (cliffhanger).

In theory, time travel is possible because of a thing called “Time dilation”. This typically happens to astronauts who spend a long time in a space station thousands of miles from Earth. However, it’s just a myth that time travel is possible and there is no clear evidence that it is, so at our present day knowledge, time travel is impossible.

Back to the Future

Back to the Future, very much like The Time Machine, is a sci-fi film. There are three films in the series, but we’re mainly going to focus on the first one because this is the one that started it all and is the most memorable.

Back to the Future follows a story of a guy called Marty McFly who knows a scientist called Dr Emmett Brown, who goes ahead to construct a time machine out of a car, particularly a DeLorean. After a terrorist attack, Marty takes the time machine and accidentally goes back in time to 1955 from 1985. Finding Emmett in the past, Marty tells Emmett that he came back in time using a time machine that Emmett made 30 years later, and so they conduct an experiment to bring Marty back to 1985.

How does this relate to my project? I have made a definite decision to include a time machine in my project, though I’m not sure where to go with this. I may just go in blind...

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Research - Amazon Rainforest Fire + Great Fire of London

The Amazon Rainforest is one of the most famous rainforests in the world. If you don’t know what a rainforest is, it’s a very large area dense with trees that has popular belief to release a large percentage of oxygen in the world. While it may be a myth that rainforests give off 20% of oxygen on the planet, they do have their benefits, like... releasing oxygen that we breathe. Without rainforests, the air wouldn’t be so clean and we would likely die from lack of air to breathe.

In 2019, fires have started breaking out in the forest. The causes are still being debated and are currently unknown, but they are mainly linked to dry weather and human activity, and it’s been ruled out that it couldn’t have been caused by lightning strikes.

Great Fire of London + Relation to project

Fires of any kind around the world can get out of control and threaten the life of thousands, possibly millions of lives. With rainforests, wildlife and close-by cities or other life is in danger of being burnt to ashes. With major cities like London, a lot of life is also in danger, whether it’d be a zoo or a skyscraper.

In 1666, a fire broke out in a baker’s shop in London on Pudding Lane. In a few hours, the whole building was ablaze. Eventually, the fire spread over one third of the entirety of London over five days, which destroyed many buildings and left over 100,000 people homeless as a result.

Very much like the rainforest fires, major city fires are so monumentally damaging that they are remembered as life-threatening events which could’ve ended very horribly. For example, imagine if the entirety of all the rainforests burned down.

For my project, I plan to include a brief explanation on how an event could get worse, but like all of my decisions so far, I’m not entirely sure.

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Research - 9/11 + World Trade Centre (Film)

9/11 (also known as Fall of the Twin Towers) was a terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, which occurred on 11th September, 2001 (shortened to 9/11).

The event was caused by four different attacks issued by four individual groups of hijackers, which redirected planes flight paths from their original destination to the Twin Towers, crashing into them as a result. This caused everybody on board of the planes to die as every crash resulted in an explosion, which weakened the build of the towers from the heat, causing them to collapse. In total, 3,000+ people died during the attacks and 6,000+ were injured.

World Trade Centre (Film)

Both 9/11 and the World Trade Centre film are relatable as they both represent the same event, except the film interprets how workers survive the collapse of the towers but then get rescued by a group of other people who go into the ruins and get survivors out.

In this scene, you can see what it was like for the people inside to witness the attack happening, particularly the workers, who hide in a small space when the plane crashes into the tower.

I don't plan to base anything in my project around this event nor the film itself, nor do I have any inspiration from it. It’s just here just in case I have to relate to something in my progression post.