Week 3: The Shapes Applet and My first Game Review
Hanan and I were working on putting the finishing touches on our first technical paper. It was tough because Hanan and I have no experience writing technical papers so we were a little in the dark about what it should include. Dr. Barnes and Eve had no particular format in mind for the paper. They both mentioned that if a programmer were to read our paper, then they should be able to execute the cube applet project step by step. So here is our first technical paper and hopefully it has all the details that a programmer would need to know.
For the shapes applet Hanan was assigned to find out how to do the drag and drop operations while I try to figure out how to render a 3D sphere and a pyramid to the canvas since we already know how to render a 3D cube. I have found a lot of online resources and tutorials on how to render the 3D figures. The NeHe productions website was a very useful tool as to what direction I should go with the 3D graphics code. Since I am working with LWJGL (Light Weight Java Gaming Library) to render the 3D figures, I had to make some adjustments to the code, but the concept behind the code was the same. The process of rendering the pyramid was very similar to that of rendering the cube. The tricky part was rendering the sphere to the canvas. Even though rendering the shapes were a little of a challenge, I was excited when I came to the realization that I am learning how to do 3D graphics in Java and LWJGL! Maybe working on the dance tool won't be so scary at all.
This week for presentations, we are working on our game review. I am so excited because I want to base my game review on Kingdom Hearts which is the reason why I bought a Playstation II in the first place. For those who have never heard of the game, it is a single player RPG game created by Disney and SquareSoft. To learn more about the game, click here. After game reviews, Dr. Barnes gave us a few pointers on how to do a game review from a game designer perspective such as the mechanics behind the game, what type of audience is the game targeting, etc. By giving these tips, it allows us to think more about the games that we are designing.
Besides the game review, my presentation also includes the research paper title “Serious Video Game Effectiveness”. The paper discusses what factors make a serious game an effective learning tool. It also includes information about my role in our next assignment which is the shapes applet. To see this week's presentation, click here.