Category: University
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Picnic is Released!
A couple of days ago, I posted Picnic to itch.io! Version 1.0 of my honours project is finally complete. This is an exciting milestone because now my focus can shift almost entirely to writing my dissertation. Download the game on itch.io! Furthermore, I am amazed that with no marketing, several streamers have already played Picnic! It shows how…
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Midnight
This week, I’ve been writing the proposal for my honours project. Unfortunately, sitting in a library for multiple hours a day doesn’t make for an exciting blog post. So I thought I’d do another mini-case study inspired by my research like I did with Shrek Swamp Sim, where I talked about Freud’s concept of the uncanny.…
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Onions
In his essay of the same name Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny as an unhomely and creepy sensation that comes about when the subconscious mind projects its repressed urges and feelings onto the world. This phenomenon can explain the unease people can feel when dealing with things such as the occult and arcane; it can…
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DES311 #9: The Final Sprint
This is it, the final sprint, the last push. This week I have added in a music player and have begun my last round of bug fixing and optimization before submission. My music player script stores a number of licenced music tracks in an array, and plays them in a shuffled order. By naming each…
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DES311 #8: DOTS or how I learned to stop worrying and love my garbage code
This week just a short post about the user testing I’ve been conducting. I’ve sent the game to a number of people who have been reporting any bugs they’ve found back to me. So far I was aware of all the bugs sent to me and have a plan in place to sort each one.…
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DES311 #7: Version 1.0
Sprint 3 is finished and a version of the simulation with all the major features is complete. I’ve begun sending the simulation to people for testing and am hosting it on itch.io. Click here to download the latest version. UI The features I spent this week working on were the UI and menus. The UI…
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DES311 #6: The Fish Locomotion Rabbit Hole
I have now started with my scheduled goal of adding animations and sprites to the simulation. To make this easier I decided to pick a species of fish and predator to base mine on. Inspired by this dramatic scene from the BBC documentary The Hunt in 2017 I decided to go with Sardines as the…
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DES311 #5: Predators
Progress continues, this week I’ve implemented the last feature on the sprint 2 backlog, predators. Furthermore I’ve been making tweaks to the flock behaviour that has lead to some interesting behaviours and have put in a spawning system that controls the number of BOIDs on screen. Predators How predators work is quite simple when compared…
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DES311 #4: Goal Seeking
This week I’ve made some improvements to the cohesion behaviour and implemented goal seeking. Cohesion Improvements Last week I spoke about how the cohesion behaviour wasn’t causing the swirling patterns I was looking for. I hypothesized this was because BOIDs were packed together too tightly and not able to jostle for central position. I attempted…
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DES311 #3: Coming Together
This week I have managed to implement the cohesion behaviour in my BOID simulation as well as completing a project timeline. I’ll discuss both in this post. The Timeline The project will be broken up into 4 fortnightly sprints whose tasks will be taken from a project backlog. This backlog will change over the course…
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