After Class

Well, the semester has come to a close and I've just finished my last class session with CS-108. It was nothing like what I thought it would be, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Being a CS major and the class being called CS-108 (I didn't know it was also called Art-108), I was expecting the focus to be a lot more on programming than things like MDA or "guess who's theory!," but I think that it was good to learn those kinds of things. I still plan to go towards Game Design as a programmer and leave the creative work to the designers, but I'm a lot more confidant with my own ideas and think one day I might try to design my own game, or at least pitch an idea or give feedback without feeling like I have no idea what I'm saying. The course itself was harder than I expected, but that was mostly due to my own forgetfulness and not realizing when due dates were, but all in all I most definitely enjoyed the class, especially the gamemaker project, it was a lot less stressful than the final project.

 I plan to visit the Game Dev club next semester, especially now that I have a 6-7:15 class on Thursdays, and the main thing keeping me from going was the time, since i live over an hour from school and would have had to stay an extra 7 hours at school or 2 extra hours driving to get to it. Finally, I would like to thank professor Morgan for making this a fun class (although I think he forgot about game of the month after the first month)

Final Project

The final project was definitely one of the more interesting things we've done all year, but I'm not sure that's a good thing. The idea I started out with was a rougelike dungeon crawler in which the player would have to make it through a certain number of random floors until they reached the boss. This proved to be a surprisingly difficult task, as Unity (which I decided to use for the project so that I could get some experience using it) makes it fairly easy to randomly generate a single room, but has no easy way to store those rooms so that the player would be able to move between them without having to generate them all over again. I got it to work by making a Room object that had a game-object that was the parent of all the tiles in that room.

But it seems it wasn't meant to be, as I encountered a major bug in Unity that forced me to restart from the alpha code that was stored on my desktop, where the room storage wasn't quite right, and then, as soon as I got it working again, I broke it while adding the level transitions, so I had to settle for a game where the player has to survive through as many rooms as they can.

In the end, although  I'm certainly not too pleased with the outcome, I think the experience was very helpful, as I now know a lot more about Unity, and will be much more prepared for the next time I attempt such a project.