I’m more than halfway done but I still haven’t decided what my favorite games are. Hopefully, I’ll do that soon. This week I’m battling a rather nasty bug, but I’m still making progress.

It’s an RPG system I’ve built from scratch and I thought it would be fun to make a playable version of this video. It’ll be up an playable soon.

**UPDATE**
I LIED. The prototype still isn’t completed. Instead I decided to go off and make a start up. We secured a bit of funding and placed second in a state-wide competition, so that’s cool I suppose. The retrospective is complete, though.

I decided that I should probably look up some tutorials about making 2d games specifically in unity. I’ve made 2d games before in Java/python/Javascript/C# but in those games I usually generate the areas with maps of ints with each int corresponding to a specific tile. After you write the engine, generating maps is easy, but you can’t necessarily visualize it without some sort of map editor tool. Since unity has an awesome looking editor, I decided to check out how games made in unity use the editor to their advantage and learned some cool stuff. These posts serve as a way to reflect on the stuff I’ve learned and as a reference for later.

Tiles are created as prefabs.
In my previous approaches I’ve created a single plane to act as the ground and then generated objects on top of the plane. When programing in Java etc, this saved resources and helped to reduce the number of objects generated. However, it seems like unity is ok with generating a prefab for each tile on the screen. I’m not sure how light-weight the prefabs are, but, considering there were a lot of objects in my last project, the number of prefabs doesn’t seem to bog unity down too much so I’m going to try out this system and see how it goes.

Snap to grid feature.
This is the coolest feature I’ve seen in unity for a 2d game. When clicking on a prefab select Edit>SnapToGrid and it will show a dialogue box that lets you customize how the prefab will try to line up with the grid underneath. After that is selected, holding control will allow prefabs to snap to the next available space when moving them around. Using this approach I was able to create a small map very quickly. Looks like using this system will save a lot of time when creating tile-based maps.

Using game objects to organize.
Looks like empty game objects are used to hold all tiles related to maps. We did some of this in my last project, and it certainly worked, but I wasn’t sure if it was standard practice in unity.

Orthogonal camera.
Used this feature in previous implementations. makes sense for a 2d game, but I’d like to mess with the perspective camera to get a more picture book-y feel for a game like “The Woods”.

I’ve heard the saying that the only people that will read your thesis are your advisor and your mom. While I love my mom and really respect my advisor, this just doesn’t do it for me. I, like many academics, want my work to be read.

Whenever I get frustrated with something I try to do a bit of research on it to pinpoint why it’s bothering me. It also helps me think about how I can address my frustration so that I’m not just stewing. In my review, I saw a trend: academic writing seems to be inaccessible.

First, there’s the actual restriction on academic articles, paywalls. With a paywall, an academic journal can refuse to show you an article unless you have a subscription, or pay by the article. For example here’s an article about videogames and neuroscience that I wanted to read:

For a broke college student, this is a lot of money. Especially if you’re doing a lit review which would require several sources. All is not lost, though, because most universities give free access for their students. Unfortunately, not everyone is a student. Actually, only 39% of 18 to 24 year-olds are in college (and that’s across all disciplines). Point being, the majority of the population needs to pay a lot of money to stay up to date with research… and that’s not happening.

Even if you manage to get ahold of an academic article, there seems to be an art to deciphering them. A quick google search of academic writing, and bad academic writing, reveals tons of people complaining about the language and style used in academic articles.

It’s not that academics CAN’T write, but that most feel pressure to write in academise. I’m currently reading a book titled “Writing for the social sciences” and have found it immensely helpful (link at the bottom). The advice given in this book is to write plainly, and to make your writing accessible. The problem is it generally doesn’t sound smart, and, as shallow as this seems, people may not hold it in high regard.

It’s no wonder that wikipedia is so popular. It addresses both of these issues. It’s accessible, and it’s readable (for the most part). Still worried about errors in an editable encyclopedia? you might want to take a look at this Nature article.

So, how can we address this issue? That’s a difficult question, I have some theories but they may only work for myself. While I was at Stanford I noticed that almost every assignment was accompanied with some sort of presentation or media. Most stanford classes urged their students to create some product that people could actually use when conducting research. I’ve gathered a few examples of what this means.

Have an elevator pitch.
You’ve probably heard of this concept, but if you haven’t you should be familiar with it. An elevator pitch is “is a short summary used to quickly and simply define a person, profession, product, service, organization or event and its value proposition.” In other words, pretend you’re in an elevator and have to describe your work before the person you’re talking to gets off. I know this is hard to do you’ve probably spent YEARS working on your project and summarizing this is intimidating. But, I have seen several researchers scare off potential audiences because they don’t have a concise answer to the question “What do you do?” Plus, you can use this pitch at family get togethers.

Don’t say, show.
Vsauce is making some of the coolest science videos on the internet right now. Take a moment to check out this video. Did you notice how many views that video has? At this moment… 1,776,571. The video cuts to the cool part of the study, gives a short synopsis, and provides a link to the actual paper. That’s freaking cool. It’s like a movie trailer for a research study. Now, I’m not saying you should have production values on par with this video, but, if you want viewers, it doesn’t hurt to polish it a bit.

Have some sort of presence on the internet.
Having an online presence helps to get your work out there and makes it more visible. Some of the coolest interactions that I’ve had come out of tweets and blog posts I’ve written. It does require some upkeep, but keep in mind you’re a few keystrokes from sharing your ideas with others.

If you want more people to read your work, I suggest you try out some of these methods and reflect on how you learn about new studies outside of journal articles.

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Social-Scientists-Chicago-Publishing/dp/0226041328

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/27/arts/when-ideas-get-lost-bad-writing-attacks-scholars-include-barbed-contest-with.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Recently, I went to New York and found myself at the Nintendo World Store. In short, it was awesome, but not necessarily because of the stuff that was being sold. Don’t get me wrong, they have lots of cool stuff that you can’t get anywhere else (I picked up some Mario Bros. Pixel Playing cards). The coolest thing about that place: The staff.

The Nintendo world staff was great! After talking to them for a bit you can tell they love games. In fact, they have a really cool display on the second floor made up of memorabilia donated by the staff. The display has stuff from Pokemon, Fire emblem, Earthbound and tons of other games. However, the highlight for me was being able to use a hylian shield! (It was heavy!) I wanted to buy it, but it cost 80 rupees.

I will be hosting a roundtable at Meaningful Play. Information about it can be found here.

In short, I think failure is very productive, but how do we leverage that failure for the benefit of players? I’m actually looking at the effect of failure on people’s perceptions of themselves as well. Right now I’m looking at self efficacy, but I know that this can also manifest as labels and learning disabilities. There is a great article by Ray McDermott that I’ve been citing showing these effects:

Failure has transformed from simply not succeeding to something that determines the opportunities available to students. Failure becomes a label by which a student’s mental faculties are assessed. In its most malicious form, a failure can even manifests itself as a learning disability. At this point it has devastating effects on how the student views themselves, and how society views the student (McDermott, Goldman, & Varenne, 2006). With so much at stake it is no surprise that students do not wish to fail.

That’s actually exactly why I think failure is interesting. You can learn so much from it, yet it can also be quite devastating.

Thoughts about Failure? Leave them in the comments.

I feel like I need to start posting more. There are a lot of cool things i’m currently taking part in (developing /studying games, drawing, writing), and so little time to just reflect on what I’ve done. So here’s the deal. I’m going to try to write one new post a week on what i’m doing. Simple right? Sure… until I get self conscious and delete this post.