Game Design – Week 11 – Updating Workflow – Mind Like Water

 

“‘Be shapeless and formless.. like water’ (Bruce Lee)” by Akinini.com is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“Have a mind like water.”

― David Allen,  GTD

SUMMARY

I got hands-on experience with Construct 3 and found how good of a beginner-friendly engine it was. I also learned about the daily D.O.S.E of happiness humans need, I knew about the basics of those chemicals but I’ve never really learned about them until this week.

PRACTICE ROOM (TUTORIALS)

Unity – C#

I left off on Passing Arguments. Being an advanced student, I’m aware it’s no longer a requirement for me to take C# in SoloLearn, but we all need refreshers. And I need a certificate in C#.

CLASSROOM (THEORY & ANALYSIS)

Screenshot from Construct.net

Construct 3 seems to simplify every aspect of game design with the engine’s block-based approach, although, you can still create scripts in Javascript. I think Construct 3 would be a great place to start for beginning students, although not an engine to stick with due to Construct being rather limited in areas where Unity is not.

LAB (THEORY PRACTICED)

Screenshot from editor.construct.net

OUTSIDE (PRODUCTIVITY & THE BRAIN)

Image from bananatreelog.com

  • Every day, I start by putting tasks in my GTD system, I then work on my game a bit during my 1st-period check-in. Whenever I’m on my computer, designing something or in between classes, if I have the time to, I put on my headphones and listen to music. Every day, I try to take a walk or exercise on my grandpa’s exercise bike depending on the weather. And finally, every day I eat a vitality bar made of a base of dark chocolate, dates, and peanuts.

STUDIO (CREATIVITY)

Screenshot from Construct Beginner’s Guide

I liked how I could get simple tasks like moving done in half the time in Construct than coding in Unity but many things that I’ve grown accustomed to like timed object spawning were not available to me in Construct 3. I still think this would be a great start for your first year in the class, but move up to Unity ASAP due to the sheer amount of limitations in Construct 3.

CONTROL ROOM (PRODUCTION)

WHAT I LEARNED and PROBLEMS I SOLVED

I learned about what the 4 happiness brain chemicals do, I always had ideas as to what their functions were but could never quite pinpoint them. I also learned about a block-based solution for those starting out in the game design industry, being block-based removes some functionality from Construct, although you can add most of those details via JavaScript. I still think the best engines out there are Unity, Unreal, CryEngine, and the homemade engines from AAA companies, especially Rockstar’s RAGE engine.

In Construct, I was trying to figure out how to change the background to another image and thought I could with “Get Image from URL”. I couldn’t, the solution I tried to this was to download the image, add it as a sprite that also covers the entire layout, set the opacity to 0. Then I made two events, one for M being pressed and one for N, in both those, I changed the opacity of the normal map and Norse map accordingly.

WEEKLY ACTIVITY EVALUATION

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