Here we go, final (required) blog post for the Capstone course! I can’t believe how quickly this quarter passed. I’ve been talking to my therapist quite a bit about this class (mental health is important, y’all!) and apparently, she thinks I’ve been in this state that she called “the edge of overwhelm” for the last few weeks. I feel that’s an understatement (haha). I’m very confident that we’ll complete all our main goals for this project, but there are a lot of little things we discussed throughout this process that we thought would be cool to have, and I’m a bit disappointed that we might not have time to include all the things we wanted. It’s hard to visualize the game without those little bonuses (like being able to actually grab the items, audio cues for completing each task, etc.) because we talked about it so often, but there’s nothing stopping us from adding fun stuff like that after we’re done with this class! Ryan, Angel, and I briefly joked at the beginning of the course that we’d work together in the future to create some of the other project ideas we had when we were first brainstorming… I know it was just a joke back then, but honestly, now I’m really hoping they’d be open to working together in the future.

I’m really glad Ryan and Angel were my teammates for Hablo Gato. I couldn’t have asked for a better team. It’s been such a fantastic experience working with them. Communication has been so easy – if there were any issues, we were able to get them sorted out right away. It’s been really nice to feel comfortable with reaching out if I’m struggling with something and they’ve been so helpful and supportive throughout this entire process. We’ve been learning together, which I feel is one of the best bonding experiences. Plus, we’ve been meme-posting together, and I think that’s an even better bonding experience! (:P)

Before working on this project (which now has a title – Hablo Gato! [or, the rough translation, “I Speak Cat”]), I wasn’t really sure about my path post-graduation. I entertained the idea of continuing with a bit more schooling via completing the cybersecurity certificate… I’m still interested but I’m still not certain I’ll be satisfied with that in the long run. It would be very useful to learn though, so it is still on the table. When I first started this program, I intended on pursuing a career in game development. That mostly faded into the background over the last few years, especially after I heard some people’s experiences and other events that came to light recently. However, Hablo Gato has been such an entertaining and great experience that I’ve been considering it again – more specifically, VR game development. While I’m not completely sold on it yet, it wouldn’t hurt to add a few more personal game projects to my portfolio and see if I still find it fun. I suppose it could just be that I’m riding the high of the working on my first proper game, but I think it’s worth exploring.

But that’s for future me to worry about! I still have a game to finish working on! I’m really excited to see our final product. I hope it’s everything we’ve hoped for! If we’re not scrambling to complete everything, maybe I’ll come back here to post some pictures, just for closure’s sake…

Seriously, where would I be without Unity Learn. There’s been a fairly detailed introductory lesson (with pictures!!! because that’s the important part) for every project goal I’ve set out to complete so far and I could not be more grateful. I’m sure I would have taken twice as long to figure things out otherwise.

This week’s focus was on creating our game’s menus – not anything terribly complex, but definitely a bit more time consuming than I anticipated. It was a lot of little things that slowed me down though, like figuring out why one button looked pixelated in game view while the others didn’t (scaling and text size difference) or altering the overall sizes of the Canvas areas little by little until I deemed it a decent size. Plus, it’s not even fully completed yet. Even though everything I’ve set up so far is working as expected, I’m still not satisfied with how it looks. I’m going to have to let that be for now though. As Ryan told me, the polish can always come later, and we won’t be adding the UI art until later on anyway.

I knew developing a game takes a good deal of time and effort, but now I have a more accurate idea of how much and just, wow. Solo developers are very dedicated souls. If I didn’t respect the developer for Stardew Valley before, I absolutely do now!