Confirmed Changes to my Dissertation

Hello again, readers!

Following some discussion with my tutors, I am going to go through with a recommended alteration to my current work plan for my dissertation. The project series will remain about 80-90% the same, but now will include a "final" project each semester.

This final project will be a larger game which incorporates mechanics and coding techniques learnt during the course of that series (with roughly three games worth of experience in each), demonstrating an ability to tie multiple mechanics into a single, cohesive game.

For this, I will plan out the mechanics I will need to learn, and select specific games and tutorials that will teach me these mechanics in preparation for the final project for that semester.

This will lean my dissertation slightly closer to a design perspective, but will still be primarily focused on coding, and should still teach me everything that I need to reach my goal of learning C# and demonstrating coding proficiency.


The first of these games, due sometime in January/February (date to be confirmed later), will be a fairly basic top-down shooter. This will involve:

• player movement
• player health
• bullet firing
• a scrolling camera
• at least two types of enemies with some simple pathing AI
• exploding parts of the environment
• possible controller compatibility.

This is a game I would be reasonably confident making in ActionScript 3, so hopefully it shouldn't prove too challenging with the preparation from the projects leading up to it. If I find myself with extra time, then I can also attempt to incorporate a basic degree of random generation to the enemy spawning and/or terrain.


I will begin my search for specific mechanics in tutorials this week, but first I would like to complete a short C# project to let me get a better idea of the process of these projects, including how quickly I'll be able to work with this language, as well as to iron out any problems in my existing knowledge of the language and platform.

I'll begin this tomorrow, and should be done by Friday, giving me a week to locate the tutorials I need and plan out the timetables of my projects before the deadline for our proposals comes about.

Daily updates will follow, beginning with another post tomorrow with my opening progress (please don't expect a great deal).

Until then, have a fine day, readers.