This senior thesis has been an interesting event for me to participate in regarding applying my abilities into more “real-world” uses. Looking back, there were several things that I would have changed, the major one regarding the scale of my project. My project by itself was way too ambitious for a single person project, and would have been better if I had a group to work with. A multi-man group would have made the project so much better, seeing as many of us did game projects and many of them were not as polished as we had intended. Knowing what I had wanted for a game, I should have looked for others trying to do similar things and combined projects. Another thing I would have done differently is I would have created a more cohesive scene, although the idea of my game was a child’s imagination and the every day household things that the child would have their stuffed-animal fight against, I feel as if it would be a lot better if the characters were more similar, and if I had planned out more time for animation bugs that made me discard two of my characters which would have given the game a larger variety of enemies to fight.
For future IMM students, I would suggest choosing a game with simpler mechanics, if the intention is to create a full game, or not taking seven classes in the semester in which the senior thesis event is to be done in. There just wasn’t enough time for me to create a game with such a large amount of mechanics as I thought there was.
During this project, I learned how to use the animator controller, a fair bit of programming, and a lot about the Unity particle engine, which helped a lot in making my game the way it turned out. The animator controller was a very large problem early on in my project, causing me to spend a large amount of time trying to use it to animate my characters correctly, with some amount of difficulty. I feel as if I now have a much better grasp of the animator and have applied this understanding to projects in class. As an ex-computer science student, there wasn’t as much coding to learn, but more of syntax for a language I had not coded in before in conjunction with the Unity engine.
During the showcase, I learned that the major appealing characteristic of my game was the cuteness of its characters, rather than the mechanics of the game in which I spent so much time developing. They also did not seem to care as much about the bug where sometimes an enemy would follow you into your respawn zone, which began to appear the morning of, due to the fact that I changed the way the movement of the characters were done. Everyone I talked to really liked the project and the way it was done, although most of the feedback was about the cuteness of the characters.
For the future, even though most of the feedback was about the cuteness of my characters, I would still like to work on the mechanics, to make this game’s mechanics better than I had done by the presentation. I want to also make more characters and fix some of the bugs so that I may make a more well rounded game.