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.