Adam's Blog

 Vision Statement Introduction Roll-a-Mole is a fast-paced, top-down re-imagining of the classic arcade game Whack-a-mole.    Roll-a-Mole sets you, the player, in the ring to square off with those pesky moles that are destroying the arena and coming to take your title belt. You can't stand for this and that's why you launch into action rebounding off the ropes to come firing straight back into the action as you try to reach a High-Score and defeat the moles. -Whac-a-Mole, Arcade Game (1975) Background Whack-a-mole is a classic arcade game with physical components such as the mechanical moles that emerge from the holes and the hammer that the player uses to bash them away and gain points. This arcade machine has been taken and spun into so many differing concepts of the original but none have delved into the virtual side of gaming and truly reinvented the core mechanics of this classic video game whilst maintaining the same powerful nostalgia. Until now.  With a virtu...

 Unity Tutorial 3 In Unity tutorial 3 I had to open up a new asset folder and use the assets to make a game about feeding animals. I really liked this tutorial because it branched off into new materials and assets that I had to then apply rules and scripts to.  - Screenshot of the game and its assets I had to program a playable character to be used by the player that could be controlled to go left and right. I also had to learn code that would prevent the character from exiting the view of the camera and is actually something I was wondering while sending my car flying off into the abyss in the previous tutorial. I learnt a lot from this tutorial that I was genuinely curious about because one of my game ideas was very similar to this. It also involved things coming towards the player at random times and random positions.  A script I found useful was the 'Destroy' script that I could code and then apply to game objects that I didn't want existing forever within the game wo...

 Tech Task: Redesigning my Blog After making a handful of Blogger Posts and having initially choosing a quick template and background picture that I liked, I decided I try to make my blog look a bit more unique and make it feel like more of my own space.  I first started off with my icon. I designed my Icon a few years ago when creating a Youtube Channel. I got a few references from the internet and used a free photo editing software called GIMP to pull it all together. After recently realizing I needed an Icon for my blog I figured why not use something that I'm used to so I chose the Black and Blue icon as my icon. The only problem was that in the years since designing this icon my favorite colour has changed from Blue to Red and I thought that maybe I should just simply bring the icon into Adobe Photoshop and change the colours. But once I did that I saw ALL the imperfections I had made when I first designed it. The edges were all misaligned, design-wise the angles were wro...

 Games MDA MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design The first article was an Academic paper by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek, named, "MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research". It was a very easy paper to read compared to the ones I've previously read and I think that's due to the topic being discussed. From this paper I have learned a few things about Game Design, Research and MDA, a framework to help guide Game Developers, Game Designers and Scholars. Basically, MDA stands for Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics and is a formal approach to understanding games and bridges the gap of game design and game development, game criticism and technical game research. Mechanics is the particular components of the game, at the level of data representations and algorithms. Dynamics is the run-time behaviour of the mechanics working on the player inputs and each others outputs overtime.  Aesthetics refers to the desirable emotional responses evoked in the...