The life of Niamh

This week i read an article that talked about how productivity applications can learn from games. The article was called  "Building a Princess saving app"  . In this weeks reading, we dived into the process and importance of decision making within a game.  What i found the biggest help while reading this article was the steps you may need to consider in order to create a cozy game and by steps i mean the "ingredients" of cozy aesthetics. The ingredients for cosy aesthetics are as follows: 1. Abundance - food/warmth 2. Smooth transitions  3. Protection and support - environment or characters 4. Focus - eliminations of interruption 5. Familiar setting 6. Refuge and escape  7. Welcome entity   8. Seasons  9. Ritual - repeating actions. Id you make the decision to have these cozy aesthetics in your game, it will allow a player to reframe their mindset, relax and continue with the game. It gives comfort to the player and i pers...

"Index cards on all four corners" http://www.thegamesjournal.com/articles/DesignConsiderations.shtml The first article i read was called " "Design Considerations" " written by Greg Aleknevicus.  In this article Greg teaches us about the importance of doing something right instead of wrong. They both cost the same. The first thing we are told is that its best to use contrasting and striking colours when creating games but also to bare in mind that many people suffer from colour blindness so its not easy to tell which will suit best. Ive learned not to use orange and red as player colours as they are very similar and hard to distinguish even for people without colour blindness. Greg also talks about the FAQs page online. Its very important to have this in your webpage for your game and it will allow your company to interact with the customers and will keep customers happy, knowing that you are willing to answer their questions. In this article Greg also ...

This weeks reading was quite difficult to get through at points, i wont lie to you. The whole idea of mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics in gaming is completely new to me and would never have considered them when it came to gaming really.  Ive never thought to much into detail about games till this module. The MDA Framework by LeBlanc, Hunicke and Zabek was very confusing at points, in my opinion. I found it very difficult to keep up with what was being told to us and hard to fully understand it. There was points that i had to read a few times in order to try grasp it. Im still not fully sure on what MDA is and how it works and maybe it'll take me a while to fully comprehend it but ill keep reading up on it as i know its important for creating fully developed and functional games. For the second reading, i wasn't able to open the videos on my laptop for some reason, so i wasn't able to get the full experience of the powerpoint. Which was not ideal and caused a good b...

"character development" -Lee Sheldon http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/197601/sponsored_respecting_and_.php The first article i read was  Postmortem: Pinball-RPG hybrid 'Rollers of the realm' . I thought this article was very useful for getting an idea on how to talk about the process of the game development and i liked the way it split it up into what went right and what went wrong throughout the project. It showed me its just as important to show what went wrong as it is to show what went right. It will allow them to reflect on it in the future and not let them make the same mistake. They also broke it down into sub-sections which allowed us, the reader to follow what they were talking about more easily.  I enjoyed the part about audience testing. They got most of their information about target audience and what people found difficult to understand about the game and they were able to change it directly instead of guessing it. The second article i read was...

"understanding games - Kongregate" http://www.kongregate.com/games/pixelate/understanding-games-episode-1 From all the reading material on our website, these games/readings were the best ones. I found that these mini informative games where the easiest to understand. The use of plain english and competitions to get the beginner to understand what game design is and why it's used was very clever and beneficial to both parties. 'Pulling the plug' - Lewis Pulsipher Non digital teaching and learning In this reading Lewis Pulsipher, breaks down what happens when beginners learn using non-digital vs electronic games. He states each step in bullet points and then goes into detail about why non-digital learning is better. He shows that if you start on non-digital its very easy to change a mistake where as with electronic it has to be done through coding and could take days, even weeks to change one minor fault. He tells us that people go into . game making wa...