Tag Archives: Masters

Student Blogs

Presentation time

As I’ve been following Mia Zamora’s class, it’s now my turn to do take over the class for parts of tomorrow and present my thesis.

My thesis will focus on Participatory culture within game developement and gaming communities. I will present my practical projec,t the Twine game I’ve been blogging about, my positive and negative experiences about it and how I connect it to participatory culture. I will also talk about what my plans is for the rest of my master program, what I plan to do and how to go about it.

I hope to get a fruitful discussion going in class about participatory culture, the reading I assigned for them (chapte 5 of Participatory culture in a networked ers and a video with Henry Jenkins), and any input they might have on the topic.


Student Blogs

Blogging about Master #3

Whoah. It’s been a while huh? Sorry about that.
A small update here for you.
I’ve worked more on twine and the Harlowe format, not only working on the story I’ve showed you a screenshot of last time, but a seperate oneto test more of the coding and on my actual game that will be my finished Twine game.

For the game, I’ve made a timeline of how I want the story to go and what I want to be able to do in the game.

thoughtmap1

thoughtmap2(Illustrations: My thoughts on how the game should proceed)

Twine has a page where they have documentation on the Harlowe format. It’s very useful and helps a lot with smaller problems that I do not need to ask in the Q&A forum for.

I am also trying to be more active in the community that I find around Twine. They have an official Q&A forum that I’ve now asked a question at (currently waiting for an answer). They seem active there so I hope I get some feedback there soon. I will also go looking for more games made in twine and try to find out where twine developers tend to be. What website do they prefer to use? Do they talk in forums a lot? Where do they publish their twine games? These are questions I am asking myself.

Besides working on the game, I’m also looking for books & articles specifically relating to participation culture. Mia Zamora has many good resources on her webside for the DIKULT 303 course.  Jenkins is an author I will be using a lot from as he is very relevant to the theories I need.

 


Student Blogs

Blogging about Master #2

Giving you guys an update for my Masters.

I am currently still working in Twine. It’s slowly but surely going forward.
Twine has 3 main story formats you can use when coding your story. coding in them are slightly different and what the game will look like will also change depending on what you use. I am going with the defauls Harlow format.

There are a few youtubers that do tutorials for Twine. The one I found that I liked the most was Don Cox . I am currently working my way through his tutorials to learn how to use certain techniques  such as adding a header and footer to the story.

Twinetest_headerfooter

Here I’v eadded the real time in the header as an example. We will see if I am going to implement the header and footer in the game I am making or not.

Speaking of the game itself; I have also worked on the story of the game.
I did this as I made a high concept for the Twine game. I will base it off a Dungeons and Dragons Campaign I participated in. My plan is to implement both an exploration element and a combat element, though in story format. As D&D is about collaberative storytelling, I felt it worked well with Twine as a game engine.

My plan is to have the first version of the protoype for the game ready in 2-3 weeks. At the very least, make it playable even if all the graphics aren’t ready yet by then. I do have some trouble with how to implement the CCS in the Harlowe format on twine, but I hope to fix that soon. Twine has a Q&A site where I can ask questions if I get stuck and tutorials does not work.

Twine also has a Twitter that I can interact with.

I’ll update you guys on how it goes later in the week 🙂


Student Blogs

Blogging about Masters #1

Hello again. I’ll try to blog about my masters project at least once a week.  We’ll see how that goes.

What is my project about?

My masters is in Digital Culture. I will be doing a partly practical project and partly theoretical. As my theme is participation culture around game engines, I want to also use these game engines for myself and participate in the culture around these engines.

The game engines I’ve chosen is Twine, Construct 2 & Unity. As I’ve only got one year to do this project, the games themselves will not be very long, but I felt 2 Game engines were to few.

What have I done so far?

Most of what I’ve done so far has been preperation and setup. as such, I don’t have too much to say for now.  I’ve been setting up and organised my notes as well as downloaded the relevant programs and game engines.

I’ve also gathered texts and books by authors I find interesting and feel is relevant for my project. this is also why I participate in #resnetsem on twitter and Mia Zamora’s class.

Twine is the firss engine I’m working on and the one I will be wocising on for the next few weeks.  I’ve already started trying the game engine out.  Twine is used for text adventures and I can use HTML and CSS to edit and code the project.  So far I’ve been trying it out a little to check it’s functionality and it’s restrictions as well as looking at the official Q&A forum and tutorials online.

twinetestgame_3.PNGInterface in Twine 2.1.3 online version