I never considered myself as a big-time gamer. I didn’t really play a whole lot of games growing up, but game creation has always been appealing to me. I am a CS major who is into the XR (VR/AR) space, so I’ve have years of exposure to Unity. Even though I learned Unity just so I can do VR/AR creation, Unity is essentially a game engine, so I found myself immersed into the game creation realm and started venturing some game creation from there, and that started my love for game design/engineering.
I’ve been wanting to take this class because making games is one aspect in the broad field of CS that never ceases to entice me and makes me stay curious. However, I never really created any grand games – I’ve only created (broken…) simple FPS games or (again, broken…) simple puzzle games. I never learned any formal “game development” – both on the fundamentals and the technical ends, and I was dying to learn more about game creation and actually making some cool games myself! After this class, I would say that it exceeded my prior expectations on both ends. I would even go on to say that this is my favorite CS class I’ve taken at Stanford (and I’ve taken a lot of CS classes)!
For the fundamentals, I think the teaching staff (Christina and all amazing TAs) did a great job covering all the aspects of game development. I love the design of an entirely analog P1 game leading on to potentially technical P2 game. This not only allows CS students like me to actually dive deep into the computer engineering aspects of games eventually, but it also allows all of us to start creating a game from ground up without having to add in any extravagant coding/engineering aspects that might take away the pure gameplay core creation itself. P1 really allows me to tie in all class concepts well and execute them into a working game. In a lot of classes, I feel like tying in class concepts is a requirement that I have to force myself to follow or even make up some bits here and there, but this class, tying in class concepts in game creation is so natural and all the dots connect. Later on, using these already built fundamentals, I delved into my area – Unity C# coding – and created a game using my expertise and my newly learnt game creation course concepts.
I think I got lucky with both my P1 and P2 groups. I kind of know all my group mates for P1, and we worked perfectly since all our niche expertise is only a bit similar while perfectly complements each other. For P2, I was pretty nervous coming in the project without knowing who I would get paired with, but I really wanted to create a complete and polished game so I chose the “create a complete/published game” option in the form. And luckily, I got paired into such a high-achieving team that strives to do everything more than what the course is asking. Throughout this process, I learned so much about group work as well as the technical aspects of working as a team (namely GitHub haha).
Overall, I LOVED this class. This class is one class I would go around and ADVOCATE for and urge people to take! I just wanted to say a huge huge thank you to Christina and all the TAs again. You really made this class magical.
