Beta

 .

Unity Tutorial 10

 For this weeks unity tutorial i continued on to finish what I had been doing last week, I did lesson 5.4 and challenge 5. Continuing the lesson on was easy enough as there was only one part left and of course I had the tutorial to follow alongside. In this last section of the lesson we learned to add three new buttons which would set the difficulty to either Easy, Medium or Hard. The harder the setting, the quicker the objects would spawn. 

(My screenshot from the unity website)

Like always I went into the challenge hoping to try figure it out all on my own, and then I look at the hints, and then I'm still confused so I take to youtube to help me. The difficulty buttons were messed up, the score wasn't being counted, the restart button was missing and overall it was just a mess. I did attempt to fix it on my own for a while but I couldn't get it. I found someone on youtube who works through the challenges and its really helpful because he shows his process of figuring it out and tells you why he's doing each thing which helps me to actually understand it. 

Thanks for reading :)

Games Testing

 Game testing is an extremely important part of game developing, and it's best to start testing as early into the process as possible.You should be trying to find all errors or areas needing improvement as soon as you can. However, there are some risks for Game Testing for example:

• If there is no fun factor
• If the Game is not unique, fast-paced or competitive
• If there are broken features or bugs 
• The game doesn’t include a player-centric design

It is important not to become too involved with the testers process, although it's temping to jump in and help if someone is struggling to progress through the game it is crucial to allow them to figure it out alone. This is to make the experience as authentic as possible as future users will not have the designer/developer there to help them. 

The 7 most popular Game Testing techniques are:

1. Functionality Testing - This is done to confirm if the end product works
2. Combinatorial Testing - Using this method you can test the game quickly in the early stages, this can help you find out if the game has any bugs
3. Ad Hoc Testing - Also called "General Testing", this is a much more informal and less structured way of testing. It doesn't follow any process or plan and needs no documentation.There are three different types of Adhoc testing; Pair testing, Buddy testing, and Monkey testing.
4. Compatibility Testing - This tests the compatibility of your game on various different devices and platforms
5. Clean Room and Tree Testing - This is to test the consistency and reliability of the software
6. Regression Testing - This is to recheck if the game is still working correctly and to see if any new bugs have come up with the changes made.
7. Performance Testing- This tests the games overall performance in real time scenarios 

(Image found on pinterest at - https://pin.it/2Yke6Vx)

Thanks for reading :)

Unity tutorial 09

 This week I chose to continue doing the provided unity tutorial because although it would be very beneficial to do one more related to my game I felt I would prefer to have a bit of a break from my own game. I am enjoying creating my game but sitting for hours staring at the same thing can get a little tiring without taking some time away from it. I found it really refreshing doing this because I was still learning and progressing on unity but this game was much easier and a lot more fun to make than some of the tutorials recently and a good way to step away from my game for a bit.

I did the Unity tutorials 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3, this was to create a game similar to Fruit Ninja which is a game I used to play a lot when I was younger so that also helped make this tutorial that bit more enjoyable. We learned a lot of new things with these tutorials, it brought in new elements like an opening screen where the player can choose the difficulty level for the game, a scoreboard throughout the game and a game over screen at the end with a button to replay the game. These new elements really make the game feel so much more professional and help to give an overall more enjoyable experience as its now fully playable and super easy and clear. 

(My screenshot from the unity website)

Game stories

 A lot of games which are interactive claim to allow you to choose your own story, however from watching the video "Telling stories with systems" -https://youtu.be/NyMndWpihTM we can see that with most games it doesn't really matter which choices you make because the games are designed to play out the same, whether you choose to save one character or the other now, the other will still die later on and they will both die the same way in the same place anyway,. If the game gives you a choice in going somewhere they want to take you, you will probably still end up in that place no matter what decision you make because this is how it has been designed. Like it says in the video it would be too much work and money to make hundreds of versions of a game to give players a unique experience, when each of these outcomes would only be seen by a small number of its users. Whats more important is presenting your players with a conflict and letting them feel as though they're in control and allowing them to rely on their own morals to determine the outcomes. 

The article "What every game developer needs to know about story", tells us just that. From reading this I learned the basics of how I would need to to go about creating my own story narrative for a game. It would need at least three acts (Start, Middle and End). This article tells us how "games aren't movies, just like movies aren't plays" even though yes they do all tell stories but differently. Common misconceptions are that "story is dialogue' and that 'story doesn't matter." Dialogue is/can be part of a story but that is not all it is and in this article and in Mass Effect 2: A Case Study in the design of Game Narrative, we learn how important story is to a game. Conflict is what makes a story, we have our protagonist and they come face to face with some sort of issue they are given many choices that lead them somewhere which will probably have another item of conflict and this will repeat itself again until orderly life has been restored by the heroes risks and choices and this is what builds a story. The choices in the game are more important than that of the outcomes because this is what gives the player a feeling of control in their story. We are told "Do, don't Show", this is how we allow the player to have that control and become immersed in the game because they feel they are doing it, they are a part of it instead of just watching it like a movie.

(Image found at - https://images.app.goo.gl/rQm1DGJdBYF3aevdA)