Final Blog Post! Course Reflection

Going into my last semester at SJSU I wanted to take a class that I was passionate about. I've always been a fan of video games and being able to create my own has been a small dream of mine. This class was the best class for me take, as it was a really relaxing atmosphere and really let me "play" with the class. As much as I learned to develop and program games, I never delved into game design. This class helped me improve my designer skills and really honed my ability to make a fun game.

For the final presentations I was really pleased with everyone's enthusiasm and passion for video games. I thought many just took the class to get an easy grade but it turned out everyone really enjoyed the subject material and had a passion for video games. Seeing everyone's hard work on their game pay off was also really cool as well. I was also pleased with the reception my team got when we introduced our game. Of all the projects that I worked on at SJSU, this was by far my favorite and most accomplished work.

In the end, I definitely read, wrote, play and design games. This class was a real blast and I hope more students have the opportunity to take this class and discover the important of play and making your own games.

Final Project Draft

The end has finally come. Only a few weeks left of school then I'll graduate into the real world. Pretty happy I chose this class as it was pretty easy-going with a very fun topic. For this final project, I opted to team up with a couple of friends. We decided to make the game in Unity as it gives us enough power to create the game we want to within this limited time-frame. It's been a couple of weeks and we still haven't though of a game name yet, but the core mechanics are pretty much finished.

The game is a side-scrolling shooter. The mechanics include changing and shooting different weapons and manipulating the direction of gravity. Our game would've been pretty boring without some sort of gimmick, so I added the gravity manipulations to make it more dynamic. The shooting mechanics are pretty solid as well. The player can shoot in a full 360 degree rotation and the character will point towards the mouse as well. This took quite a bit to program, mainly because the sprite looked weird if pointing directly up or down but I conceded that it would look better than way than limiting the range of motion.

The game also features two modes at the moment. One is an arena mode where you fight endless waves of enemies for a high score. We also plan implementing a single player mode that showcases the different mechanics in the game. Our prototype was just primer of all the mechanics and a fight with a very tough enemy to show that you have to master the skill of gravity manipulation in order to do well against tough boss. 

Overall, the experience was really fun creating this game. I ran into a lot of challenges programming the game but it was very satisfying seeing the work pay off some pretty fun gameplay. The hard part however is to polish the game and make it "juicy". 

Also programming shaq as the final boss was fun as well.