Second Semester Final Project START

Greetings readers!

The time has come again to plan and prepare the Final Project of the semester. This should be the final piece of work I produce for the Dissertation (unless I decide to create any additional prototypes in my final weeks of the academic year and document them on this blog).

For this final piece, I've decided to return to using Unity and MonoDevelop. It's by far the best games creation program I've used, uses C# natively, and is becoming a powerful standard in the industry. Being able to use Unity more proficiently increases my employability and showcases my ability to use C# far more effectively than any other program I can presently use or have access to.

As for the game itself, I don't really feel like I've made any serious progress with C# over the past semester, certainly when compared to the first semester; as such, I will be using this to simply demonstrate my existing knowledge and abilities, and hopefully gain a little more experience and something new to show off in my portfolio. As such, I'd like to produce something polished and interesting, something with simple mechanics and some level of audience engagement. The Top-Down Shooter game I created for my First Semester Final Project was a passable demonstration of mechanics, but it didn't give the player much of a reason to play the game, and wasn't nearly as polished as I would have liked.

Puzzle games are usually quite good for engaging the player audience, and often only require a bare minimum of mechanics to produce, so I'll start there. I would also like this game to be three dimensional (in visuals if not gameplay), as my portfolio is noticeably lacking in anything but 2D Flash games.

This should be enough of a description for me to start working on the game. With any luck, I should have an update for Sunday, depending on how busy I end up being during the week.

Wish me luck, and have a very good day in the meantime, readers.

Fifth Tutorial Phase Update

Good evening, readers.

This Tutorial Phase has been something of a flunk, I'm afraid to say. In usual fashion, I left the work until the end of the week in order to focus on the more immediate project deadlines, but when I got around to finally starting the tutorial, I discovered that, as the tutorial explains, XNA was discontinued by Microsoft for Visual Studio. However, the tutorial failed to mention that it was utilising an older version of Visual Studio (2010, I believe, which I do not have access to), and Microsoft's Developer Network doesn't offer versions of XNA for the modern versions of Visual Studio.

So, in short, the tutorial was sadly impossible to follow for me, and useless even if I had found an alternative solution. Sometimes the progressive nature of computers is a problem.

So, then, what is to be done with the Fifth Conversion Phase? I think that spending some time learning the Visual Studio program would help, and there are several particular points I'd like to address in that regard.

As yet, I haven't learnt how to import assets (such as images) into Visual Studio, something I'd hoped to learn from the tutorial. While I can't follow the tutorial through, I can try the same techniques the creator used, and find alternative methods if they don't work due to incompatibility.

In addition, I'd like to experiment a little with the possibility of scrolling images and environments within the program, perhaps finding a way to accomplish this in a partial segment of the window.

So, then, I'll spend some time focusing on these points. If I have time, I'll produce a prototype game demonstrating these elements; if not, I'll at least have learnt and practised them, ready for use in future prototypes.

I'll post another update documenting my progress on Sunday the 8th. Until then, have a fine day, readers.