Samantha Spreitzer-451

Puns. Anyway, I've finally come up with what I think is a fairly solid idea for my game. It's going to be a sort of spaceship simulation, with the player in a cockpit controlling the speed and direction of a spaceship. The goal will be the fly through a number of targets. Whether there will be more than one level is dependent on how long this takes. I'll also probably have to make the whole cockpit myself (unless I can find a free one not on the Unity asset store) so that might be more or less detailed depending on, again, time. It's partly inspired by Star Trek Bridge Crew , at least in terms of 'sitting down game set in space' I suppose. Below are some of the sketches I did as I was working this out.

Here is an early draft/start to my research paper from last week. Samantha Spreitzer ART 451 Research Paper Draft Virtual Reality and Immersion: the Quest for Balance             The discussion around so-called ‘immersive games’ has been around almost since video games entered the mainstream. As the standard for graphical quality has improved, there is almost an expectation for realism in games, though of course there are still games being made that are stylized more than realistic. The problems, then, can come when a game aims to be more realistic but due to whatever reason (budget, time, or another factor) does not quite get there. This can at times lead to an uncanny valley effect. Usually mentioned specifically for humanoid subjects—though there have been a number of exceptions to this—the uncanny valley refers to something looking mostly realistic, but somehow off if it does not appear entirely reali...

So this past week was a bit of an adventure in, essentially, realizing that I'm going to be using Unity for the development of this game and not Unreal. It took almost a day just to get Unreal installed since the download guides are out of date and the only link on the download page is for PC. No problem, I thought, since I run Windows using Parallels on my Mac. Several hours of downloading later... However, it turns out that it doesn't recognize graphics cards properly like that and the only way to run it like that would be through Bootcamp, which I wanted to avoid and why I use Parallels in the first place. So I uninstalled that, since 20 gigs is not a small amount of space for an unused program. Getting to install it on a Mac was not quite as easy but I eventually figured out I needed to install the Epic Games Launcher first, then install Unreal through that. So I did, and luckily it didn't take quite as long to install this time but it was still long enough that any...