Reading 06: Writing your introduction and conclusion

This week we have to write the very beginning and the very end of our papers, otherwise known as the introduction and the conclusion.

Writing the introduction after writing the body paragraphs might seem a bit backwards to most people but the introduction is just the statement of what you're going to discuss in your body paragraphs so it makes sense to write those first.

As I'm writing just a section of a chapter in a book the introduction and the conclusion will have to be about the entire chapter and not just my one section. Which means that I will have to discuss the other topics in the chapter with the person writing about them in order to write a proper introduction and conclusion about the full chapter.

The purpose of an introduction is to give the reader more contextual information of your topic so that they can understand the analysis that you make throughout the paper. It should state the scope of your review, give your objective and tell the reader how your review is organised.

To write a good introduction you should make sure to avoid giving too much detail on whats in the rest of the paper, you want to hook the reader, highlight the importance of the topic that you're discussing in your paper, try to convince the reader that even if this is something they're not particularly interested in that its something they should still read.

Image from here

The purpose of the conclusion is to summarise everything you've said in your paper so far for the lazy reader who didn't want to read more than one hundred of the words on the page. The summary should include your key themes, the overall findings and the relevance of the topic to current knowledge.

In case your introduction didn't work and your reader wasn't hooked, this is your second chance. If the reader has skipped the body paragraphs to read the conclusion the summery of your paper and your topics should hopefully be able to convince them to go back and read what you've written .

Unitys Own: Unity Tutorial 06

This week we've moved onto another unit and another game to create almost from scratch. We had to follow along with three of the lessons from the unit which took me roughly three hours.

The goal of this weeks unit is to set up the basic gameplay for this yet another prototype. We of course start by importing the starter files that unity provides us before we start. This game will be all about the character jumping over obstacles as they come at them from off screen.

Screenshot of Jumping Game

Next we had to choose a background and a character from the selection in the starter files, and code to allow that character to jump when the player hits the spacebar. We also had to choose an obstacle for the character to jump over, and create a spawn manager that throws them in the player’s path in intervals.

Now that we have that done we have to deal with that the character appears to be running for the first few seconds, but then the background we chose just disappears. In order to fix this problem we need to have the background repeat to make it look like the character is running non-stop. We also want the game to stop when the character hits an obstacle, triggering the background to stop repeating and the obstacles spawning.

Now we need to have the character actually run and jump instead of just sliding across the ground, we to give it animations for these things. We will also have to adjust the speed of the animations given in order to make them look for natural in the game.

These three lessons were just the beginning of the unit but I'm excited to see where this game is going.

Reading 05: Writing the body paragraphs

Image from here

After writing the analysis of our paper it is of course time to write the body paragraphs of our paper, possibly one of the most important parts of the paper itself, writing the body paragraphs means writing the bulk of paper. It also means spending hours staring at a computer screen trying to find the right words to type. These paragraphs will be written under the subheadings of the paper that I created last week, based on the common themes in my research.

This week I will be discussing writing the body paragraphs for the two topics that I chose for this semesters project if that wasn't obvious from the title of this post. In case you don't remember what they were, Other forms of expression and Game modifications, these are just two subheadings in a much bigger chapter.

The purpose of the body paragraphs is to logically discuss the synthesis and analysis of the sources. These paragraphs support your thesis that you've been working on so far and present the conclusions you've come to in your research. This basically means you talk about all the stuff you've read while you were researching.

In my research I have found that games and game modifications are a way for players to express themselves in fun and imaginative ways. So in my body paragraphs I will be discussing this and  supporting this by using information and quotes if necessary from my sources to back up any statements I make. I will of course reference these sources at the end of my paper.

So far writing fro this semesters project has taught me a lot about writing in general, the do's and don'ts, as well as how to do proper research. while I was a bit confused at first now that I understand what I'm doing it's a lot more fun.

Unity's Own: Unity Tutorial 05

This week we finish off the unit we've been working on with the final lesson and them another buggy game to test our new found skills on.

In this lesson we learn how to write our very first custom function in order to make our three animal prefabs spawn at random instead of when the s button is pressed because otherwise the player wouldn't enjoy the game as much if they had to spawn the animals themselves. We use another new method as well in order to have the animals spawn by themselves at intervals.

Screenshot of game 

The second last part of making the game was to being able to feed the pizza to the animals as they run at us, we do this by using box colliders. We have to add box colliders to all the animals and the pizza which allows for the game to know when the pizza enters the space of the animals.

We then code so that once the collider senses the pizza entering the space of one of the animals they will be deleted from the game.

The very last thing we do is add a game over screen to the game incase the player cant get the food to the animal in time.

Then of course just like last time we have to put all our new found knowledge to the test by fixing a buggy game. This time we have to help a person play fetch with their dog. 

I found this test slightly harder then the last one but I like testing all the new stuff I learned.

Reading 04: Conducting and writing your analysis

Now that we've done our research and found some sources its time to start writing our analysis.

Writing an analysis means that I have to identify the themes that have emerged while I have been researching and weave them together into a coherent thought that answers both of the research questions that I have previously put forward.

In my analysis I hope to be able to answer both of my research questions and explore the common themes amongst both of the questions as well as explore the topics separately.

While reading through my sources I found that my two topics have a few common elements, one of which is that the players often use the games they are playing and modifying to express themselves and their interests. Sometimes these modifications can be the changing of a characters appearance to look wacky and sometimes they can just be simple bug fixes.

One source I found stated that players enjoy games that are open to being modified because it helps them to feel like they were part of the creating process of the game itself. It also helps the game stay relevant for longer in the eyes of the public because the games only limits is the imagination of the player.

I would like to write more about this common factor in my analysis because I think that it helps to answer parts of both of my research questions and I think that it will help to integrate my sources into a wider conversation.

Screenshot of one Review Matrix 

Unity's Own: Unity Tutorial 04

Another week, another set of unity tutorials. This week we start another unit of tutorials, this unit taught us how to make yet another type of game.

This game is about being a farmer and throwing slices of pizza to woodland creatures while they are running at you from the top of the screen. The assets were provided for us but we had to make our own code following the tutorials just like in the last unit. 

For this game we are taught how to code for items to shoot when a key is pressed, for instance when the space key is pressed a piece of pizza shoots across the screen, and disappear once they are outside the bounds of the game, so as to not clutter the game and possibly break it.

We are also taught how to have the game spawn the animals at random from the three animal prefabs that are present, a moose, a deer and a fox and to have them spawn in a wide area around the player. These too disappear once they leaves the bounds of the game.

I look forward to seeing what else this unit has in store as I really like the idea of this game.

Screenshot of Animal Game

Unity's Own: Unity Tutorial 03

This weeks tutorial guided us through coding the controls for the truck in our game so that the player can make the truck go forward or backwards, left or right. This was something that I couldn't figure out when making my game last year so having it explained so well step by step from the beginning really helped me to understand where I went wrong.

Screenshot of my Unity Truck Game 

These tutorials also have challenges and quizzes after each unit to test you on what you've learned. The challenges are games with bugs that you have to fix and the quizzes are just simple questions. This units challenge was to fix a plane that that couldn't be controlled and was moving in circles at a fast speed. 

Screenshot of Plan Challenge

I think that these challenges and quizzes really help to solidify the information you've learned over the course of the unit and there are hints available for you if you get stuck on the challenge.  

I'm looking forward to seeing what the other units have in store and what other things I can learn about making games in unity.