APD - Week 3 - Tinkering

Considering the theme of tinkering I jumped into Unity with no idea what I would be making. I knew I wanted to explore Playmaker some more and see what I could generate in a short time by mixing up things I knew already and things I haven't looked at yet.

I was thinking about the games The Incredible Machine and Mouse Trap, which made me want to make the room the character was in perilous and difficult to explore. I played around with spinning blocks that would shoot the character around the room, however while I was having fun trying to play this game where you had to walk back and forth through these spinning blocks I couldn't quite figure out what the 'game' of it was. I added in the spinning camera and asked a few others in the class to play and I noticed they were more interested in the hypnotic element of just watching it as everything span around. I then removed the character and exported a screen recording out to make a looping video. I hadn't thought about creating these kinds of videos in Unity before and am really excited to explore it further.

Updated write up:

Method

My intention for this week’s theme is to make a game level in Unity where the room is dangerous for the player and difficult to explore.

Context

The Incredible Machine and Mouse Trap are games that include little machines that are fun to play around with, The Incredible Machine being great for playing around with tools in a sandbox style environment, and I had a lot of fun as a child setting off the traps in the board game Mouse Trap.

Response

I began creating a room full of spinning objects and throwing a character into it. I was thinking about the spinning discs that shoot Hot Wheels cars on tracks at high speeds. I was able to make these spinning discs sort of work but I couldn’t really find anything compelling about them. I then added in spinning pillars and made a little game where the player characters had to get through them while they’re pummelling them. It was fun but I just found again that I couldn’t make this compelling or fun for more than twenty seconds. I added in more challenges for the player, such as the camera spinning around, but still it didn’t feel fun. I removed the character and had the project playing while I watched it and I noticed Yao standing behind me watching this spinning, looping video with captivation. I made a screen recording of this loop, as it is interesting to watch.

This week I also purchased the PlayStation 4 game creation game Dreams, but had a really difficult time creating anything in it. I would like to revisit Dreams at some point but this week I let myself down with this response.