lights and confetti

Towards the end of last semester, we discussed some of your thoughts on the module content and structure.  This semester plan has taken many of those suggestions into account. 

Reading and Writing

In this module you will be continuing to develop your reading and writing skills to the level of writing a Literature Review.  This page sets out some of the reasons why it’s important to learn how write in a formal, academic manner.

While the positive reasons may be obvious for those that might pursue a post-grad, it is important to emphasis that many of you that are hoping to pursue a more artistic angle for a career will also rely on writing skills throughout your career.  Writing script and copy, as well as submitting applications for shows, grant applications, and funding are all important parts of the work of a modern creative practitioner.

These next few weeks will hopefully build your confidence in conducting desk research and improving your writing skills. This writing resource presents many of the approaches for developing these skills that you will encounter.  The structure presented at the link above may appeal more to some of you.  Many of these ideas, combined with other elements have been included on this website to provide a pretty comprehensive writing plan for the semester.

One of the suggestions that emerged towards the end of last semester was that you would like the opportunity to start selecting your own readings.  This is something you will really be developing this semester. As I have mentioned to you, last year in Multimedia Development 2 the group produced a book on game design.  This is an amazing achievement for this group of students, and the book is available on open library, and in the TU Dublin library.

Based on this I am suggesting that we continue in this grand tradition and create a sequel to this open-source academic textbook titled Game Design and Development 2. If everyone is open to the idea I’m willing to work in conjunction with you to see if we can publish this book at the end of the semester, for most of you will be your first peer-reviewed academic publication to add to your CV! not bad for 2nd year!

See Our Miro Board

Tutorials

For the practical aspect of the class I have taken into account some of the feedback regarding having more choices in this area.  For this semester you are presented with a choice of 3 potential paths or ‘streams’ that you can complete.

For Unity, there are two paths, a beginner path in 2D game development that will begin to help with coding your own project which is perfect if you want to re-enforce the learning that took place during semester 1, and an intermediate path for those of you who enjoyed the challenge of the last semester and would like to further explore XR technologies and Unity. Please look through both paths before you start as you need to commit to one. If you are unsure complete both paths for a week and re-evaluate.

There is also a  3rd path that you can choose this semester, an E-learning project. This is the most self-directed option –  a self-selected & designed project. It should not be seen as the easy option – you will have more decisions to make and you will have to do a lot more ground work in terms of selecting your own resources. It will require careful selection  both in terms of content and software selection.

 

I suggest you work on your week 2 tutorial this week as week 1 is very light and week 2 will be a work-heavy week.

2D Game Dev

A series of tutorials for 2D Unity Development,

Ruby’s Adventure: 2D Beginner

These tutorials will take approximately 14 hours (weeks 2-7) from week 8 it is expected that you will create your own 2D game.

https://learn.unity.com/project/ruby-s-2d-rpg?uv=2019.2

Introduction to XR

A series of tutorials for developing a VR project (headgear not required) The first set of tutorials will take approximately 14 hours, you will then make an XR project of your own!

https://learn.unity.com/course/introduction-to-xr-vr-ar-and-mr-foundations

https://learn.unity.com/project/vr-in-unity-a-beginner-s-guide?uv=

E-learning Project

Choose suitable software to produce a multimedia project. This will consist of working on a complete project from initial brainstorming to design, development, and testing to a high standard. These projects are self-directed and will need to be approved in advance.me.

Project Documentation

For the project documentation you will have two choices.

  1. You will complete a weekly blog on your game development process and progress
  2. You will complete a final report on your Game Jam project detailing your process and progress 

 

Questions for 1st day of Semester

How best to organise our Thursday? I will be available each Thursday for all sessions but do you have thoughts on how best to use that time? do we need to meet F2F every week or are there weeks that you would benefit working from in groups or on your own? Should we split ourselves into smaller teams when working on our writing?

Secondly, a task that I would like everyone to contribute to on Thursday morning 10:00 – 12:00 is the creation of an outline for the proposed book “Game Design and Development 2”, I have begun this task by adding in some potential chapter topics to the mind map. I will help you further develop this over the coming weeks. As a group, we can decide on Chapters and sections, and then we can choose which part we would like to work on. The tasks for this will be individual but like so much of our work, we will be supporting each other through our feedback.