Hello again readers!
Welcome back to my blog. My final term at OSU is now underway and I am back with some exciting news and updates. As I described in my first blog post, video games were a huge influence in inspiring me to pursue a degree in computer science and birthed my interest in programming. So this week when our groups were assigned along with our respective projects, I was feeling very thankful and happy to see that my group is responsible for creating a video game! Even before being assigned this ideal project, I was glad to see that there were several video game projects listed for us students to choose from. But now it’s official, this term I will be creating a video game along with my team members.
The type of game we have been assigned to create is described as an Escape Room. There are several specifications we have been given that will be required but all implementation details are being left to us. This detail is what inspired me to choose the title for this blog post. The “cornerstone” of our project is going to be deciding upon which engine to move forward with. Right now we are weighing the pros and cons between two popular and widely used game engines, Unity and Unreal Engine. They each have their own areas where they shine so it seems difficult to compare the two but we do know that either of them would be capable of implementing our ideas for this game. I personally lean more towards Unreal Engine simply for the fact that I have more experience with it than with Unity, which I have never used. About two years ago I took a Udemy course on creating games in Unreal Engine and got through a decent portion of the class. This gave me some familiarity with the Engine. Secondly, Unreal uses C++ while Unity uses C#. I’ve been using C++ since my very first class at OSU and I am much more familiar with it than with C#. Still, I’m not too worried about which engine we decide to more forward with as I am confident in myself and that my team and I can meet the challenge, and if we do decide to go with Unity it will only mean more experience. Below is listed the course that I took on Unreal Engine.
https://www.udemy.com/course/unrealcourse/
As I mentioned above, I have taken some courses outside of OSU related to making games. You might already suspect that this is my dream job, and you would be right. Throughout my time at OSU I have applied several times to various game companies that had openings listed and have done much self study as well. I found the Udemy course on Unreal Engine to be very interesting, as well as reading about various design patterns that are widely used in game development. This last topic about patterns directly helped me in a previous project where my team created the board game Clue in a virtual form. During that project, we used the State pattern to easily write code for different “states” that the game could be in such as pause, main menu, cards screen, and others. Below is a site I found loaded with useful content, including but not limited to design patterns.
https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns/
It is still early in the term but I already feel excited, motivated, and confident to take this project on. I think the fact that I was assigned to my first choice of all the projects is definitely adding to those feelings. Additionally, I have played Escape Room video games in the past and even partially created on in the Udemy course I mentioned above. The prior time spent playing Escape Room games is giving me lots of ideas for fun features we could possibly implement. We have all agreed however, to first lay down the bare requirements and meet the specifications given to us before adding anything fancy. I am looking forward to having fun while working on this challenging project and I think it is the perfect way to end my time at OSU. Dreaming of creating a game is what pushed me to programming in the first place, and now I am doing just that as my final project.
Stay tuned for more updates readers!
