Week 9 Reading and Writing

What a hefty two months this has been!
In these short nine weeks I've learned a multitude of skills and facts, both about the process of designing and developing a game as well as about my classmates from college, since they're all writing their own blogs, and we often look at each others' blogs.

My favourite reading was from week 7, developing a princess saving app. I liked it because we took a deep dive "under the hood" of a simple app, a complex app and a videogame (which is an app too, really). 
Also I liked this and wanted to share:

(image taken from week 7 reading PDF)

Overall, I would say I'm finding the game development part quite challenging because I set out to create a game that has a unique system, where you fly a spaceship rather than control a single character in an environment on terrain.

I decided this at the start because we were shown this video which talks about the growth mindset. To me, creating a game like that would've been too easy (or so I thought) so I wanted to take myself out of my comfort zone and create something that's quite different (but not too different).

What I didn't expect was that Unity would be an ass and decide to randomly not work (or work dead slow). This, along with Jimmy Vegas's (the series we were given to learn) version of Unity is two years older than the one I'm using (2017 vs 2019) which made some things (for example texturing the terrain) a bit of a pain and I had to look for alternatives.

Despite all the annoyances, I think it's still worth it at the satisfaction I get from compiling C# code (that I totally didn't steal from the internet) with 0 errors and running exactly as I want it is great.

Still, I feel like I'm way behind with my game as all I have so far is a spaceship which can be controlled with W A S D as well as multiple asteroids, with varying sizes and rotation speeds and directions (so they look like they're slowly spinning in space).

Some things I have to consider adding are textures (or at least colour), an enemy or two, make the enemies destructible and make them drop loot, make them shoot their weapons at the player and also a main menu. So I've a good bit done, but I still have a good bit to go.

One more thing I wanted to talk about is the extra credits tasks, specifically the tech tasks and wikipedia trails. For tech tasks I used several different online tools that I might need for other purposes. One example was using cheezburger to create a meme. I found it funny, but it shows how to quickly upload an image, crop, edit it and add text to it.

Wikipedia trails I loved because I'm a nerd for useless information so finding random facts in the pile of words that wikipedia articles are was quite fun too.