My Games Design Experience

My first proper gaming console was the Wii and now I am on the Xbox One. There's a gap of 7 years between release dates, the Wii was released on November 19, 2006 while the Xbox One was released on November 22, 2013. As a result, the Xbox One is more advanced than the Wii. I got my Wii for Christmas in 2008. Games that came with it included Cars, Mario Kart, Wii Sports and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Over time, I got more and more games for it. I got my favourite game for it after wanting it for just over 2 years for my 11th birthday in 2013, Mario Kart: Double Dash (as you could put GameCube discs into it and play them as normal provided you had a GameCube controller (which was still wired) and a memory card). The Wii was Nintendo's first home console to have game memory stored on the system instead of on a memory card and the first one to have wireless controllers. My favourite proper Wii game was Cars: Race O'Rama, which was so good when it was released ...

For this assignment, I will be looking at a general sound problem as well as a music problem. My sound problem comes from Grand Theft Auto V. Graphics-wise, it is meant to be one of the most realistic games in history, but when you hear some of the sounds that male NPCs make when you kill them with one punch, it really isn't. If you've followed my blog for a little while, you already know how much I've criticized the 3rd sound in the video below. It's meant to be made when the guy gets murdered. I scrolled down to use some qualitative research and see what people thought about these sounds but the comments were just full of people saying which one was their favourite because of how hilariously bad it is. However, I did get an answer at home. When I asked a family member what they thought of the 3rd sound, they said it sounded more like the guy had got his finger trapped in a door. Other than that, I knew it was down to me because this appears to be one of those prob...

Research Techniques Primary research is when you go out to collect people's feedback about something you've come up with. Ways to conduct this include conducting surveys both online and in the street. Sometimes just observing can get you the results you need. For example, you can check to see what types of games people are buying so you know what type of game to make. Secondary research is looking at existing examples of work from previous projects to get inspiration from your own. Examples of secondary research include looking on search engines like Google and Bing or looking through books and encyclopedias. You could use primary research to analyse a problem in a game by holding a survey to ask what people think about the problem to see how much of a problem it's viewed as. If you have an idea of how to resolve the problem (for example a sound problem) from better examples in other games, you could view them using secondary research to compare the good example with ...

In this blog, we will find examples in video games where sound could be improved. One of my favourite things about video games is the music choices. Usually game developers are very good at using music to set the scene or situation. Usually to tell people it's the same situation, they'll re-use music. For example, in Super Mario 64, they used the racing and sky theme for the clock stage to set in players' minds that you can still expect the same chaos as in the sky stages or racing. As a result of that I wasn't particularly impressed when in Mario Kart 64, they used the same music for Wario Stadium as they did for the Raceway tracks. This means that a quarter of the stages in that game use the Raceway music. I get the similarities that like the Raceways, Wario Stadium is somewhere you'd actually have a race but they're basic kart racing whereas the stadium's more of a dirt bike track. Personally, I think that Nintendo could have looked at inspiration from ...

Exercise 1 The three games I will be analyzing for sound are Super Mario Bros., Bully and Grand Theft Auto V. Most Super Mario games are really good at using sound as information. In the original platform games, the music that plays when you get a star changes from the normal steady level theme to a more rapid theme. This tells the player that they are invincible and that nothing can kill them (apart from falling through a gap), and the increase of speed adds to the player's determination to complete the level quicker now touching Goombas and Koopa Troopas kills them instead of the player. It's such an iconic theme that if it plays in public, people will probably think they're invincible themselves. Also, when you've been dawdling in a level and you're in the last 100 seconds before time's up, a dramatic piece will play to tell you to hurry up and then the level music will play at a faster rate, to try to increase determination to finish the level. In Bull...