Final thoughts and reflections on my senior thesis project

What should I have done differently on my thesis, what can I learn from this experience that will help me create future games? What advice can I give to future seniors that create a thesis like mine?

I should have put more focus on understanding my primary goals for the project.

Everything else wasted valuable time that I had could have used to work on goals that were easier to accomplish and improve the quality of my project.

For those who follow in my footsteps I recommend avoiding goals that seem very promising but are too time consuming or complicated to accomplish and focus on creating code that references in game events.

What did I learn?

Creating this project taught me the valuable skills of creating references for in game events like when an object is hovering over another object and when an object should appear on the screen when a timer reaches zero. I also learned how to use a coding method called a “Singleton” to manage my game’s operations when starting and when its over.

Observing people use my game during the showcase gave me an important lesson on making the game’s instructions as descriptive as possible towards describing what the player is doing, what are the controls and what are the game’s win condition and game over condition.

I’m not finished. I’d like to create a scoring system that determines how well the matchmaking algorithm is doing at pairing players with similar skill levels into server rooms.