Monday 16 December 2019

Culture

Review of work

Culture Mission


For my culture mission I worked with Zoe and Lusin and our topic for this was to discuss about Personal Data Tracking. We followed the same format like on previous project by each of us picking and discussing a topic on Personal Data Tracking. Personal Data Tracking covered how multinational companies or applications they design get most of our personal information after we consent to their terms and conditions to the website to be able to use it.

Zoe was to mostly find information on how applications such as Google Maps, the Health app on the Apple iPhone tracks your physical health and movement and the screen time feature which shows how much time you spend on your phone . What she found out was that many of these do ask for permission now thanks to the Data Protection Act 2018. She used her iPhone to show how these applications track you.

I myself focused on how our data was recovered first. I started to explain about the Data Protection Act 2018 or GDPR which set guidelines to companies and personal data as most information had to be taken online and the user must accept terms and conditions first. I had to discuss cookies and how it benefits companies in collecting and selling personal data to "help" supposedly the user into promoting things they previously or commonly search. I also talked about the advantages and disadvantages of Personal Data Tracking how it does help with daily life things but also gives an insight of the dangers of ho your giving your personal data too.

Lusin talked about what kind of things can be taken up and then collected by anyone such as bank records, IP address, medical records or even personal interests. She covered the good and bad behaviours of Personal Data Tracking. So for the good behaviours she talked about Spyzie and how it was helpful towards her kids as it would track where they would be if they used their phones and she can access their browser.







Methodology

Methodology
Process
For the process of our video myself,Justin and Ava set up to meet in D030 in the lecture room to record our video there as there was equipment in the room (microphones and a projector board). We then talked about how we would lay out our video by first giving an insight on what our topic for the mapping was to be. We decided to choose a road trip documentary called an Idiot Abroad which focused on a comedian named Karl Pinklington who was to visit the seven wonders of the world and document is visits. We decided to treat the video like a late show interview as theses shows were perfect as they would cover details but not too much which was good as our video was to be 5 mins long quick and detailed. I myself was to be the host and ask the questions; Justin and Ava were to be the ones who created the story map using the website StoryMap Knightlab. Justin and myself started first talking about what he used to create the Storymap, what the Storymap was based on or talked about and how they felt about their work. We then passed on to Ava where she discussed and showed off our Storymap and the design of it. We used Justin's phone to record the whole video, we didn't take different videos each time we made a mistake so that it would be easier while editing just to find the certain points. We used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit our video and took most of our background noises as Mp4.

Purpose
The purpose of our work was to show off how the video was made, how the video would relate to the topic we pick and show team-work. Our process mainly came from our video while making it as we tried to tackle obstacles that would make the video longer and that's not what we were aiming for as we needed to be a maximum of 5 mins. The purpose was not to dicuss mapping but rather make a video that would demonstrate vividly "What Mapping is"? also show off your editing in the video to demonstrate the use of audio , narration and a back track. What I had to watch out for mostly in this was time management as it would effect the overall editing and from the previous two projects that is what affected me the most in my work. Of course the main thing was to show off the storymap of An Idiot Abroad and give details on season 1 of the show understand how the map works and each feature like the text box, where to add media and the design of the map.

Reflection
After finishing off our video I was really happy how it turned out there were a few errors such as misplacement of audio we had to fix but couldn't cause of time-wise. I felt like a gained more experience in editing on Premiere Pro and how to actually edit a video. I was happy with how we performed as a team myself, Justin and Ava as we all felt that the video was able to give an understanding of mapping. Although we had top pass the maximum time of the video 5 mins and it became a 7 min as we had to add more clips in to show off the storymap even longer. The storymap I was most proud of as it showed off good information and background to the show An Idiot Abroad which was the goal of the project.





Wednesday 27 November 2019

Creativity

Review of work

Creative Mission

Process

For this mission I am in group with Eoghan and Joe. We decided on doing the gaming aspect of this mission as we have an interest in gaming.
My goals for this mission is to work as a group, create a game and to demonstrate our research on our power point on the aspects of gaming.

As a group we hope to produce a functional game that shows off what developers have to go through to make a game. Show off the creative side of it as well as the actions/code that makes the game function. We hope to show off our research in a power point that gets the points across in our own words in a understandable way.
We are using a game maker website called Flowlab. We will create the game on this website using its provided tools. I don't have much knowledge of this website but I will watch videos on YouTube and look up posts on google about how to set up the actions. For my research I used a lot of my own knowledge of gaming from being interested in it since I was young, and I also used Google to help with anything I'm was not sure of. I also relied on the others in the group for anything I'm was not sure of for the website or points I used for my research. For our presentation we used Microsoft office PowerPoint to create our slides on our research, then at the end show off the game and how we made it, then present it in class.
After the mission is finished:
               
 Overall I am very happy with how our mission turned out. We worked great as a group and helped each other out when it was needed. The PowerPoint went well. We all had our own points in it. The game turned out perfect. After a lot of trial and error with the actions of the game, it eventually turned out the way we wanted. We all contributed to the making of the game. The only thing that I would of changed was that we focused more on the PowerPoint then showing off the game. We didn't get to show off how we made the game or any actions. However, we did get to show the game level off... even though Joe died straight away. I am very happy with how everything went. 

Product

We went about by brainstorming ideas of the game first of all by looking at different features or avatars that Flowlab uses to give us an idea of how we would layout our game. On the first day of brainstorming we decided to rather meet together at the end of the day in the library and discuss the objectives, characters, actions , and ending; these are the key features in making a game work.

Myself, Joe and Eoghan gave ourselves each a role in the making of this project, I was to give the layout of the game, create the background and add the characters in and the barriers. Joe was to add any actions, movement and give the barriers( enemies ) the worms a feature that if you hit them you would instantly restart the game. Eoghan would try out the game and change any errors or add improvements onto the game.


 For the PowerPoint, we all picked a topic based on gaming for our presentation. Eoghan focused on how gaming has changed Past to Now(how consoles have been improved), Target Audience and difference to child and adult friendly games. I myself talked about the barriers(enemies) that prevent you from finishing the objective, the soundtrack that makes the game more entertaining and what type our game solely was a 6 bit game. Finally Joe talked about the different genres in games e.g. shooter,horror, the graphics that help improve the games performance and style giving it an aesthetic look and the types of gaming platforms such as the PlayStation and Xbox. 




Reflection


To reflect on anything during the evaluation and review we got from Shaun would be Time Management; we were told that we passed the 8 min mark given to each presentation as we had a good amount of slides to present and described each slide with a little of our own opinions to the topic we each had to present about Gaming. For my next presentation I would have my group and I  first read over our topics in our next project just to get a good understanding of it and present it more formally rather than looking at the board and reading from there.Overall the game that we designed had performed well, we didn't get to show off the game in the end as we took too long presenting our presentation. The game we created had all its key features to make up a game its objective, characters, enemies(barriers), end goal, and interact-able environment. The soundtrack and whole background of the game makes the game more aesthetically pleasing and more entertaining to play. Flowlab provided everything for us to design the game and I would really recommend it for designing projects.The group I had with Joe and Eoghan was well received and we all knew each other before we started college so we were able to communicate daily through Messenger of any ideas or improvements that could help the game perform really well. We also had experience in using Flowlab as we previously attended a PLC in Dunboyne. Although the game performs really well and we completed our tasks I felt like more brainstorming could've been put into the theme of the game as "an apple" as the main character seems really simple and no thought into it. For the enemies for our game were designed to look like worms; unfortunately we weren't able to make them move which would've made the game more like a retro game like Mario and the Goombas.