Courtney McGilp

One of the most talked about problems associated with children’s media in the modern day is how much people want to invade their entertainment with media that is not designed with their mental growth in mind. Media for young children has to be carefully handled helping them grow and become outstanding members of society. This project was designed to navigate the world of designing animation for young children and avoiding the traps that these poor types of media utilise.

Outside of the scope of the audience, this animation was an excellent subject matter for learning how to showcase personality and life with just the eyes and body expressions of the character. This project had me breaking my character rigs in many interesting ways to display fun and interesting shots throughout my animation.

This dissertation was an exploration on how succesful it would be to teach the 26 letters of the english alphabet to non-bsl learners in a serious game format. As the popularity of language-based games like Duolinguo continue, despite the limitations of learning a spoken word language exclusively visually. As BSL is a visual based language, how useful would a serious game about learning BSL work out both in the short and long term?

This project provided a typing-game with a BSL theme, and the results from how audiences behave before, during, and after the game was tracked to see how succesful it was at being a successful supportive learning resource.

The typing game was made in 2D Unity with a gameplay loop taking influences from Typing of the Dead, and carnival shooting galleries with a piroritiy on forcing the participant to repeatidly have the same signs being shown to try and make the participant convert the knowledge they have aquired here into long-term reachable memory they could perform when it comes to using the signs afterwords.

To find the results participants were interviewed at three different stages, to judge how they would perform:

• Before playing the serious game
• just after playing the serious game
• two weeks after playing the serious game

The results aquired from this dissertation saw that participants were succesfully able to recall most of what they were learning to sign, with most of the confusion coming from signs that did look similar to each other, or just generally forgetting everything about the sign.

As a challenge to my skills as a programmer, Into the Minotaur’s Maze was a challenge to design something that falls out of the convention of the standard VR experience. Utilising a computer monitor as an alternate character, this game puts the VR player in a game of cat-and-mouse with the monitor player in an exciting game of trying to outsmart the other player.

This game took inspiration by Scotland Yard, and was created to fairly support a fair yet balanced horror experience.

The gameplay loop for this experience involves the VR player acting as a defenseless human wandering a small maze. The monitor player acting as the Minotaur. Should the VR player successfully visit every space of the maze they win, if the Minotaur enters the same space as the Vr player the Minotaur wins.

Outside of programming, this project featured developments of my 3D animation skills, with the minotaur having numerous different unique animation sequences depending on how the players behave inside of the game.