Throughout this class, because of the creation of my project, I have learned how to use game engines to create something. Considering that the game is not done yet, from the amount of time I have put into building something, I still created something to the point that you know it’s a game. Using at least the Godot engine, I was able to create something similar to the old Atari game, Asteroid, and although things were still being worked on, controls, enemies, projectiles, score screen, menu, collisions, a game over screen was completed. I was nearly done with a game and the fact that I built that from hours and hours of learning everything from scratch seemed very fulfilling. Fulfillment to the degree of me not looking at just as a standpoint of my grade, but the accomplishments as an individual building something that isn’t graded based on a rubric like a linear assignment, this was mostly on me, and compared to my partners in my group, I still think I had the visually best as well as the best functioning game when we each did our own individual demonstrations for various game engines. The success I had in the initial works for the class made me reflect a lot on what I’ve been trying to do since I started this program, feeling accomplished when coding, without the endorphin high of a good grade or confetti animation when you press submit on Canvas website before the due date.
I do think that the individual, no holding your hands approach to a capstone class is expected. It’s when you try to combine the fundamentals from the core classes and apply it to a final project but I have to say the principle of that is the what is the strength of this class. It’s neccessary for people to be able to give some breathing room and you go ahead and create something after everything you learned. It was fun and it was very challenging but really made me feel accomplished and gave me a mental booster when I try to attempt to look for a job using this degree in what is not the best job market for this major currently. In terms of weaknesses and opportunities, I do wish there were more projects we could have selected from.
Although I am fine with the project that was taken, perhaps a wider selection would have been better, or at least something that had more of better translations towards our curriculum. For example, this project I did, consisted of languages I never used before so we learned everything from scratch, I saw selections that used languages we had maybe one class for or even none so there would be no fundamental practice for leading us to have to a smaller selection of final projects.
Leave a Reply