Unity Tutorial 04

Sprite Animation

In this Unity tutorial I learned how to make my character move through animation tools.

Firstly, I created an animator component ,then an animation clip, to move my character left ,right, up, down. My character has a lot of sprites, so I chose a few only and applied to it.

It's fun when your character are running and jumping so fast, as in the timeline has 60 vertical lines between 0:00 to 1:00.I learned about blend tree, parameters,(Move X, Move Y) and how to control my character. Also I used projectile to help my character to throw the cog bullets to fix the broken robot.

Image Info: Unity tutorial screenshot

 Reading 05

Coding Document and Creating Themes

The purpose of coding documents to make sure the reader can read it easier,

as the written format and layout design for it.

I used my 7 articles  annotated bibliographies for coding documents. First I read, then highlighted the main headings and paragraphs ,I used table form as I found it easier to organize and read.

It's interesting to rewrite and add your own thoughts for the theme.

The structure of coding the documents is simple ,just need to remember Code=categories=theme

As my topic is about Game characters development, so most of themes look like the same-Character behaviour, Character emotional bond, Character /Avatar anthropomorphic ,Fictional Character and so on.

Step by step I am getting close to writing my own Character development book, as all these articles really helped me to understand what the book is going to look like. Now, I know what’s the role of the game character in the game and what’s the goals of the game characters.

Image Info :Click here:

Screenshots are  my own review documents 

 Analysis

For this week  task, I used three pass method for my research materials:

Highlighted the Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion pages  and described what I read, learned from the authors. Also, I summarize the main findings for my project. I used the MATRIX method for the authors opinions and contributions for the following topics. I found this method in one side handy but in other side time wasting. I hope ,when I get more familiar to this method, maybe I will change my mind. The best way for me to analysis my research materials are writing down on A4 format paper and using red pen for highlighting all my main and important findings.

Annotated Bibliography

1.ISBISTER, K. (2006) Better Game Characters by Design. A psychological Approach. San Francisco, California: Morgan Kaufmann. Source

Designing a game character, it doesn’t mean that all the game characters should react successfully in all media platforms. The game character designers should be very acute on the designing process to create a character which can operate for variety media formats. Also, it is important to transfer your character into different media platforms preserving their quality and depth. Game character developers are always starting with researching a character, building the base of character: recognition, fascination ,even mystery. Character must be a unique persona for the players, having background, goals, needs and motive, and the main objective of the game character designers  enabling the character to interact with others.

When game players  choose their characters,(avatars),they are paying attention to their appearance, and where the character is going to take them, what journey it is-hard, simple or even fascinating. To convince the game player, the game character should be built on high standards. Sometimes a bad design might lose appeal to the players, and many video games become unsuccessful and fail in the game market.

That’s why the visual design is playing a big role in character development. The game players want to feel their characters, and game characters affect the players’ emotions.  Emotional connection between the player and character might be believable and convincing.

The game players can choose their own game characters through their appearance and acting behavior: what sorts of power it has and how the players are feeling when they control them and move them using their keyboard and following the action that is happening on the screen. Also the game players want to see their character more intriguing and powerful, rather than shallow and dull.(279words)

Keywords: game character, intriguing, powerful, unique persona

Tutorial 03

 Unity Tutorial 03

World Interactions- Collectibles ,(Damage Zone)

In this Unity tutorial I learned about a new game element -Triggers.

This element will help my game character to collect objects.

I gave my game character Ruby a few variables Health and Expose, start and update functions.

These functions help the character to collect more health objects or less.

The role of the exposure variable is to change the speed of the character during the play.

Overall, I found this part of the tutorial more interesting and I want to go deep to build this game and see how it is going to look at the end, so excited.

The next part is to create the enemy and build a damage zone.

If the character wants to collect some food for his health, the enemy will try to prevent his moves and also in the damage zone the character will lose his points.

I am so happy to see my progress in Unity, it makes me feel a little bit more confident, but I still need more practice in C# script...

Image Info: own screenshot

 Unity Tutorial 02

In this tutorial I learned how to create Prefab for the game objects -Metal Cube Sprites, and allow my player to move the game character Ruby to go through over the Metal Cube Sprites without colliding with the metal cubes. Also ,I learned how to set a Pivot for the sprite, when we rotate the sprite, it will rotate around it.

The next step in this tutorial is to add Physics system to our game. It will control all the movements, when we push the box, we should use gravity, the force and  ground frictions for controlling our game. In the GameObject we will use Rigidbody2d component to control physics system. Meanwhile, I learned to add rigidbody and collider to my character and metal cubes.

I am not concentrating too much on design at the moment, I want to experiment more with coding: how I can move my game character, and what actions it can do when I press play button. So far, I'm excited to explore Unity 2D.

Image: my own (screenshot)

Reading 03

 Doing-Reading 03

 Process of the Literature Review

For this week task I did some research and found out some of interesting sources describing the character development routine and talking about the methods. I did also some research how to write literature review, and I underlined some systematic strategies:

• Review planning
• question formulation
• search strategy
• selection process
• strength of evidence
• analysis
• synthesis
• process monitoring

I asked myself what can go wrong during the literature review?

• maybe search can fail to be comprehensive enough
• or maybe search and review may focus on the wrong sources
• or maybe the review can be a collection of sources without a clear sense of synthesis

After looking through all these thoughts I started to read the abstract and introduction of my chosen topic. If I found it interesting and relevant to my topic then I started the literature review.

However, I used Three-Pass-Method, which is very useful and handy in this case.

First-read-through

read abstract, introduction, conclusion ,then describe it.

Second-read-through

read the content and summarize main findings

Third-read-through

identify and challenge every assumption and conclusion made by the author

identify strengths and weakness of ideas

identify inherent assumptions

When I starting my literature review I was passive note-taker, as I highlighted, underlining all the information ,after that I started to work as an active note-taker,-summarizing the text in my own words.

This is a screenshot one of the article that I am doing at the moment- the literature review as a passive note-taker-(Highlighted)

This is a sample of how I started to use MATRIX method, to be honest ,it is a little bit boring and wasting my time.

Annotated Bibliography

1.ISBISTER, K. (2006) Better Game Characters by Design. A psychological Approach. San Francisco, California: Morgan Kaufmann. Source

Designing a game character, it doesn’t mean that all the game characters should react successfully in all media platform. The game character designers should be very acute on the designing process to create a character which can operate for variety media formats. Also, it is important to transfer your character into different media platform preserving their quality and depth. Game character developer is always starting with research a character, building the base of character: recognition, fascination ,even mystery. Character must be unique persona for the players, having background, goals, needs and motive, and the main objective of the game character designers  enabling the character to interact with others.

When game players  choose their characters,(avatars),they are paying attention to their appearance, and where the character is going to take them, what journey it is-hard, simple or even fascinating. To convince the game player, the game character should be built on high standards. Sometimes a bad design might lose appeal to the players, and many video games become unsuccessful and failed in game market.

That’s why the visual design is playing a big role in character development. The game players want to feel their characters, and game characters affect the players’ emotions.  Emotional connection between the player and character might be believable and convincing.

The game players can choose their own game characters through their appearance and acting behavior: what sorts of power it has and how the players are feeling when they control them and move them using their keyboard and following the action that is happening on the screen. Also the game players want to see their character more intriguing and powerful, rather than shallow and dull.

2.Nowak K, and Rauh C:"Designing Serious Video Games for Health Behavior Change": Current Status and Future Directions Debbe Thompson, Ph.D. Source

In this article the author was talking about a serious video game, how the video game character designers achieved the dual goals of entertaining people with special needs and diseases through character modeling and character dialogue. 

When game Character designers start to design a character for  a serious video game, firstly they might consult with a behaviour scientist and be guided by them, and follow to their five behavioural science concepts:

Game character or avatars are playing the main role in a serious video game, as they are teaching the players how to reduce risk of obesity and diabetes-promoting them health diet and physical activities, or people with cancer using the character to destroy the bad cells and get treatments. Also through the game characters the players can achieve some goals ,solutions, problem solving, self-monitoring. Observing their avatar with the similar appearance they can “coping style” and change their behaviour :positive or negative.

This type of video game can help the player to modify health behaviour.

A serious video game designer should count that their players are expecting to have fun and entertaining,and designing the games they might follow all the expert and specialist advice and get balance between seriousness and fun-ness.

Nowak K, and Rauh C point out a vital role of avatar in a serious video game, as it assists the player to choose the avatar’s appearance similar to theirs.

3.Felix Schröter and Jan-Noël Thon:" Video Game Characters- Theory and Analysis" .Source

The author proposed to distinguish between narration, ludic, social experience, and dimensional parts of video game characters' Eder, Jonnidas and Schneider have tended to consider that the characters in video games are “textual structures” ,” paradigm of traits” , or even “surface feature of discourse", however the cognitive approaches assume that “characters are the part of imagination in the player's mind”.

Many video games have been designed around character, laying as a” narrative", despite some scientist debate around it until now, mentioning that video game characters can’t be assigned as a narrative, as the character-avatars are just  people’s  imagination, and it's an equipment, tools that humans are playing for fun and entertaining.

Therefore, in contemporary video games the players can  use a variety of strategies in their scene, even they can change the mode `ludic events” while the game is played. It's described as four kinds of game rules: game mechanics, where the player having action within game space, the game goals-how the player can outcomes all the obstacles, the possibilities of interaction-relation between player actions and game actions, and the last rule is the rules of representation -how game play is represented. It is divided into three modes: Mode of narration- where the character is a fictional. The second mode is a simulation, it focuses on the character’s function(shooting, running, hiding),and the last mode of communication-allows self-representation in the social space of the game.

Goffman’s concept of three “frames” talking a game as a ”primary framework", when the players can recognize each other as a video game player and act as an event ,Second frame he called “in light of the conventions of the game”-where the players are governed by the rules and constraints. And the last frame is “narrative frame “keying”-when the players pretend as fictional characters and act out their logic.

4.Christopher Totten, Washington ,D.C,(2012):"Game Character Creation with Blender and Unity,(pp.4-5)Source-TU Blanchardstown Library

The concept of the game art is the process of creating and designing the video game character. When the game character designers are planning characters, first they should produce ideas for their characters backgrounds, tastes, religious beliefs, and include more details telling who they are. The author also points out the important concept not only to design the game character visually engaging but also make them marketable.

5.Mechanisms of the Soul_final (digra.org)

5.Cavazza, M. O., Charles, F. and Mead, S.J. (2002) 'Character-based interactive storytelling', IEEE Intelligent Systems, 17 (4), pp.17-24. Source

6.Kristine Jørgensen Eludamos:"Game Characters as Narrative Devices. A Comparative Analysis of Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 . Journal for Computer Game Culture. 2010; 4 (2), p. 315-331 Source

7.  Jim Bizzocchi1 and Joshua Tanenbaum :Mass Effect 2: A Case Study in the Design of Game Narrative  Source

8. Jacqueline Burgess1 and Christian M. Jones:  “Is It Too Much to Ask That We’re Allowed to Win the Game?”: Character Attachment and Agency in the Mass Effect 3 Ending Controversy.Source

9.  Jörg Kienzle, Alexandre Denault, and Hans Vangheluw :"Model-Based Design of Computer-Controlled Game Character Behavior" McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 2A7, Canada      Source

10.Kristine L. Nowak Christian Rauh:"The Influence of the Avatar on Online Perceptions of Anthropomorphism, Androgyny, Credibility, Homophily, and Attraction,.."  Source

References: Image Info:

 Unity Tutorial 01

Ruby's Adventure 2D

Unity 2D tutorial is very interesting and easy for me, as I learned Unity 3D before, in Unity 2D,approximately all the tools are the same, only you are not going to use position z, not to create 3d shapes, and a few more things are different. I found it fun and excited .

The first task I should create a new scene, and my character is a Ruby, who should be able to move on screen- up-down, left-right using C# script (horizontal-vertical Input-axis).

Also, I learned how to design an environment for my character. It is a Tilemaps, I learned to paint Tilemap with tiles. This part a little bit challenging for me. Of course, this is not going to be my final Tilemap, I still need to improve my skills on it. However, I am so excited when I can move my character at the end of the task.

Image info: my own tutorial screenshot

 Planning

Literature review

(Character Development)

Goals of Character Design(avatar)

As we know, Literature review is a critical evaluation of the research on a particular topic, in this case its an evaluation of the goals of character design in the game.

How I am going to organize my literature review:

Firstly ,I should choose a topic.

Its going to be "Goals of character design". I should consider how review was conducted, what's major theories or issues do I need to discuss. it's going to be the introduction part.

Number two is main body- where my research is summarized and discussed.

Number three is a conclusion - what do I achieve of my major findings.

My research strategy:

• identify and define topic
• conduct a literature search
• read research and take notes
• organize notes and thoughts, make outline
• write the review itself

I will keep all my research download sources in one folder. I would like to use The Matrix method. I learned how to use TU Dublin Blanchardstown library website, also I signed in RefWorks, and our University  librarian explained how to organize all the research work and write Harvard Referencing. I found today's lecture an informative and useful for my project.

image info: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/lkcmedlib/files/2016/04/search-strategy-lit-review-cycle-1el3q62.jpg