Senior Thesis Retrospective and Looking Forward
The IMM Senior Showcase was this past Friday and for me it went very well, all things considered. I was very surprised and relieved that Anthony and I’s project was able to come together in time as it did, as I was not in a good place at the time of my last post. There is still a lot of work to be done on our board game before it is a high enough quality to sell to the public as an actual product, but we got far enough with the idea that the people testing our game during the showcase had to be pulled away from it in order to let others play. So we were able to make something that is legitimately fun and interesting for others to engage with, and that is a mission accomplished in my book.
If I could start this academic year over, I definitely would have budgeted my time differently and “eaten the frog” first. I am disappointed that I was unable to get RFID tags working with the game-assistant program I coded in time for the showcase, and that was due to a lack of planning and moving our scrum from the Trello board into the real world. (What I mean by this is, I lied to myself and said “I can do that critical work later because I’m already working on this less complicated part of the project now”). If there is anything I can pass on to future IMM seniors, it is that. Get started on the hardest parts of your project as soon as you can, that way you can get a sense of how long it will take you to reach a point in which you are satisfied with those aspects, and you can pace yourself appropriately without needing to make (development time-based) compromises on your vision.
The future of Monsters and Mayhem is still a little up in the air, as I need to continue to work with Anthony if he too wants to bring this project to the market, as well as talk to some others about the logistics of doing so. We received a lot of responses asking us to create a GoFundMe or KickStarter, from showcase visitors who had fun playing our game and wanted to buy it. I took those as the most genuine compliments I could have received from the showcase. It is absolutely something that I am interested in going through with, but I am aware of how much goes into making the real thing. There is a big difference between “Hey check out my student project” and “This is my board game, it is for sale” so I cannot just blindly tell people that I intend to do that. However, if we do end up turning Monsters and Mayhem into something people can purchase, you can trust that I will write another post on Medium about it with a link to the website for it.
