Nyssa's Digital Media Design Blog

In today's lesson, I had to finish off the last few bits before I submitted my work. To do this, I had to finish adding in my Harvard-Style references into my Project Artefact for my game, then I had to go through my InDesign work, to make sure that I had added in everything that I needed to add in. I then had to export this, so that I could send it off.  After dong these things, I had to finish off the last Davinci Resolve Fusion video that I had been working on, so that I could export this, and upload it to YouTube, so that I could submit that as well. I had then finished everything, so I was ready to submit my work.

23/01/23  In today's lesson, we covered An Autobiography of Artificial Intelligence. We began the lesson by looking at the definition of intelligence, and through this covered the key points about how to be truly intelligent, something has to be able to learn and figure out what it needs to do for itself, rather than just follow instructions. We then began looking at Artificial Intelligence (AI), and how machinery is becoming able to learn and figure things out for itself in some cases. We covered the history of AI, and how people like Alan Turing and his contributions to technology, have allowed the rise in AI that we have seen be created around us, such as self-driving cars, and BigDogs, created by Boston Dynamics. We looked at a couple of films, including "2001: A Space Odyssey", and "Blade Runner", which  is based on the novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?", by Philip K. Dick. After this, we then looked at the concept of The Chinese Room, t...

Over this weekend, I was continuing to add in the scenery to my game map. After I had finally finished doing this, I had to build my game, to export it to my files as a playable game. As I did this, I had to generate the light within my game, make sure that my Main Menu scene would be the first scene shown when played, and I also got to add a personal thumbnail to my game, for which I used the same background image that I had used within my scene backgrounds. 

In today's lesson, I continued with my game design. As I had finished designing the actual mechanics of my game, all I had left to do was add in the scenery, so I spent the lesson adding in different sized bushes and trees, making the map look more like a real forest.

In today's lesson, I decided to make sure that all of my work was ready for submission. I sorted out all of the files that I needed to submit, and placed them together into a new folder, where from there, I looked at the assignment brief to see exactly how I should sort these files. After I had sorted all of these out, I then had to upload all of my video work to YouTube. So I uploaded what I needed to, and then added all of these links to a new Word Document, so that they were all together. I then had to return to InDesign, and finish uploading the work that I had been working on this semester, making sure to add in my video YouTube link.

After this, I was able to create a Game Over screen that would show up at the end of my game. Rather then creating a new scene for this, I created a new Canvas within my main game scene, which I then coded so that during gameplay it was hidden, and then would appear at the end of the game, as the original canvas disappears. I managed to make this happen, by coding in that when the player runs out of arrows, after a small amount of time, the canvases would swap visibility.  When the canvases swap, I have also managed to make it so that the player can no longer move around, and the background is frozen in place. I also managed to change the game, so that during gameplay, the mouse cursor was hidden, but whenever there was an option to be made, it would reappear, so that it was easier to press the buttons.

In today's lesson, I was trying to get the scoring system to work within my game. To do this, I followed one of the tutorial videos that I had been watching to help me create my game, and this taught me that I had to create a new canvas within my game, and add a text box within it. I then had to create some new C# scripts, to make this text box change it's contents, depending on what happened within the game. I then had to create colliders on my targets, which I did in Blender, and then within Unity, I had to assign points values to each of the rings within the colliders, so that depending on where you hit the target, you would get a different score.

As the submission deadline is getting close, I had to work a lot over the weekend to get all of my work finished. For my game, I had to add in the different scenes that I needed, such as a Main Menu. I ended up creating four extra scenes in addition to my main game. I first created a Main Menu, which allowed the player to either play the game or exit the application. I then made a Beginning Text scene, which gives the player a short paragraph to read about how to play the game. I finally also made a scene where you can choose whether you want to go around the Red or Blue route. To go between all of these different scenes, I watched a tutorial on how to create working buttons within Unity, which I followed, and was able to add in functioning buttons to my game. The tutorial that I followed, also had downloadable Sprites, which I used to create the shape of my buttons, and their outlines.

In today's lesson, I was trying to get my game to work, as whenever I would shoot an arrow, it would clip straight through, and would fall through the ground.  I tried many different things to try and get this to work, however nothing seemed to be working. At one point, I had found a piece of code from a question and answer forum, which partially solved my problem, however when the arrows hit the target, they would completely change direction, and I couldn't find a way to fix this new issue.  Finally though, I went back and re-watched an episode from the tutorials that I had been following, as although from the title, I didn't think I would need to watch this particular episode, I realised that part way through it, the creator quickly mentioned a couple of lines of code, which completely fixed the issues that I'd been having throughout the day.

In today's lesson, I was able to finally start working on my Three Screen Piece. As I had filmed the footage that I needed to be able to edit my video together over the previous weekend, I began the lesson by creating a new project within Davinci Resolve, and importing all of these clips into the Media Pool of this project. I then had to create 4 new timelines within this project, three of which would be the video for each screen, and the fourth would be a Master Timeline, where I would place the other three timelines into. In this timeline, I had to resize and move the videos, so that I could see all three clips being played together as I edited them separately. Throughout the lesson, I then went through each timeline, adding in the clips from the Media Pool, and placing them into where I thought looked good within the video. I had to keep referring back to the Master Timeline though, as sometimes I needed to make sure that the clips in different timelines were lining up with each...