I think I finally had a major breakthrough with my Unity project. I’ve spent a lot of the previous weeks working on the room structure and just making it look nice with assets, but this last week I spent almost all of my time on scripting. I started to really put in thought on how to implement my puzzles for the Escape Room and started scripting it out as well. I added the main Game Manager that would hold all the statuses of my puzzles. The most useful video for that was this video on singletons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6cKPfUTrsA

I have completed the first puzzle which would be a weight trigger to solve a puzzle. This turned out easier than I expected once I started watching more youtube videos. I also figured out how to instantiate new objects into the scene when a puzzle is completed. This will be used for creating new objects to be used in other puzzles.

I feel like I’m making really great progress on my room. I think my whole group is doing great on our individual rooms, and soon we will have to come together to work on the overall game manager and flow of the game. I am confident that we are all on target.

Looking back on what I’ve learned during this entire program, I’m really glad that I went through this program. One of the things I am really grateful for, this that I started this program when it was still doing C++ for the intro classes. Honestly it was grueling sometimes but I really did give me a great foundation. Python is ultimately my favorite language so far, but that one was easy to pick up without taking any formal classes (perhaps due to having a foundation in C++??). I picked up Python when I took algos and I’ve pretty much just stuck with it since then.

One of the things that stuck with me the most is that I did 161 and 162 entirely in vim. I had never even touched vscode until after those classes! Learning vim and really sticking with it was an incredible journey. I use vim everyday now. Vscode is my main IDE but I always turn to vim for quick edits. I learned so much using vim and customizing my vim experience, I really enjoyed it. I’m so used to the vim arrows that I have them mapped on a layer on every keyboard that I use.

I know I’ve talked about this before.. but at work I get to work with a lot of apis and building out automations and workflows and it’s a lot of fun. I remember when I was taking Web Dev and Software Engineering 2, I was so confused and did not understand api calls at all or what they do. Now they’re part of my daily 😀

Throughout this program, I’ve had a lot of doubt that I’d be able to get to where I want or if I was really learning stuff or doing it just to do it. Ultimately, I think its up to the user to get the value they want. I could probably easily skate by not even know what I’m doing, but there has to be effort made to understand the material. That being said, I am really happy with my new job and graduating soon 😀 I feel more confident in what I can do and what I’ve learned. I’m confident that this journey has been worth it.

What exactly is coding? I have been tasked with making “coding” more accessible at work by doing “codeless code.” It’s interesting after spending all this time in the OSU program coding that I am thinking about it in a new way. The reason for this is that my manager and I both having coding experience, but the rest of the team does not. In the long term, we want everyone to be able to automate tasks and not have to do manual work that can be done by calling something else to do it. It’s amazing how many apps can actually do this now through a gui. It’s possible to make full formed functions that can be called from other functions that branch into conditional logic. However what I’ve run into now is that I know how I would actually code something in python or something else, but I cannot figure out how to do it through a gui. It requires much more thinking…. at least in my opinion.. I’m glad that I have the working knowledge to actually think through the logic though if I were to actually code it.

At work, I may also have a chance to work with assembly code again. When we discussed a work project to do some low level code to control hardware, I flashed back to when I took Assembly Language and man.. that was a tough class. I’m not certain that I can do it in a professional setting since it’s been a minute since I even took that class, but I think it would be fun to look at the code and just see how everything works. My current job seems like it’s going to a mixture of a lot technical things including coding and hardware stuff, but I’m enjoying it so far.

As for Unity, things are coming along. I’m still stumbling through videos on how to script, but it is very rewarding when a script works the way I want it to. The smallest thing like getting my text popup to work got me super excited. It seems surreal that this quarter is nearly half over? and that I will finally be done with school. Once I’m done with school I hope to play video games again (it’s been on the back burner for a long time with work and school) and I’d also like to finally get into pcb / keyboard design.