justanotherditstudent-blog

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Blog 10: The Programming Plague.

Monday’s Game Design class was once again an interesting one, as we learned all about the different types of decisions that are in games, which fall under three categories, interesting, obvious, and blind. Each of the three decisions has it’s own merits, and uses, and I look forward to implementing them in this week’s assignment, which is to plan out a game with several of each type of decision. 

Doomsday finally arrived in the form of the Programming lab test we had this Tuesday, and doomsday was as full of doom and gloom as I was expecting. My near future in Programming looks bleak.

Wednesday, however proved to be quite fun as we got to attend our double Ludology lecture that was owed to us from last week in which we played a dice game involving some basic characters on pieces of paper. After playing with these characters for a while we were given an opportunity to change some aspects of them before sending them to other people to play with. We were then allowed to make our own character, with the objective to make it balanced, but in what I think was a foolish move Hugh decided to tell us there was to be a competition between our cards. This led to some people making cards that were a lot less balanced than other people’s due to a desire to win. All in all, it was a fun few hours, and proved to be just what the doctor ordered to recover from that plague of a lab test.

Friday saw us present beta footage of our Atari remakes, our remake did not receive a lot of feedback, just some minor things that we were planning to change anyway. However the need for Street Racer to be complete is a daunting task that is racing towards us, time to knuckle down on this.

 I am still recovering from the Programming plague, I’ll be sure to let you know when I recover, if I recover...

[justanotherditstudent-blog]

Blog 9: Justice For War.

This week’s Game Design class was one of the best, most enjoyable, and rewarding classes yet, as it was the final play-test of our card games. The difference between this week, and last week, was that this week we were allowed to have someone from our group present to watch, and where necessary explain while another group was playing our game. This proved to be a great help given that our game was easier to pick up through playing, and not so much by only reading the rules. This meant that War finally got the recognition it deserved, as we were given positive feedback, and it was finally confirmed to me what I had already known, my recreation of War is fun.

In Programming we were allowed to work on our end of semester projects and I finally began mine, and made surprisingly good progress, which given my aversion to programming left me feeling proud.

On Wednesday we had a double Ludology lecture scheduled that ended up being cancelled, due to Hugh being ill.

The week ended as always with Game Production, which took the form of yet another play-test. We got a little bit of feedback that wasn’t all that useful mostly because small glitches distracted players into making that their feedback, despite us knowing about those and obviously knowing we needed to fix them already.

I guess I proved the Fallout franchise wrong... “War, war occasionally changes...” #JusticeForWar

[justanotherditstudent-blog]

Blog 8: Gr8 To Be Back

One rather unproductive reading week later the blog returns.

Game Design proved to be a minor disaster as we had to do blind play-tests meaning we needed to hand over a rule book for our party-game-style recreation of War, which is much easier explained by playing. It was quite a useful experience for me nonetheless as it proved that players can totally and utterly misinterpret a game from the rule book because it doesn’t teach strategy, and strategy makes War far more fun.

Programming provided yet another array of problems with the introduction of arrays. (No I won’t apologise for that.) Arrays make the least amount of sense out of anything so far so that’s not great news really.

This week’s Ludology class saw the presentations on the games about our lives begin. The end of these presentations seems a distant light in a long tunnel as we made it maybe a quarter of the way through our class and my name hadn’t even yet shown up at the very end of the screen, let alone the top.

Creative Practice developed on last week’s discussion of Edward De Bono’s work, which I missed. This time we discussed his idea known as Consider All Factors. Considering the fact(or) that I missed last week’s class I was still able to understand the fundamentals of the topic.

In Production we presented footage of our games in alpha stages and people seemed relatively impressed with where our game was going while also giving helpful feedback, this provided some encouragement for me as it was good to see how my peers reacted positively to the direction I was taking with the Speed Racer title. 

P.S.: Excuse the title, I’m really grasping at straws at this point.

[justanotherditstudent-blog]

Blog 7: War Has Never Been This Fun.

In this week’s Game Design class Bas tasked us with creating our own card games from a deck of fifty-two cards plus jokers. At this point the first thing that came to mind was the remake of war that I had created with the help of Steven and Eibhlin. War was originally a two player game and so was my remake, while Bas wanted us to make a four+ player game, but I saw potential for the remake on a larger scale, so I posed it to my new group and they loved it. We decided to use two decks so we could double the players, as well as changing the split in the deck from red vs. black to the suits fighting against each other. This didn’t take very long and we were soon playing the game and discovering that it was actually really, really fun. This creation is by far my favourite thing from the course so far, and I am very proud of it.

Programming still looks very bleak for me at the moment, Bug Zap proved another confusing mess to me, while it looked cool and what not, it made very little sense to me.

In our last Ludology class we play-tested our new card games and there was a breakdown in communication for our War remake as the rules were misunderstood by the team that we were handing it over to, for which we can take only partial blame because while we left out some values which were quite important, they also didn’t follow the rules we had given them. Had I known that the game would be so helpful for Game Design I may not have been as annoyed by the failure of the game in it’s early stages.

I missed this Wednesday’s classes due to illness sadly, so I cannot comment on them.

Friday was our first play-testing session as our classmates got their hands on Street Racer for the first time. We got some helpful and good feedback from this, even if the game did glitch a little at times, leading to some quite repetitive feedback.

College stress is starting to win a couple of battles, but I’m very very rarely beaten in War.

[justanotherditstudent-blog]

Blog 6: (Not So)Easy Breezy

We once again missed Game Design this Monday because Hurricane Ophelia made it a bit windy, blew over a few chairs in Dublin, granted it blew the roofs of a few houses in some other counties.

Tuesday saw us return to action, as it was a bit less windy, and a mock-test was held in the Programming lab, the less said about that the better to be honest.

As for Ludology we were shown how stupid and broken Tic-Tac-Toe is and then asked to fix it, which people took wildly different approaches to. We were then given a list of broken games to choose from, and told to re-make the game so that it’s not quite as broken. I was partnered with Steven and Eibhlin and we haven’t spoken a whole lot just yet, but I have an idea for War with a lot of potential in my own (not so) humble opinion.

Creative Practice was all about teamwork and conflict resolution as we were tasked with the Marshmallow Challenge (which sadly and misleadingly has nothing to do with eating Marshmallows). We had to make a tower out of dry spaghetti, tape, and a marshmallow, with the highest tower winning. My team and I had such great plans, such high hopes, which then went totally to pot as they literally fell apart, at which point we tried and failed miserably to make a spaghetti spire essentially, which although quite tall for all of three seconds, fell in the end. I thought we had done okay until I turned to discover Jason&Co’s Eiffel Tower of spaghetti and marshmallows. Their team each won a bag of marshmallows, but there’s always a silver lining as Harry gave me some of his.

Production studio this week was all about further development of our Atari remakes and despite our terrible recording quality Tab and I got some pretty good feedback on our Street Racer remake.

So, as another week passes things may not have been the easiest but they have certainly been the breeziest yet.

[justanotherditstudent-blog]

Blog 5: At Wit’s End.

Sadly Basil couldn’t be with us for Game Design so we were given card games and told to play them, with the plan being to analyse these games later on. I was put in a group with some guys I only half knew, and others I didn’t know at all, but we had a great laugh playing *insert some Mexican sounding word starting with T here* Poker, which was a game all about bluffing, making it great for group play, as there was even more betrayal to be had. I feel like I know the lads I was with a little better after playing with them, especially their tells.

In Programming loops remained as foreign a concept to me as they had from the start so here’s hoping my good ol’ pal the internet can help me out there.

On Wednesday the inconceivable happened, as in a double Ludology class, we finally completed the introductory presentation! There was also some discussion on the importance of good characters, and the different contexts of games, which proved quite interesting.

We had a super-sized class on Friday as we were shown a presentation about project planning, which really taught us about the nitty-gritty of Game Design out in the real world that’s full of deadlines, disappointment, co-operating with people that you don’t necessarily agree with and god-forsaken Gantt Charts. I hope I’m not quite as battle-scarred in the world of Game Design, as our presenter, at that point in my life, but that’s in the distant future and I needn’t worry about it just yet.

Usually I try to come up with some semi-witty last remark for these blogs but I got nothing for this week so... See ya.

[justanotherditstudent-blog]

Blog 4: Return of the Blog

Last week’s Game Design class saw us revisiting 2 Rooms 1 Boom and Werewolf as an assignment was posed to us to create two new characters that added constants and two that added variables to each game. This proved to be a lot harder than one may think because we needed to take into account not only how the new characters interact with the basic mechanics of the game but also (more importantly) how they interact with the other characters in the game. I was partnered with Eibhlin for this, and we decided on our eight characters without too much difficulty.

This week’s Game Design class was all about puzzles, and whether or not they should be considered as games, as well as the difference between a good puzzle and a bad puzzle. There was also a rather funny physical puzzle involving string which I enjoyed seeing my classmates tangling themselves in. We were put into groups and tasked with making a total of four puzzles including one involving string. The string puzzle could prove a last-minute panic pick of a puzzle as nobody has any clue what to do, but the other three are simple enough to create.

I was absent for the Creative Practice class which saw our topics for our video presentations given out, and sourly discovered that I had been assigned with the task of presenting about the sustainability of a game that I dislike... I’ll get back to you when I figure out what that means or how I’m meant to do it.

Ludology was cancelled this week because the government are talking about college costing us limbs and most of us went to go and use those limbs in protest.

As for Game Production we were showing the basic demos for our Atari remakes, not much to show for Tab and I as all we had really done was the player and how it would move, which, to be fair, was all we were told to do, that’s just not a whole lot in Street Racer, a game where a car moves side to side to avoid other cars crashing into it. So, basically, given that the obstacles weren’t there, we showed a car moving side to side.

Another week, another blog, starting to settle in.

P.S: You may be thinking “Why didn’t he mention Programming at all?” I’m kinda just hoping that if I leave it alone it will afford me the same courtesy...

[justanotherditstudent-blog]

Blog 3: Creative Practice

So far I have found creative practice very interesting a module. I think it may be due to the fact that I have always had some sort of inbuilt interest in the mechanics of communication and deception. One example of this would be that I remember loving the show Lie To Me from the young age of about ten, I loved the idea of micro-expressions and how they could give people away without them even noticing it.

Obviously creative practice as a module doesn’t exactly have as much Hollywood glam as Lie To Me but it’s still really interesting to me ( no offence Brian but you’re no Tim Roth ). So based on that introduction I think it’s pretty obvious that the most interesting thing that I’ve learned about so far in Creative Practice is definitely about reading people, such as when we were shown the Irish politicians lying to the people, it’s stunningly obvious that they’re lying once you know where to look.

That isn’t all I found interesting, however. I also really liked learning about the breakdown of how a conversation functions. I found it fascinating that every conversation realistically could be summed up in a simple diagram. The sender encodes and sends their message, the receiver then decodes that message, encodes a message of their own, and sends it back to be decoded by the original sender. It’s that simple no matter how complicated the conversation, whether it’s about nuclear thermo-dynamics or how the weather was today, it all follows the same base code, for some reason that just fascinates me.

Learning about feeling out a crowd also interested me and the metaphorical image of the metronomes synching up really emphasised that to me. It was essentially a lesson stating that keeping everyone on the same page while presenting is very important, which I hadn’t honestly thought about that much before.

On the whole Creative Practice has turned from a module which I dreaded due to presentations, into one I’m genuinely interested to learn more about.

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Blog 2: Maybe not ALL fun and games.

I’m midway through another week as a DIT student and life is still pretty good, lots of adjusting to the whole new lifestyle to do yet though.

In last Monday’s Game Design class we had to create games using random titles in groups, under certain parameters. So we basically had to come up with a new and unique game based off of random titles given to us by a generator, e.g Kamikaze Fashion College. This was another example of group work in action as we put our heads together to create the ten games we were given, which was pretty fun if a little challenging. In this Monday’s Game Design class we played a game called 2 Rooms 1 Boom, which was good fun and became more advanced the more we played it due to the introduction of new mechanics as we played. This was a really good way to show us how the mechanics of a game and how they can change drastically from a seemingly small change.

I’ve also had two programming classes since the last blog, and two labs to go with them. Update: Programming is still scary, much learning to be done.

Last week in Creative Practice, we had to stand up and talk to the class about our favourite games, it served both as a good introduction to the scary task of presenting and also the class, as someone’s favourite game is quite important when you’re making friends in Game Design. This week we learned about how to present and what is key to it, as well as learning about facial expressions and what they can mean, which was interesting.

I’ve spent the last two weeks in Ludology learning about meaningful play as well as games systems. Ludology really serves as a subject to make you feel like games are more important than just providing entertainment, which is nice because it makes me feel even further justified in my choice of course.

As for Games Production, since my last blog, I have been informed that a classmate and I will be working on a rejuvenation project of sorts on the Atari 2600′s Street Racer. Last Friday we did a presentation on Street Racer talking about the game, what’s involved in it and what basically is wrong with it. Something being wrong or bad in an Atari 2600 game was a pretty common theme across all presentations, which didn’t come as a huge surprise. 

All in all, things are still going well and I'm still enjoying myself, presenting projects and trying to program pretty much anything is still pretty terrifying but I guess that’s all part of the learning experience. 

[justanotherditstudent-blog]

Werewolf, an introduction to DIT.

This form of werewolf is not quite as scary as most people’s depiction of the mythical beasts, unless of course you have social anxiety, that is because this is a very simple game played with others, making it the perfect intro to our Game Design course.

What exactly does the perfect way to introduce you to others entail exactly? Being deceitful towards them and accusing them of spending their evenings as a murderous beast, of course. All jokes aside I did really enjoy my introduction to both my peers and my course, and it did serve as a fun way of getting to know people and making friends. The bonds formed by agreeing as a group to all point one person to death in the form of lynching certainly were strong, and only made stronger by laughing at the dead person because they were totally innocent. It was really good to know that a lot of the other people in my course were seemingly as darkly humored as I am. 

So Werewolf wasn’t so scary after all, now programming, that’s a totally different story... As a whole I greatly enjoyed my first day and the rest of the week thereafter, and for the first time in quite a while, I find myself looking forward to being educated further.

And my mother said it wouldn’t be all fun and games... Connor: 1- Mother: 0.