Project update

I started this project with something very different in mind. I kind of thought we would create an open world game with idle images for each character. However our team decided on a 2d 8bit style game.

I do believe we managed our project well, though obviously if we all had the game development tech stack from the get-go things might have gone by faster. I did doubt my ability to complete the project many times due to the wonderful event of our son being born, but managed through it with the help of my teammates.

Getting this project up and hosted publicly would be the first step to get some good info on gameplay and required modifications. I do hope we can stick together as a team to further develop this game even after the school quarter ends.

Technologies

In all my coding ventures I’ve come to appreciate GitHub the most. Version control, online editing capabilities, clean UI, … and most critical of all in this project, teamwork support. GitHub supports creating rules for security, pull requests, versioning, and more which ensure clean long asynchronous development.

I really wish I had unity/GitHub in my tech stack, but we’re working on that all now. I’d love to create similar games to the one we have in the future.

On clean code

I took the opportunity to read through some of Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. There was a lot of discussion on different perspectives regarding “clean code”. Some mentioned that clean code is “enjoyable” and “pleasant to look at” while others focused on readability and how fast a new developer could understand what the code does. Another perspective was that clean code means minimum duplication and entities, while ensuring objects and functions clearly do only one thing instead of several.

Following that reading, as an actionable decision I will try to stick to better naming conventions and try to make a key for myself at the top of my code. I sometimes am guilty of getting lost in using verbs or switching to snake case. What I definitely now want to avoid is having functions do more than one clearly named task. I sometimes find myself rereading my functions to understand what they do.

Finishing version 0.0.2

At this point, with the end of the first quarter of our capstone project, we have submitted version 0.0.2.

In this version, we’ve worked on getting a small working version of our app up and running. Currently, it manages only a few locations like “bakery” with clear objects and NPCs. One thing I loved about v0.0.1 was one of our team members minor additions like the an NPC who, upon asking questions regarding unknown objects reacts like this: “he chuckles uncomfortably. I have no idea what you’re talking about…”. It gave nice creepy vibes, but was deprecated to my great disappointment.

As of now, we’ve managed to get left-to-right languages working fine, but need a font-getter to fix the display of right-to-left languages like Mandarin and Arabic. That will be something to fix in the next version.

Senior project: LIVE

After much contemplation, agonizing, and practicing patience (aka: being divided into assigned teams) I ended up becoming part of the Language Immersion Virtual Environment (LIVE) project.

The final goal of our project: to design a virtual, AI-enhanced game environment for immersive language learning. After all, not many of us can experience actual immersion learning due to associated costs and risks of traveling to a foreign country just to learn a new language. Right now, I’m super excited to see what the final result of this will be. Just 9 months to go.

So far, we’ve worked on a design document where we defined functional requirements for our project and assigned each to a team member with more experience in that area. We have a barebones game down thanks to a skilled Unity-practicing team member and are working on the very complex Task Management System. I’m responsible for the localization aspect and making sure locations, NPC’s, players, and objects read with the target language while observing correct form.

I’ll keep y’all updated on how that goes.

Introduction

Hi all!

This is Zoha, a senior student at OSU majoring in CS with an applied option of Game Development. I’m from the Bay Area, and as is usual for we Bay-Areans, love the ocean. I could talk for hours about my experiences under the sea (scuba diving!) but this isn’t the blog for that.

What really got me into Computer Science was my personality of problem-solving. As a kid, I loved engaging in mental puzzles and math. Engineering may have been the obvious choice, but choosing a career-path was a big dilemma for me. I really wanted to do something meaningful for others and initially was set to become a doctor. After some more research, traveling, and soul-searching, I decided that the way I wanted to contribute to my world was by working for equitable access to information and education.

I transferred to OSU in 2022 and got my first job in software development starting 2024. Alongside, I’ve had the honor of being a TA at OSU for 3 quarters in Ethics in CS and Intro to Databases.

I’m really excited about the senior project we will be working on starting this quarter. Some of the projects I’m interested in, in order: 

If you’re interested in working on/researching similar topics, send me an email at zoha.akbarzadeh@gmail.com. I’d love to connect!