Final Reflection

CS247G is a class I originally intended on taking my Junior year, but I got scared out of HCI after taking CS147 that same fall. This whole year I’ve felt so sad that I got to join the Stanford game development/HCI scene kind of late, but this class felt like the perfect end cap to my time in school.

P1 was relatively tame, I think I learned a lot from CS377G on how to make an analog game, and about what kinds of things would be easy/hard to balance. I spent a lot of time on P1 making sure we didn’t overscope our game because of my disastrous P2 in CS377G. I think the end result of our P1 was really great, and I had a blast playing it.

For context, on that 377G project, I picked an ambitious technical scope and then was entirely unable to execute on the narrative aspect, and did (deservedly) poorly. My biggest goal on this P2 was to not overscope, and properly complete the assignment. I was lucky enough to get put into a group with some friends of mine from outside of CS (specifically theater), they all have some coding experience, and we’ve worked together on shows in the past. Of the group I was the only one with an extensive background in Unity due to my job experience, so when I suggested we do a fully 3D game “how bad could it be” they trusted me and agreed. So much for not overscoping! 

With all of that being said, I really wanted to work on a project where I could push myself, so 3D is where we went! I learned a ton on this project, I learned how to use Blender, how to properly make an animation state machine for a character, and many more small technical skills. I think the most fun part of the project was helping my groupmates learn Unity though, and designing the project around our different skillsets. Because I had thrown my friends into the deep end with a 3D game, I got to code a lot of interesting modular systems that could abstract away some of Unity’s oddities to put content together without needing to program. To this end, we made a complex puzzle and interactable system where entire puzzles and interactions with cause and effect, could be created without editing any scripts. I also got lucky that my teammates all picked up Unity very quickly.

Unlike my P2 in CS377G though, I was not at it alone, I would say that we rose to the occasion, actually completing the game, with our entire narrative, and even most of our vastly overscoped technical goals realized. I’m incredibly proud of what we put together. This game is the last assignment I’m submitting as a part of my Stanford career, and I could not be happier with the end result.