As my last quarter of OSU and my capstone class are coming to an end, there is time for reflection about both what my takeaways from the class are and what can be done to improve the course.
Our project is a 3d escape room challenge game written in Unity. My biggest “success” this quarter was very simple on the surface, it was just exiting a scene and returning to the prior scene at the same location vs. the original spawn location each time the scene loads. Seems really simple right? BUT just like I ran into during my SWE internship, complexity lurks everywhere. The way we decided to implement scene changes and persistence between scenes may not be the most common way to do it. So when I, a person with no game dev experience prior, tries to implement this, I did what everyone does, googled and chatgpt’ed it. The issue is when your general implementation is different than what all the examples are, it forces you dig deeper and learn the material better. I was able to learn a lot about object lifetimes and how Unity instantiates them. It was a real challenge, but I feel like I’m a better dev because of it.
I want to give a review of the class a whole, but disclaimer, this comes from a person that is in a group that had basically free reign to design and build what they wanted to.
- Strengths:
- The openended-ness of our project allowed us to design how we wanted to and choose that technologies that we wanted to
- The wide array of projects that hit a lot of the major future jobs for us (mobile, web, OS concepts, game dev, etc.)
- The ability to choose your own group
- Weaknesses:
- As a post-bacc student, quarters are only 10 weeks and you are into the 2nd week before you get your project assigned, so it leaves less time to dig really deep on things vs. sprinting towards getting the requirements done in time.
- Opportunities
- I think there are additional ways to do a “capstone” like the practical experience program that launched this year for post-bacc students
- There could also be an internship option for credit for those of us who do summer internships in cs related roles
- Threats
- The school requires some sort of practical class to graduate, so I don’t see a threat to the class but with the abrupt change in the SWE job market, I can see enrollments going down, which impacts the number real projects that are available.
Overall, I’m happy with the class due to the project we were assigned and the group that we put together prior to the quarter.
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