Aaron Hogan

Game Testing For this week I read an article called 'Giving Criticism-the good, the bad, and the ugly! The article is about criticism and why it is effective and how a person can go about giving someone criticism without hurting the persons feelings. Why giving criticism can be a good thing: Criticism can be a good thing because it offers feedback, either positive or negative. Giving criticism can benefit the person receiving it as it can better their work/project. If you want to give good constructive criticism, then… 1) focus on valid and unbiased feedback and… 2) make your criticism clear, understandable, and relevant. The poor way of giving constructive criticism: That logo design sucks, who the heck would pay for something like that!? I hate red and green, why not use black and white instead! I can’t read the text. The good way of giving constructive criticism: The balloon font used in the logo seems a bit too playful for your business, do you thin...

Game Stories This week for my reading task, I read two articles ' Into the Woods: A Practical Guide to the Hero's Journey' by Bob Bate and  ' What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story' by John Sunderland.   I enjoyed  reading this articles and found them very interesting. The first article I learned about the hero's in games. Mostly every game has a hero. My favourite hero in a video game would have to be Mario from the Super Mario Games.  This article helped me learn more about what goes into a hero in a video game.  These are the possible steps that a hero can go through on his/her journey: Establishing the hero's world The call to adventure Entering the mythological woods Trail of trials Encountering the evil one Gaining the hero's prize Returning that prize to the community Hero's play a huge part in games. The audience love when there is a certain hero in a game because they can get attached to the hero and really f...

Week 9 Reading and Writing For this weeks reading and writing task, I had to look back at my readings and writings from week 1 to week 8 and see how my experience has been going.  I feel like the readings and writings have became more enjoyable as the weeks went on. 1. I feel like the readings and writings are working great for me. At the start of the weeks, I thought that I would not enjoy them to the extent that I do now. I especially thought that the readings were going to be boring and that I would not enjoy them but they have proved me wrong. My favourite reading was from week 4, it was called "what are game elements?'. I enjoyed this reading the most because I feel like I learnt and gained a lot from that reading and benefited towards me making my own game. Here is a link to the article I read for my week 4 reading: https://learn.canvas.net/courses/3/pages/level-3-dot-1-1-players . I feel like the readings overall have helped me towards my game as they give me...

Game Fun For this week, I read over two articles. The three articles I read were: -Natural Funativity by Noah Falstein - Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs  by Richard Bartle I will summarise what I found important and learnt. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -Natural Funativity by Noah Falstein: The first article I read was 'Natural Funativity' by Noah Falstein.   I enjoyed reading this article as I learnt the different three basic areas that make up the natural funativity theory. They are: Physical Fun: The same connection between us now and our evolutionary heritage is the survival instinct. Anything that threatens our survival grabs our attention. Games love to have survival as a big part of the game as it grabs the players attention and makes them more invested into the game. A good example of a game using survival as a huge part of their game is Mi...

Game Decisions For this weeks reading task, I read an article called ' Social Design Practices for Human-Scale Online Games' by Daniel Cook.  - What we can borrow from social psychology :  Social game design operates within the physical and mental constraints of the human animal , so it pays to understand these constraints and build them into our designs. -An overview of friendship formation:  Friendship formation requires 4 key ingredients:  1.Proximity: Being close to someone will encourage many interactions.  2.Similarity: Having something in common with someone will make it more likely that they will become friends 3.Reciprocity: Players must engage with each other in order to share social norms. 4.Disclosure: At high level of friendships, there must be safety and trust between them. You can take any two players, put them together in matches for hundreds of hours, and if the above criteria are not met, they are unlikely to bec...

Games GDD I read an article called 'Design Considerations' by Greg Aleknevicus, here's a link to the article: http://www.thegamesjournal.com/articles/DesignConsiderations.shtml . He gives us tips on improving the UI and rules for writing for board games. A good game doesn't need good components but it doesn't do any harm to have them. The list of components Greg said are good to be used are: Make tiles smaller than the spaces they're placed upon: If your game has pieces beside each other, it's better if their smaller so if you move a piece it won't disturb the rest  of the pieces. Use highly contrasting/distinguishable colours for player pieces: It's a good idea for your game to include colour so it is easy for the players to distinguish between the pieces easily, but it is wise to not choose colours that look a bit a like for example, red and orange. Use shape as well as colour to distinguish pieces: It is a good idea to have shapes in you...

Game Elements In my reading for week 4, I read and learnt about 'what are the elements of games?'. I enjoyed this read as I learnt a lot of valid information. The first element I read about was player. -Player:   A game needs a player for it to work. The amount of players can vary from 1 player to 2-15 players. There's many types of player structures when it comes to a game, two examples are, Head-To-Head: this is when its 1v1 eg, chess. Another example is one-against-many: eg, Build-up chasing which is chasing but every time you catch someone they join you.There are much more types of player structures, so here's a link to some more: https://learn.canvas.net/courses/3/pages/level-3-dot-1-1-players -Objectives(goals): Every game has a goal/objective in it weather it be to cross a finish line or save a friend from evil bosses. every single game has to have a goal for the game to work properly and for the game storyline to make sense. -Rules:  There are...

Game Design An image of a killer in a game. Image source: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/game-design-cards-killer-green-4268961/ The first reading I done was on "what is a game?". I learned about the game "three to fifteen", when I first read about the game I thought I didn't know it when it was being described but as soon as I say the image of the game, I instantly knew it was a different version of X & O's. It had the same outcome as it but there was just a few differences between the game but overall they are the same game in a way. This showed that there are many games that are similar but even with one tiny difference can make the two games not the exact same.  I read something in the first reading that basically said how if we were to describe a game to someone we know, that we would describe it by comparing it to another game of similar gameplay. That was interesting to read because I never realised how true it is.  I read an article...