October 23, 2012 | Leave a comment Block 2 – Days 11 & 12 Oh, hi again! I’ve finally picked up the pace with my work on guidance methods in level design. The document’s approaching a total of 27 pages! That’s with all the pictures and stuff, of course. So, what did I do yesterday? Well, I wrote another two entries in my guide, one on landmarks and one on open doors. It’ll make more sense when you read it, trust me. Other than that, I also noticed a pattern in my descriptions of the methods’ functions. I found that for a lot of them, I was describing the use of patterns, of establishing them and sometimes breaking them in order to draw the attention of the player. As a result, I started looking through the school’s database for some existing research on how we’re affected by regular and irregular patterns. After some searching, I found a research paper called The Encoding of Temporally Irregular and Regular Visual Patterns in the Human Brain. The paper was very scientific in nature, but from what I gathered, they’d researched brain activity when the participants looked at different regular and irregular patterns. I’m going to look at it a bit more, it seemed like it may be useful as a sort of scientific basis for my research. As for today, I finished up the second entry from yesterday and wrote another one. I found that I was a bit low on screenshots from games to use as examples, so I played a bit of Half-Life 2, The Stanley Parable and Portal 2. With an hour or so of playing, I had enough screenshots to document the methods I had been writing about. That’ll be all for today. Until next time! Marcus out.
