Final
When I was originally thinking about what to do for my thesis project, I started by thinking of things I like to do for fun. Obviously, working on something you enjoy is way better than forcing yourself to slave away at it, especially when it’s over the course of several months. I like reading and also like playing video games, so I tried to think of a way to incorporate the two together. That’s how I decided on making a visual novel, the perfect mix between the two.
Making use of feedback is one of the most important parts of the thesis process. The most effective way to receive feedback from my experience is to ask very specific questions to very specific parts. By targeting a singular part of your thesis, you’ll learn what’s working/wrong with that part and make the thesis as a whole better. Asking vague questions will only get you vague feedback that is unhelpful.
Finding a project idea that both capitalizes on your existing knowledge and challenges you to learn more at the same time sounds difficult. However, the way I approached this was by first thinking about what I am able to do and what I need to do to finish my thesis. Before starting my thesis, I had some previous writing, drawing, and coding experience. However, as I developed my visual novel, I had to expand on those previous experiences by learning new things. For example, I knew how to draw basic character sprites, but as I was drawing, I realized that I had no knowledge on how to create and draw backgrounds! Developing new skills comes naturally with the thesis creation process. Don’t worry if you don’t know what you’ll need to learn at the start.
Developing good work habits is arguably the hardest part of the thesis process. From my experience, it’s easy to work for a long period of time once you sit down and get to work. However, it’s getting to the chair that’s most difficult. I found the best way to solve this is to set a specific day and time during the week to sit down and at least work on your thesis a little bit. Even if you don’t make much progress on a particular day, at least you sat down and looked at it for a little bit. For me, this method would make me feel guilty if I didn’t at least open up my thesis and wrote down a paragraph. However, even little progress is better than no progress.
During the thesis process, a large portion of it is dedicated to finding resources you need for it, such as people, knowledge, hardware and software. I found that Google was the solution to many of the problems that came up while working on my visual novel. I was unsure on how to do many things on Ren’py, however, a quick Google search often showed me the solution. Although this went smoothly for me, it may not be as easy for other peoples’ thesis projects. The next best thing to do is to just ask people. Often times, with the wide skill set that many people in IMM have, you’ll be able to find a solution to your problem. Even if they can’t directly solve it, they may be able to redirect you to someone who may know how to fix it.
When applying for internships and jobs, the best way to represent what you have learned from IMM is to individually list all of your skills and the things you have done. For example, a prospective employer may not necessarily know what “Interactive Multimedia” is, but they will definitely know what the Adobe Suite, HTML/CSS, Javascript, etc. is. Rather than putting your knowledge in the vague term “IMM”, this demonstrates your wide skill set in tangible terms everyone can understand.
