Games

What Started It All and My Experince Thus Far...

My decision to go into Computer Science started when I was younger, like a lot of CS majors, with video games. I was the youngest sibling so a lot of the time was spent watching my older brother playing various games, mostly fighting and RPGs. Even when I started to play games on my own, RPGs is where I gravitated, with action based games always triumphing (current favorite game is Solstice Warriors). So naturally, when I got to college I was very excited to start diving into game development.
I have had the opportunity to create games through classes like Human-Computer Interaction and Interactive Game Design. While the games created are far from being what I consider good, it has allowed me to start growing my knowledge of what goes into game development and experience with a game engine. My hope is that this summer and senior year I will be able to put in a lot of development towards an idea I've had for a couple of years! Below are the two "games" I have developed for these classes and my experience with them.

Collection Game

For my first Game Design project, I made a small collectables game. Players move around the small map to collect various collectables which alter the timer or score, giving players an opportunity to try to beat their score. This project was mainly to practice creating and destroying objects in Unity as well as discovering the terrain tool and shortly playing around with it. This caused me to have to tweak the movement controller I had been using to be able to handle incline walking.

VR Game

This game was definitely one of the harder projects I have done so far. The game was developed for a Meta Quest VR, and at the start of development, they had just recently changed their toolkits which made this project especially challenging while trying to find help since most referenced the older toolkit. I also had to deal with specs on my laptop not being good enough to run Meta's preferred apps for testing VR applications, opting to use a slightly more round-about way to test. This game is far from perfect, but an accomplishment nonetheless to have gotten finished results on a time crunch. It certainly challenged my knowledge on Unity which I am very grateful for, feeling much more comfortable with the editor afterwards. I definitely intend to come back and refine this at some point, fixing some of the glaring issues, hopefully with a better set up for development!