PHIL HOARE TIME
Week Two
This week I focused on choosing four topics and diving deep into them, to allow me to have a good starting point for next week. The topics I chose were time, sea life, intelligence agencies and theatre. I read multiple sources for each, utilising a combination of Google, the library and my own books. I aimed to have a broad knowledge of each one which will allow me to go deeper into individual parts of any given topic next week. The notes taken for each topic can be found in their individual pages in the sub-menu for week two in the navigation bar above.
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We also had a lecture on treating game-worlds as a second world that people can exist in. The lecture focused on the importance of stories within games, highlighting how they can teach us mechanics as well as give people a reason to play. The lecture finished with a workshop in which we developed a Powerpoint game.
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When developing this game I used the mouse-over functionality of Powerpoint, allowing me to set game-over states when the mouse goes over something such as a spike, to create a maze game where the player moves the mouse around a maze. In keeping with the theme of game-worlds I decided to create a full world for the player to navigate; the world came complete with different biomes. I also included abstract storytelling, such as with this image, to communicate a world that is lived in to the player.
​I used different slides to act as different areas so the player would regularly feel like they are opening up or finding new areas of a bigger world. The player begins in the centre of the world, by going through a portal so as not to break the immersion, and can go off in any direction to access different biomes. I used mouse-over detection to detect when the player goes to a screen edge so that it can take them to the area in that direction. You can find the full game in the attached Powerpoint file here:
​Finally, I made and presented a presentation on my four researched topics. You can find the slides for this presentation on the page titled “presentation on 4 topics” under week 2 in the navigation menu.