Final Class Reflection – Victor

Hi there! To whoever may be reading this, thank you! Whether you’re a TA, Christina, a classmate, or even a random netizen, thank you for interacting with such a fun part of my life 🙂

CS247G has been one of my favorite experiences, and I’ll forever keep it as a fond memory of my college days. Christina, thank you so much for the wonderful, fun, quirky, and comfortable lectures! I always enjoyed my time in class. Dear Nina, Woof! You’re so sweet hahaha. Dear TA’s, I really enjoyed how supportive you all were, and your dedication to the class and our games! You guys fostered this collective comfortable and cozy, but still very productive environment that I really enjoyed. Dear Amy, thank you so much for being my Section Lead as well as my TA,  your dedication to the class and to everyone is actually unreal. Section has been great, and I appreciate all that you’ve done for me and my team! Dear classmates, I appreciate all the fun interactions we’ve had in class! I loved the storytelling sessions(bound to a demon + multiversal travel?), the game concept ideations(underwater dating sim mmorpg?), trying out your games, having you try out my game, and so much more!

Before taking this class, I’ve been an enjoyer of both making and playing games! My elementary and middle school days were filled with rushing home to keep making games on Scratch. This class really brought back those memories, and how I much I enjoyed making games back then. But now, I’ve learned so much more! I have all my sketchnotes, critical plays, and mindmaps to look back on. Definitely thought lots about MDA, Onboarding, and Accessibility when developing my team’s second game. We definitely focused on the game’s aesthetic appeal, and were okay with prioritizing mechanics less. This meant our movement + camera system still had some minor bounding box and collision difficulties, but the narrative was deep and had lots of foreshadowing. The different controls are spaced through the initial few minutes, and are limited to different rooms. The tutorial is blended into the beginning of the game, starting with WASD. We then guide the player to press E to talk to someone, and E again to interaction with the rooms, picking up their keycard in order to leave. Sprinting is only taught later. The most challenging part of this class for me this quarter is time management, since the workload isn’t negligible. It’s a good workload, but it required me to stay on top of things. I grew lots, and I really enjoyed working with my teams this quarter. Next time, I’ll aiming for bigger and better! This definitely won’t be the last time I do some game dev. Thank you again everyone! I really appreciate all of you, and feel free to find me on instagram at @victor36.ig

Signing Off,

Victor o/