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Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! As games are both hugely technical and creative things, they are subject to a lot of public opinion. From is it a good game to a bad game to why it's the best game ever to why it's the worst game ever and everything in between. Now, if you're a game dev or just a creative in general. No matter what you make, you've probably at one time or another been told "Don't read the comments". No matter what you make, once it's been posted online, people are going to say what they think about it without filter because, well, that's the internet for you.  So, I'm going to make the case for the opposite. Why you should read the comments. There is already a strong reason why you should read the comments and that's that it provides a great source of feedback. Even someone who hated your game can provide good feedback granted that they are constructive in their comment. However, that's not the reason I'm going to focus on. Some time ago, I was scrolling through my Twitter timeline and I came across a post from a developer who I sadly can't recall who it was but, they make a point of reading the comments on their games and taking a screenshot of the positive comments people have posted about their work. They keep these comments in a folder then that they can look back on for inspiration and motivation. I thought this was a fantastic idea and I've been since doing the same. As creative individuals, we tend to focus on the negative comments and remember them the most when there may well be a mountain of nice positive comments to see. So, For the games I make, I do read through the comments and I take note of feedback that will improve a game but I now also take a screenshot of positive comments about my work so that I can look back on them when I need the motivation to keep going with a project.
While diving into the sea of comments can seem somewhat daunting, I'm willing to bet that the positive things people say about your work will far outweigh the negative and seeing a folder full of nice comments is a great motivation to make something else.
Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!
Lately I've been thinking a lot about how people have been saying games need to push the envelope more when it comes to what we expect. That games need to continue to change expectations and push boundaries. This is something I agree with. I think we do need to explore interesting new ways to entertain and surprise players and create new an enriching experiences. However, that's not what I want to talk about. Instead I want to make the case for games that don't do this. To give you some context, I was recently looking for a horror game to play. Something short and effective. I wasn't interested in a gripping narrative or new and interesting gameplay mechanics. I just wanted a good old fashioned jump scare game. I wanted a junk food game. The kind that you can argue isn't that great. The kind you say isn't doing anything that hasn't been done already. While this may be true of games like this, can I say the game entertained me? Yes. Yes, it did. Very much so in fact. The point I'm trying to make is that a game doesn't have to push the limits of what we expect from games. it doesn't have to draw us in with a gripping story that holds us for hours in anticipation of the outcome. Sometimes all we want, all we might need after a long day of work or college is to jump into a simple jump scare game or casual repetitive game that has no end goal. Sometimes we just need some junk food games and in my opinion, having games like that around is just as important as innovating and pushing the limits with new games. So, go and enjoy some junk food. Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! In this week's blog, I'm going to show you quickly how you can load a scene on a collision trigger in Unity. First off, you'll want to open a blank scene and delete the main camera from it. Now add a plane to act as your floor and add in a first person controller. Next we'ere going to add in a cube object. In the object inspector of the cube be sure to mark it's box collider as "Is Trigger".  Next, we're going to create a new C# script. Open it in visual studio. Once open, remove the default functions that appear. We'll first create a private string variable called loadScene. This will hold the name of whatever scene we wish to load. As it's marked as private, we'll have to add [SerializeField] before it. This forces a private variable to become visible in the object inspector in Unity. Next we'll create a void OnTriggerEnter. Inside of this we'll add an if statement that will compare the tag of the colliding object with the value it expects. In this case "Player". If it's a match then it returns true and executes the SceneManager.LoadScene and loads the scene that is stored in the loadScene variable. With our script out of the way, let's head back to the scene editor.  We'll now add this script to our cube. You'll see the loadScene field now appear in the inspector and you can enter the name of the scene you want to load. Once you've entered the name of the scene, make sure that scene and the current scene are added to the build settings. Make sure your first person controller is tagged as "Player". Once you've done so, you'll be able to run the scene and once you collide with the cube,you'll load the next scene specified.
Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! In this week's blog, I'm trying to gather some information in relation to not only my blog personally but across the game dev scene as a whole. I want to try determine what areas game devs don't talk about enough. This can be from the technical (code, art, audio) to the personal (struggles, business, community). I'm going to pose the question below as a form. Let me know what you think game devs should talk more about and feel free to post suggestions too. Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! In this week's blog, I wanted to highlight two Youtube channels that have been a great source of entertainment and inspiration to me as a game dev. I'm of course referring to Noclip and Gameumentary. Noclip Noclip has a special place in my heart as it's founder, Danny O'Dwyer is also an Irishman. NoClip are crowdfunded which only goes to show that their growth and success is a direct result of them making content that people not only enjoy but also want to support. Noclip is obviously very good at making game dev docs but their especially good at highlighting the people behind the games and putting a human touch to the products that attract such large player bases. Noclip also does something very interesting that not many other doc channels do, if any really for that matter and that's production classes. Noclip release videos not only about games and the stories behind them but also videos about the way they film and edit their docs. This is a fascinating and excellent move by the channel. One which I greatly appreciate as not only a game dev but someone with an interest in video production. Gameumentary Gameumentary make game dev docs about games that are not only blockbusters but also games from developers that don't get the attention they deserve. Gameumentary doc about The Deep End Games and their game Perception was what lead me to discover and eventually play the game. One which was one of the most interesting and entertaining games I've played in a long time, with a very interesting game mechanic.
Gameumentary not only make game docs but also do interviews with various developers about various topics affecting the game dev industry. Gameumentary have been gaining popularity and growing quite quickly and I for one hope it continues as I'm looking forward to seeing what they make next. Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! Since I've been back in college, I've had my fair share of exams and still have quite a few big ones left to go. So, I thought now would be a good time to share some of the things I do in order to prepare for an exam 1: Don't Cram!While cramming the night before might work for some people, those people number a very rare amount. In practice, cramming the night before an exam does not end well. So, give yourself plenty of time to study. For the most part, your lecturers will give you plenty of notice of an exam. What I tend to do when I know there's an exam coming up is compartmentalise the work I need to revise. Don't try to revise everything that'll be on the exam in one sitting but, rather break it down into sections and tackle a section in each sitting.  2: Have a Good Study SpaceWhere you study is very important. If you try to study somewhere that is full of distractions, odds are you're going to loose focus and not have a very productive study session. Find someplace quite and free of distractions. Put your phone away for the duration of time you plan to study for. Having a study space that is tidy is also key. Trying to study in a messy environment can be frustrating and counterproductive.  3: Look at Past ExamsMost colleges give students access to past exam papers. If this is the case, take the time to look at these past exam papers and practice them. You can often identify what questions come up a lot on exams. Remember, there's only so many questions that can be asked and repetition is bound to occur. If you can determine what questions are likely to be on an exam, the better prepared you can be.  4: Take Regular BreaksThis one might not seem as obvious. You might view taking regular breaks from a study session as procrastinating. While say studying for ten minutes and taking a two hour break is most definitely procrastinating, there are ways of studying with regular breaks that can be most effective. I recommend looking at the Pomodoro Technique as a way of better managing your study time.  5: RelaxThis one is easier said than done. Exams can be very stressful. We've all been in that situation where we've studied for the exam and we know the information inside and out but, as soon as the exam paper is put in front of you, you draw a blank and forget everything. The most important thing to do once this happens is to try and relax. Don't let the panic set in. You haven't forgotten that information. It's still there. Take a breath and pause for a minute. Look over the paper carefully, reading each question slowly. While there is a time limit on your exam, don't focus on that. You have time to read over your paper and settle yourself. We often confuse excitement with fear and panic. If you've ever seen athletes talking after a big event, they often mention the excitement in the run up to the event. The same can be said of an exam. If you think of the panic you have more so as excitement, you'll get a better grasp on how you tackle the exam.  Until next time!
Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!
It's been a while since I've done a general update of everything. So, now's as good a time as any to take stock of what I've been up to. College: I'm nearing the end of my second year as a mature student in my computer science course. Things are going well, but, the level of work has ramped up significantly going into this final semester which means I've had to prioritise college that bit more. I'm in the middle of a block of exams at the moment as well as projects, so, the majority of my time lately is focused on college work. Game Dev: As you might have guessed from the college part, my time has been pulled somewhat away from my current game dev projects. I'm still getting some design and art work done on my current game but it's been slowed down until I finish my final exams for college. I hope to be able to pick up the pace once I finish and start posting more about it over the summer. Tutorials: I'm also trying to work on what will be a longer running tutorial series that will also be adapted into a workshop that I'm hoping to run over the summer. This will be aimed at beginners with the hope of being able to design and code a simple game. All in all, it's a pretty busy time at the moment but, I hope to be able to focus more on the game dev side of things soon and in turn post some W.I.P of my current projects. Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! In this week's blog post, I'm going to be talking a little bit about remakes. More specifically, what I think makes a good remake. I'm mostly going to be talking about the Resident Evil 2 remake as I think it provides one of the best examples of what a good remake is.  Remakes are nothing new. We've seen plenty of remakes over the years. Some good and some bad. For the most part, remakes tend to be the same game just with better textures and graphical effects. They tend to keep the exact same gameplay elements, even if they are buggy and the overall game itself tends to be a copy of the original that now just looks better. Now, Resident Evil 2 remake is interesting. While they maintain the story of the game, they embrace change on other aspects of the game such as the before mentioned graphical updates but most importantly, gameplay. Resident Evil 2 was known for it's fixed cameras and tank like controls which sometimes added to the tension of the game but mostly was clunky trade off of that era of games development.  The Resident Evil 2 remakes biggest advantage is how it embraced changing the gameplay from fixed camera tank controls to free third person controls. I admire this move for a number of reasons. The main one being that they're not trying to simply remake the same game exactly as it was just with better graphics. The original is the original and it has a special place in my heart for being among the first horror games I played. I have fond memories of that and I feel a carven copy remake would taint that memory. This is not always the case. The Crash Bandicoot remake was a fantastic trip down memory lane.  I also admire this approach to the development of the game because they've taken an already strong story and simply given us that again but with more robust gameplay. Resident Evil 2 Remake stands out to me as a great example of what a remake should be. Some games don't need a remake but for those who attempt the remake route, I hope they take a page out of Resident Evil 2s book.
Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!
In this week's blog, we're going to look at a simple way you can read binary and easily convert it to English text. So, if you don't know much about binary then you probably just know it as a series of 0s and 1s and you'd be right. Binary is simply made up of 0s and 1s but the number of digits and their order is very important. You may see a long series of binary numbers with hundreds of 0s and 1s but we can actually break these down into simple chunks to work them out. Binary is simply a series of bits. Each bit being represented by a 1 or a 0. However, every eight bits make up a byte. So we start by separating our long series of binary bits into segments of eight bits. Lets look at the binary here: 010001000110111101100111. We can simplify this by breaking it up into its bytes. That looks as follows: 01000100 01101111 01100111. So, we have three bytes here. Let's look at the first byte, 01000100. The first thing to note is that the first three bits of a byte determine if the text value is upper case or lower case. 010 means upper case while 011 means lower case. So we can see that our first byte is an upper case letter, 01000100. After that, the remaining bits starting from left to right have a numerical value of 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1. If a bit is set to one, we add the numerical value associated with it to the numerical value associated with any of the other bits set to one, excluding the first three bits which remember determine if our text value is upper case or lower case. So as you can see the only bit set to one is the bit with an associated value of 4. Now if we check what the fourth letter of the alphabet is, we see it's the letter "d" and in this case we know it's an upper case "D". If you go ahead and do the same for the other two bytes we have you'll see that they are both lower case letters and we find they are "o" and "g", thus spelling out the word dog. So, simple as that, you can now read binary. Give it a try for yourself. Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! In this week's blog, we're going to take a look at some of the books I've been reading as of late! 1. Gwendy's Button Box Gwendy's Button Box is a novella written by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar. The book takes inspiration from one of Kings most iconic locations, Castle Rock. The book provides a great mix of suspense, fear and a look at how easily we change over time, even if we don't want to admit it. 2. Elevation Elevation by Stephen King was quite an interesting read. While it's not exactly a scary read,it is a very strange tale. It's one that grips you and you can't stop reading out of pure fascination. 3. Brief Answers To The Big Questions Brief Answers To The Big Questions by Stephen Hawking is a fantastic read. It takes on some of the most complex questions we have with not just a knowledgeable perspective but also a very compassionate one. It gives great insight in to where we came from and where we are going but, also warns of the dangers we face in order to get there.
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