Blog Post 5 GameMaker Game

For my final project, I decided to make a game with my partner, Tony Lam, using game maker studios. At first, I thought this would be a simple task, but I was wrong. There are so many aspects to game design that we had to consider while writing this game. For instance, we had to come up with a story, game play mechanic that will compliment the story, and sprite pictures that go along with the story too. Not only this, it is hard to share the program on game maker. What I mean by this is that, it is not as easy to transfer my program to Tony so that he can edit the program at the same time. Basically, this transferring of program is not like what Tony or I are used to when we program in Java or C++. There's a feature called Github that allows us to share code and we can see the changes the other person made on the code. In game maker studios, there is no feature like this. Anyways, enough about the technical aspect of game maker that I have experienced.

                The game Tony and I wrote is about an person who was experimented on in order to improve his combat capabilities. In order to do this, he battles against zombies that are cake monsters. The game play is like binding of Isaac where movement and fighting is in a twin stick shooter style (move with w a s d keys and attack with the directional keys). Overall, the game came out decent, but I would have like to have a little more time to work on it, in order to improve it. One of the ways to improve it can be to improve the art work for the game. Neither Tony nor I am an artist so this part was a hard for us to handle since we both are programmers. Luckily, Tony came up with some pretty good sprites despite being a beginner.

Link to game: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cvcbl3iq4hxa3k9/FqdUZZ9HjK

Blog Post 4 Official Game that gives you 10 extra years of life

                Jane McGonigal talk on her game that can give us 10 extra years of life is one of the most interesting talks I have ever listened to. I have not thought of games the way she has described for years. With all the talk from people around me saying that games are a waste of time or that they would not play games because there are better things to do, such as do more school work and not play, I started to lose my reason for playing games. I felt that in order to keep up in life with others, I had to prevent myself from playing games. Mrs. McGonigal argues otherwise saying that games are a good way for you to stay happy. The reason why I thought this was interesting is that when I stopped playing games as often in order to keep up in my college work, I started to slowly feel more and more depressed. Depressed that I have to work all week long programming and not spend it playing games with my friends or loved ones. This is wrong, and I should make time to play games. According to Mrs. McGonigal, games can help you increase your life span by increasing your physical, mental, emotional, and social resilience. I agree with this because recently, I spent some time playing Super Mario 3D on the Wii U with my friends. This game pretty much increase all of my resilience(physical, mental, emotional, and social) as it made me jump up in joy with my friends as we worked together to overcome hard obstacles in the Mario game. Thanks to Mrs. McGonigal, I will not think of games as such a waste of time anymore, but use it as a medium to make me more happier. This way I can make it so I am not stress out as much and can continue to work hard towards my college degree and feel super better.